Two years ago, former Arapahoe County sheriff Pat Sullivan managed to chisel down a pack of squalid allegations involving methamphetamine, trading drugs for sex, exploiting a mentally challenged individual and even a sort-of admission of sex with minors into the world’s sweetest plea deal, copping to one felony and one…
After more than thirty years of solitary confinement — including a quarter-century of good behavior, during which he committed no disciplinary infractions — convicted killer Thomas Silverstein still poses too great a threat to other inmates, staff or himself to be allowed to circulate in the general prison population, according…
Proponents of more local control over oil and gas drilling in Colorado are gearing up to spend millions on a slew of ballot measures this fall, and no less an authority than Representative Jared Polis (the anti-fracking movement’s poster boy) estimates that the energy industry will spend as much as…
Editor’s note: Our cover story this week, Alan Prendergast’s “Party in the Park,” looks at how Denver’s park rangers are gearing up for a busy summer season. In response, Westword writers are weighing in with appraisals of their own favorite Denver parks, starting with Prendergast’s tribute to City Park. City…
From the front stoop of a house he’s renovating on Mariposa Street, Jim Schneck can see more than he wants to of what goes on across the road in La Alma/Lincoln Park. On most warm days, the regulars begin to gather at the concrete picnic tables by the middle of…
An unusual motion in a child abuse case accuses 7News and 9News of breaking state laws by airing details from confidential child welfare and medical records in their reporting on the death of Levi Welton, a two-year-old who perished in a fire in his family’s Sterling home in January. The…
When does a park become a park? Is it when people start using it for recreation and picnics? When the area starts showing up on maps labeled as a park? When the Mayor of Denver describes it as “dedicated park land,” while assuring nearby homeowners it won’t be developed? Or…
Thirty years ago, when Sherri Tippie first got interested in trying to save a keystone species whose habitat was being wiped out by breakneck development up and down the Front Range, she was ridiculed by wildlife officials as a rank amateur. What, after all, could a hairdresser and former go-go…
With Republicans determined to take back control of the U.S. Senate by unseating a handful of vulnerable Dems and polls showing the race between Senator Mark Udall and challenger Representative Cory Gardner devolving into a dead heat, it’s hardly a surprise that interest groups on both sides are pouring money…
In January, Colorado Department of Corrections chief Rick Raemisch drew headlines when he sent himself to the hole for twenty hours, so he could get some idea of what it’s like for prisoners serving time in solitary confinement. Raemisch believes that isolation cells are overused in the state prison system,…
Before it became the bustling hub of higher education in central Denver, the Auraria campus was a neighborhood of modest houses and small businesses. It all abruptly vanished in the early 1970s, after a bitter political and legal battle that uprooted hundred of residents — and left behind a trail…
April 20th marked the hundredth anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre, one of the darkest and most neglected episodes in Colorado history. This week’s cover story explores the events that led up to this deadly conflict between striking coal miners and state troops, as well as the impact the tragedy had…
This Sunday thousands of ganja enthusiasts will gather in Denver’s Civic Center for what has become an annual rite of spring, the embrace of cannabis culture at 4:20 on 4/20. But this weekend also marks the peculiar collision of several more somber anniversaries, commemorating some of the worst days this…
This week, Westword looks back at one of the darkest episodes in Colorado history: the Ludlow Massacre, a shooting war between striking coal miners and state troops that had a profound impact on the state’s politics and the American labor movement and still resonates a century later. Find our detailed…
A century ago this week, a long-simmering conflict between miners on strike in the southern Colorado coalfields and troops of the Colorado National Guard erupted into the deadliest labor war in American history. A raging gun battle on April 20, 1914, resulted in the destruction of the strikers’ Ludlow tent…
Reporters generally do a lousy job of analyzing the incarceration rate in the United States — which, despite recent sentencing reforms, remains the highest in the world, with more citizens per capita behind bars than in Cuba, Rwanda or Russia. That’s why a recent report by the Prison Policy Initiative,…
Gabrial Adams, a 38-year-old inmate serving life without parole for his role in a headline-grabbing double-murder committed when he was a teenager, was found dead in his cell on March 9. Although autopsy results have not yet been released and the Colorado Department of Corrections is offering little information about…
Not enough is known about the health impacts of oil and gas drilling in Colorado, or we already know more than enough. Surveying residents who live near wells about their “quality of life” is either a terrific idea or a lot of unscientific twaddle — and a waste of money…
To Patricia Olson, the offer just made sense. If the Stapleton Development Corporation was having trouble paying for the continued services of Dennis Piper, a key consultant involved in planning the emerging neighborhood’s parks and open space, then Olson would pay Piper’s salary out of her own pocket. But her…
Last week, after battling for more than a decade to execute Edward Montour Jr. for the 2002 murder of guard Eric Autobee at the Limon prison, prosecutors abruptly caved on the second day of his trial, agreeing to a deal that will keep Montour in prison for life without parole…
After twelve years of trying to put Edward Montour Jr. to death for the murder of a Limon prison guard, it took only a few minutes late yesterday afternoon to sentence him to life without parole, after prosecutors grumblingly agreed to a plea deal that they said would provide only…
The battle over the sale of a former school property in Alamosa — which deeply divided the town last summer, pitting advocates for a “healthy living park” against backers of a private, high-end RV resort — appears to have reached an unexpected resolution. A settlement in a lawsuit over the…
