U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Babcock has at last issued a ruling denying a motion for acquittal or new trial filed by attorneys for William Orr, the alternative fuel entrepreneur whose battles with the EPA led to a guilty verdict on 23 counts of fraud and tax charges in Babcock’s courtoom…
For more photos of Kauri Tiyme, go to westword.com/slideshow. The maid found her. It was close to checkout time on Saturday, October 18, and a member of the housekeeping staff at the Denver Marriott Tech Center used her pass key to enter the room. One look, and she knew she…
As reported with merciless pix on TheSmokingGun and with keen analysis by our own intrepid Joel Warner (“New Ski Move Spotted at Vail”), a 48-year-old skier at Vail got depantsed on the chair lift yesterday, dangling upside down for fifteen minutes while rescuers tried to get him down and fellow skiers snapped…
A recent alert from the Denver Disability Parking Enforcement Program announces that the city is recruiting citizens interested in ticketing those able-bodied but ass-lazy drivers who park in handicapped zones. Yes, you heard right. Denver uses volunteers to try to keep those parking spaces free for those who need them. The volunteers take…
Donald Westlake, who died on New Year’s Eve at the age of 75, wrote more than 100 books, mostly crime novels, over the past half century–almost all of them highly polished entertainments from a writer who knew his craft as few ever will again. I’ve probably read close to half…
The arrival of a new district attorney in Boulder has some people expecting that the 12-year-old murder of JonBenet Ramsey will get a “fresh look.” But what exactly does that mean? This mind-bending report in the Boulder Daily Camera suggests a new look means another look at John Mark Karr (pictured),…
Dear Governor Bill, I hear the clamor over who gets to replace Senator Ken Salazar, and I feel your pain. Opportunists are crawling out of the rich woodwork at the statehouse, stumbling off the barstools on Wazee and emerging from lavatories at truckstops, hands still moist from underpowered hot-air dryers,…
Gas is less than half what it was a few months ago, and Xcel is actually planning to lower rates after the new year. But savor those cheap energy prices while you can. Like Santa Claus, painful new hikes are coming to town, probably sooner than later. One lump of coal…
Those hucksters at the Colorado Lottery can’t do enough for us poor gambling fools. Check out this announcement about an exciting new development for Powerball players. The minimum payout is increasing from $10 million to $20 million! The odds of winning a measly three bucks will improve from 37-to-1 to 36-to-1!…
The Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice is proving to be one of Governor Bill Ritter’s more promising ideas for finding ways to trim the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars dumped into the state’s prison system every year. The CCCJJ just released its annual report, which is full of hard…
Eight years after she first reported a sexual assault to police and four years after prosecutors told her they were dropping the case, a young woman has won an unusual court ruling that orders prosecution of her alleged assailant, a former University of Colorado football player who was also implicated…
There must have been a time, in sunnier days, when the idea of 400 tubas playing holiday tunes in Skyline Park sounded like a really cool idea. In fact, the Tuba Christmas Concert, now in its 29th year in downtown Denver, bills itself as “one of the most celebrated and…
Jay Lewis assumes the position. He slouches, arms folded across his chest, knee bent and foot braced on the wall behind him. He looks like your typical green-tunic-clad felon, lazily taking in the passing show at the Cheyenne Mountain Re-Entry Center, a 750-bed private prison in Colorado Springs. “He’s jailin’,”…
Pat Craig walks along a fenceline of his 240-acre spread outside Keenesburg, visiting with some of his latest arrivals. He calls to them in a falsetto, much higher than his normal voice, and they respond with grunts, snorts and roars. “Yuma! Hey, Yuma! How ya doin’, boy?” A three-year-old male…
There’s more than one way to explain the latest scandal erupting within the Bush administration. The release last week of three reports from the inspector general’s office of the Department of the Interior, detailing graft, drugs, unethical sexual liaisons and brazen conflicts of interest within a federal program in charge…
Few dreamers believe in their dream the way William Orr did. He chased his idea, a search for the perfect fuel to put in a gas tank, for three decades. He conducted test after test, applied for patent after patent, and transformed his quest into a business and a cause…
To read Alan Prendergast’s blog about the Denver jail’s heavily redacted policy on pain meds and release procedures, click here. They let Timothy Thomason go shortly before 8 p.m. on August 26, 2006. He had spent less than 24 hours in the downtown Denver jail, but they were among the…
THE ZINNA BILL LITIGATION EXPENSES FOR JEFFERSON COUNTY RELATED TO DISPUTES WITH MIKE ZINNA JANUARY 2004-APRIL 2008 Outside Counsel Zinna v. Congrove $ 112,310.71 Zinna v. County $ 79,763.47 Open Records Requests $ 27,223.23 Stille v. Congrove $ 20,146.81 Zinna v. Beyer-Ulrich $ 18,205.95 Zinna v. Sheehan $ 17, 020.67…
In the endless muddle of battle between Mike Zinna and The Powers That Be in Jefferson County, moments of truth have been hard to find. But once in a while there’s a burst of light over the benighted trenches, like a flare from heaven, that offers a glimpse of the…
Thursday afternoons in courtroom 151P tend to be less formal than other proceedings in Denver county courts. Judge Larry Bohning still hands out an occasional scolding (“Time’s running out, Mr. Finn; you need to stay away from that alcohol”), and every once in a while somebody gets their probation revoked…
On a bitter winter morning four years ago, Heather Gooch stood in her apartment on South Bannock Street and listened to the awful thumping. The noise was coming from the floor above and getting louder, as if someone was slamming weights down again and again. Gooch had never heard anything…
Three things you need to know right away about Tony Krupicka: First, the guy loves to run. Loves it. He cruises the trails above Colorado Springs three, four, even six hours a day, in all kinds of weather. He runs up and down mountains with more joy and less discernible…
