A much-contested deal to trade eleven acres of open space in the Cherry Creek corridor for an office building in central Denver, pushed by Mayor Michael Hancock and approved by city council in April, has triggered not one but two citizen petition drives to nix the swap and protect the…
A new government report on the rate of sexual victimization in America’s jails and prisons lists the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility as having the highest rate of sexual assault and misconduct by staff of any lockup in the nation — four times the national average, in fact. That figure is…
This week’s feature, “The Dogs of War,” reports on the ongoing campaign to manage — and, in some cases, exterminate with poison — prairie dog colonies in the emerging Stapleton community. Master developer Forest City and city park managers are battling to protect natural-looking (but not quite natural) open space…
This week’s cover story, “The Dogs of War,” examines increased efforts to eradicate prairie dogs around the metro Denver area — particularly in Stapleton, where developers and park managers have found it easier to poison the pesky rodents than relocate them. That’s stirred up outrage from advocacy groups and parents…
More than most people, perhaps, Stapleton resident Patricia Olson feels a strong connection to animals. A veterinarian and former CEO of the world’s largest nonprofit dedicated to animal health sciences, she’s helped fund research studies on everything from housecats to sea lions to gorillas. But even though she lives in…
Troy Anderson, a mentally ill inmate at Colorado’s supermax prison, won a landmark decision last summer when a federal judge ruled he’s entitled to at least three hours a week of fresh air and outdoor exercise. Now, Anderson’s attorneys claim Department of Corrections officials have failed to comply with several…
Today is the last day for public comment on a proposal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to bring the wolverine — not the Marvel character with the sharp claws, adamantium skeleton and tortured backstory, but something even more awesome and much, much more badass than Hugh Jackman –…
Recently Gene Shue went looking for a new dog, a companion for the chihuahua he adopted three years ago — and got a bad case of sticker shock. He found the perfect buddy dog at Golden’s Foothills Animal Shelter, only to learn that the adoption fee was double what he’d…
It was an American writer, Dashiell Hammett, who wrested the detective novel from the polite confines of British tea parlors and morning rooms, packed with sleuthing aristocrats and poisoned butlers, and put it back in the gutter where it belongs. But it took a British writer, Philip Kerr, to retool…
On the eve of a 25-week trial that promised to focus on claims of poor training and worse management, the nation’s largest private prison company has reached a settlement with nearly 200 former inmates over a 2004 riot at the Crowley County Correctional Facility in southeastern Colorado. The uprising, which…
If you’re looking for a crash course in how to be annoying, you could do worse than study the guerrilla tactics of Colorado Extraction Resistance, a group of activists bent on chafing the thick hides of energy interests who rely on hydraulic fracturing methods to drill for oil and gas…
Tom Clements, the reform-minded head of the Colorado Department of Corrections who was murdered at his home last month by a parolee, makes a posthumous appearance in a new video advocating for one of his favorite causes: more substance abuse treatment for chronic, low-level offenders, freeing up costly prison beds…
When I first encountered poet Seth Brady Tucker a few months ago, it was in the course of writing about the Words Beyond Bars Project, a book club for lifers at the Limon state prison. Tucker had visited the group and shared with them how he’d learned to love poetry…
The stage is a half-circle at the front of the auditorium, marked off with a snaking trail of rope; the audience sits on the floor. Dressed in dark jeans and T-shirts, the actors look like escapees from a Greenwich Village coffeehouse, circa 1958. But the way they leap into action…
Colorado’s tough sex offender laws are supposed to keep predators under tight supervision. But a series of lawsuits claim that the system is violating even minor offenders’ rights to free speech and association, prohibiting contact with family members — and, in one particularly bizarre case, telling a 62-year-old man that…
In more than eight hours of emotional testimony that stretched well into the evening, activists and faith groups seeking to abolish the death penalty in Colorado squared off against prosecutors and other backers of the ultimate punishment yesterday — with family members of homicide victims speaking out on both sides,…
Back in 1976, while traveling around northwestern Colorado, composer and musician Bruce Odland was introduced by locals to the Tank, a sixty-foot-tall water tank outside Rangely. Odland used a circular portal to go inside the never-used tank — and immediately knew he’d entered a very special sonic wonderland. Since that…
Plenty of folks in Colorado like their nature as natural as possible. So when park officials began pushing for various amenities and improvements at a popular open-space area in Denver’s western suburbs — including close to $200,000 worth of “nature play” installations that look a lot like playgrounds — the…
Strange things happen when you poke around the “Ghosts of Auraria,” as we did in this week’s feature on whether certain promises, supposedly made to the community when the college campus was built, were ever kept. This week, one alert reader presented us with a rare copy of a study…
Update: This morning I spoke by phone with Randall Hatlee, one of the two ranchers found not guilty on misdemeanor animal neglect charges in the much-scrutinized Park County case involving several ailing horses, described in my original post below. While Hatlee expressed some frustration with the investigation he and Ronald…
This week’s cover story, “Ghosts of Auraria,” examines recent efforts, through new construction and revised master plans, to change the look and design of the Auraria campus — and looks back at a time when the area was a thriving working-class neighborhood, one that was leveled in the early 1970s…
This week’s cover story, “Ghosts of Auraria,” delves into the half-buried history of the campus, which is moving rapidly forward with hefty development plans that include three new flagship student-services buildings, a hotel, and a leap across Colfax to build new athletic fields on a contaminated industrial site. The changes…
