This week’s cover story, “The Beetle and the Damage Done,” reports on the mounting toll of the worst bark-beetle epidemic in recorded history in Colorado and the various causes blamed for the infestation, from past fire suppression policies to climate change. Are the millions of dead trees claimed by the…
With a nod to emerging brain science that contends adolescents are fundamentally different from adults — and a stern rebuke to the one-size-fits-all approach to prosecuting underaged defendants in adult courts — the United States Supreme Court ruled Monday that a mandatory sentence of life without parole for crimes committed…
Archimedes had his bathtub, Newton his apple. Scott Ferrenberg’s Eureka moment required more fieldwork to confirm, but it began when a bug the size of a grain of rice landed on his sleeve as he walked through the woods. In late May 2008, the graduate student in ecology and evolutionary…
Last Friday, U.S. District Judge Marcia Krieger threw yet another hurdle in the way of energy companies’ efforts to begin widespread drilling on Colorado’s Roan Plateau. The plan to tap into vast natural gas reserves in one of the state’s wildest places has been subject to considerable monkey-wrenching since the…
Colorado prisoners complain about all sorts of indignities, from the high price of candy bars to the degrading (now banned) “labia lift” procedure some female inmates were subjected to. But not all the recent squawking about a change in hygiene equipment at the Denver women’s prison is negative, apparently. Some…
Jeramie Gerhardt, one of two men charged in an assault on another concert-goer during the 2010 Mayhem Festival at the Comfort Dental Amphitheatre, was sentenced last week in Arapahoe County District Court to 75 days in jail and four years of probation for his role in the incident — while…
Update: Yesterday, Alan Prendergast reported on a supermax lawsuit alleging shocking mistreatment of mentally ill prisoners. We’ve added a copy of the suit, plus photos of the facility and the imprisoned plaintiffs in the case. See it below following Prendergast’s piece. Original post by Alan Prendergast: “A Clean Version of…
This isn’t exactly the best week ever for Community Education Centers, a private company that operates halfway houses, prisons and “re-entry centers” in seventeen states. On Sunday, the New York Times began running a three-part series on the company’s alarming record of escapes, assaults, gang activity and drugs at its…
Contrary to scenes in numerous books and movies, getting locked up doesn’t always lead to painful bouts of reflection and self-examination. Criminals are a stubborn bunch, and it’s easy behind bars to embrace a convict code and a victim mentality that merely reinforces addictive, self-destructive and antisocial behavior — which…
You don’t have to be steering a helitanker into the High Park fire to know that things are a bit toasty across Colorado these days. Drawing any conclusions about climate change, though, from a bout of unseasonable weather is a tricky business. Which is why a new report from Climate…
After one of the mildest winters in recent years, leaving some areas of the parched high country with less than 10 percent of normal snowpack — not to mention forests ravaged by drought and pine beetles, ready to explode into wildfires like the rapidly expanding High Park blaze — this…
When developer-turned-muckraker Mike Zinna won a modest $1,791 judgement against a former Jefferson County commissioner in 2009, after years of convoluted intrigues and litigation, his supporters hailed the decision as an important, if largely symbolic, victory for the rights of online government critics. But this week, an appeals court ruled…
Compared to the billions-a-day standard flow rate of tax dollars pouring into and out of Washington, $25 million amounts to scarcely more than chump change. But the passage of an amendment by Congressman Jared Polis yesterday, cutting that amount in oil shale subsidies, is a remarkable break with what adds…
One of the few hotly contested primary races in Colorado elections this year is the brawl between Leslie Hansen and George Brauchler over who will be the Republican candidate for district attorney in the 18th Judicial District, vying to succeed Carol Chambers as top prosecutor in one of the state’s…
About 40 percent of the nation’s electrical grid depends on coal for fuel. But facing increasing state and federal regulations that are shutting down many coal plants, a battery of pesky scientists moaning about climate change, increasing competition from ever-cheaper natural gas and renewables, and other threats, even power industry…
Once upon a time there was a Denver cabbie who wrote novels about a Denver cabbie who writes novels. Brendan Murphy, better known as Murph, tosses his manuscripts into a steamer trunk, with no expectation that they’ll ever be read. But his creator, Gary Reilly, never abandoned his dream of…
The meeting began with a prayer. Eight hours later, it ended with Sharletta Evans feeling that she’d found much of what she’d been seeking from a face-to-face encounter with Raymond Johnson, one of the people responsible for the killing of her three-year-old son Casson seventeen years ago. She would later…
Dark fantasy epics, as every hunger-gamer knows, are all the rage at the box office and on cable. The latest New Yorker to clog my mailbox is the special “Science Fiction Issue.” And I’m happy to report that Paolo Bacigalupi, Colorado’s own doctor of dystopia — who recently discussed his…
Colorado Springs police have arrested the man they believe is responsible for a string of increasingly violent robberies in recent weeks, during which the robber brandished a rock or brick, menaced other victims with a knife or gun — and even sprayed some people with lighter fluid and threatened to…
Known as a high-strung, high-country lagomorph that’s particularly susceptible to dramatic temperature shifts, the American pika has been described as a kind of “canary in the coal mine” for gauging the impact of climate change on alpine species. And an unusual collaboration between a local environmental group and Groupon’s philanthropic…
This week’s feature, “Sucker Punch,” traces how an assault at a heavy metal concert turned into a habitual criminal prosecution in Arapahoe County, with one of the defendants facing a mountain of time while the other got probation. In the three-way race for district attorney in the 18th Judicial District,…
This week’s cover story, “Sucker Punch”, explores the legal aftermath of an assault on a fan at the 2010 Mayhem Festival — an incident that left a somewhat fragmentary record behind, thanks to concertgoers’ penchant for uploading videos of Mayhem moshes and crowd rowdiness to YouTube. The clips don’t capture…
