Mike McCormick could have saved at least one life and a lot of trouble if he’d simply pulled the trigger 25 years ago, back when the police had him cornered in Omaha and he had a pistol in his mouth and was threatening suicide. Instead, he surrendered and came back…
When you’ve spent your time since the early days of the Reagan years in a cell smaller than some people’s closets, progress tends to get measured in small, small increments rather than sweeping events. But Thomas Silverstein, America’s most isolated federal prisoner, got some momentous news today. His lawsuit challenging…
Press reports about Denver International Airport in the late 1990s included lots of optimistic forecasting about the arrival of a luxury hotel at the airport’s doorstep by, oh, no later than 2002 or so. More than a decade later, that hotel still doesn’t exist except in the minds of DIA…
Assurant Health, the country’s oldest provider of individual health insurance policies, has had a few public relations problems lately. In addition to the debate over such companies making hundreds of millions in profits by canceling or rescinding health coverage for sick people and the grilling of CEO Don Hamm by…
A recent story in the Topeka Capital-Journal about a 2005 renovation at a Kansas women’s prison has a familiar ring to it. Inmates and corrections employees have long claimed that they were forced to remove asbestos flooring without adequate training or equipment, and state officials have failed to produce records…
At first glance, the idea of tapping into the badly stretched state budget for a few million to open one wing of a new supermax prison doesn’t seem all that loony. After all, the Colorado Department of Corrections spent more than $200 million to build the new state pen, known…
Since its first issue, slapped together in a prison cell two decades ago, Prison Legal News has run hundreds of articles on abuse and corruption in local jails and state and federal prisons, shining a light where few of the ladies and gents of the mainstream press care (or dare)…
All things considered, Ashton Daigle can consider himself a very lucky man. On March 5, the former surgery nurse was sentenced to 54 months in federal prison for “tampering with a consumer product” — a nice way of saying that he stole the painkiller fentanyl from Boulder Community Hospital and…
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar faced some impertinent questions from a Senate committee yesterday about an internal memo suggesting that his agency is actively seeking nominations for new national monuments. Salazar denied that he’s trying to use the process to lock up western lands primed for oil and gas…
Before the late-night jokes about the baggage system, before the opening-day snowstorm and the seven-hour breakdown of the train system on Black Sunday, and long before the 9/11 attacks changed the way people fly, Denver International Airport was already full of surprises — not all of them pleasant. Curt Fentress…
Denver International Airport celebrated its fifteenth anniversary this past weekend by erecting a scale model of a Boeing 787 wing and (according to this tut-tutting 9News story) handing out $9,000 worth of cupcakes. Sweet! If our friends in broadcasting can get that exercised over a few thousand just desserts, think…
Lauren Lollini knew someone had to speak up. That’s one reason she decided to go public last year about her ordeal, letting Westword use her face and name in “Going Viral,” a feature about what dozens of people were facing as a result of surgical tech/dope fiend Kristen Parker’s rampage…
Last week’s summit on health care reform in Washington produced the expected speechifying and little consensus on what’s to be done. But there’s one point that Democrats and Republicans echoed each other about: Rescission sucks. The practice of taking away someone’s health insurance because of sometimes dubious “pre-existing conditions” or…
As noted here a few weeks ago, Colorado’s U.S. Senate race is shaping up to be an epic mudwallow, with GOP hopeful Jane Norton painting incumbent Michael Bennet as the spend-crazy flunky of a soft-on-terror President and the Democrats firing back with videos that present Norton as a loony teabagger…
Lawrence D. Bockar is the first to admit that he isn’t perfect. The 67-year-old retired radiologist — “L.D.” to his friends — has worked in emergency rooms, served in the U.S. Army and volunteered in various civic associations, but that doesn’t mean he’s never screwed up. And, yes, he or…
After years of fizzled efforts, Colorado may be close this year to legislation that could reduce slammer-oriented penalties not only for marijuana possession but small quantities of other drugs. Better yet, as this Denver Post article details, the anticipated savings from the move could fund badly needed rehab programs for…
It’s the start of the decade, and that means the U.S. Census Bureau is posting fliers everywhere, looking for temporary, part-time help to ring doorbells and glean data. Pay starts at $16.25 an hour in Denver, considerably less in Grand Junction ($12.50) and Pueblo ($11.00). You’d think in this economy,…
This week’s decision by the Colorado Limited Gaming Control Commissionto allow casinos to pay 6-5 on blackjack isn’t exactly a shocker. The gaming regulators aim to please, and the casino operators know who their customers are and what they want. Their customers are rubes and feebs, and they want to…
Almost two years ago — fittingly, on April Fool’s Day — Sean Harrington filed a complaint with the Colorado Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel requesting an investigation of U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham on the grounds of moral turpitude. “Judge Naughty” had been much in the news that spring over…
The 2010 census gives states a new option for how to count their prison population, a move that could provide additional political leverage to urban areas — which, in Colorado, means more power to the Front Range and less to places like Fremont, Logan and Crowley counties. In the past,…
Every year around this time, the Westminster Kennel Club puts on its hifalutin, thoroughly mockable parade of purebreds, all vying to star in the next Christopher Guest movie. And around the same time, a down-home dog show unfolds at the National Western Stock Show Complex, sponsored by the Colorado Kennel…
This week’s cover story, “You’re in Bad Hands,” follows a Lafayette woman’s four-year battle with her health insurance company after a devastating car accident left her seriously injured, saddled with hundreds of thousands in medical bills — and a canceled policy because of Assurant Health’s profit-minded approach to the controversial…
