A truck driver in Colorado was recently sentenced to 110 years in prison for a crime that left four people dead. What’s unique is that that lengthy sentence was imposed for a crime was undisputedly an accident. The young truck…
How is the COVID-19 pandemic affecting the scheduling of criminal cases in Colorado state courts? And perhaps most importantly, does a defendant’s right to a speedy trial provide any relief to defendants, any constraint upon the prosecution’s efforts to delay…
A 2018 Colorado incident in which a United Airlines pilot was charged with indecent exposure at Denver International Airport, only to have the charges against him dismissed six months later, illustrates some of the deep flaws in the criminal legal…
Colorado lawyers who handle criminal mischief cases rarely see cases of a client keying a car, mostly because it is hard to catch someone doing it. But a case from October in Broomfield County, north of Denver, garnered attention when…
Jack Daniel McCullough was convicted in 2012 of the 1957 abduction of a young girl in Illinois. It was a sensational unsolved mystery and cold case that appeared to have been closed successfully in 2012, against all odds. Few cold…
Two San Francisco sheriff’s deputies were recently charged with crimes for their participation in a real life “fight club” inside the city’s Hall of Justice jail. According to news reports, deputies forced inmates to participate in fights while the deputies watched and…
Last year the Denver Police Department rolled out a program designed to catch more hit and run offenders by enlisting the help of local auto body shops. The voluntary program involves shop owners signing up for alerts that describe…
There are many troubling revelations in the DOJ’s report on race and criminal justice in Ferguson, Missouri: explicit and implicit racial bias infecting police work, patterns of unconstitutional stops, searches and arrests, a judicial system with practices that make it…
The case of on-duty Boulder police officer, Sam Carter, who shot a beloved trophy elk in the Mapleton Hill neighborhood has received consistent media attention in large part because of animal rights activists who demanded that the suffering of the…
The bill to repeal the death penalty in Colorado did not make it out of committee. Governor Hickenlooper was threatening to veto the bill. Additionally, some Democratic committee members who had stated they were opposed to the death penalty nonetheless…