Susan Greene Posts

Nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news – least of all the good folks who are trying to help Coloradans find much-needed affordable housing. But it’s brutal out there. So brutal, in fact, that now there’s a talking-points guide for service providers tasked with explaining how few options low-income people have in putting roofs over their heads in Metro Denver.

Nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news – least of all the good folks who are trying to help Coloradans find much-needed affordable housing. But it’s brutal out there. So brutal, in fact, that now there’s a talking-points guide for service providers tasked with explaining how few options low-income people have in putting roofs over their heads in Metro Denver.

Half the voter fraud cases prosecuted in Colorado have now been dropped before trial. Eighteenth Judicial District Attorney George Brauchler’s office has dismissed its case against Tadesse G. Degefa, 73, of Aurora, who allegedly registered for a mail-in ballot in 2012, despite the fact that he wasn’t a U.S. Citizen. Brauchler said he couldn’t win the case beyond a reasonable doubt. Do four cases make an epidemic, especially if two are dropped before the trial even begins?

Oklahoma state officials need to stop shrouding information about its executions, according to a lawsuit filed today. The suit, filed by The Oklahoma Observer and the American Civil Liberties Union, stems from the botched execution in April of Clayton Lockett.

A Denver police captain was arrested on domestic violence charges. The department tried to cover it up, but the Blue Wall cracked. Internal Affairs is now involved and it looks like the scandal goes to the very highest levels.

In an era of inequality some say rivals – or indeed exceeds – the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the century, it behooves us to look back at the labor and equality battles of that time. Battles like the Coal Wars fought in Colorado a century ago this year against the robber barons who abused their workers relentlessly.

A Denver sheriff's deputy who was caught on camera brutally slamming an inmate's head into a glass wall will be suspended pending an investigation. The inmate, Anthony Waller, who is black, was called "boy" by the deputy, Brady Lovingier during the vicious attack.

Outraged by misconduct in the Denver Sheriff’s Department, a coalition of African-American pastors is demanding that Mayor Michael Hancock’s administration implement reform. Be it a sheriff's deputy slamming a fully shackled inmate into a window (caught on tape) or another deputy picking up an innocent black man seemingly at random to cover for a prisoner the same man mistakenly let loose from jail, the problems in the city's police force have been well documented.

“If he had killed me, would he have gotten 30 days?” Waller said in a statement to The Independent. “I was defenseless. I was addressing the judge, exercising my constitutional rights, and this is what I get? A savage beating?”

A Colorado man who has spent more than a quarter-century in prison for a rape in which the victim claimed her attacker’s identity came to her “in a dream” is appealing his conviction based on new evidence. A man already serving a life sentence for multiple rapes in the area has offered "an outright confession," according to lawyers, but prosecutors are still fighting the seemingly innocent man's appeal.

Colorado State Senator Jessie Ulibarri sponsored a bill to search for alternatives to solitary confinement, especially when used with mentally ill inmates. Solitary, or administrative segregation, is proven to worsen symptoms of mental illness, or even cause them in otherwise healthy inmates.

By law, you get 15 minutes to argue in the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. The rules are the rules. Yet that rule comes across as painfully ironic in the case of a man who has spent a million times that limit — 15,778,470 minutes and counting – in prison isolation. Tommy Silverstein, 61, has lived in solitary confinement nearly half his life, and longer than any other prisoner held by the federal government.

The Colorado State Department of Corrections has been ordered to reveal details about how it carries out executions. This follows a state-wide conversation begun by Governor John Hickenlooper regarding the necessity and efficacy of state-sponsored lethal sentences.

After years of controversial work to transition prisoners out of solitary confinement — especially prior to release into society — Colorado's Corrections Department Director was murdered by a former inmate who was released to the streets directly from 23 hours a day in a cement cell. The tragic, teachable moment is both about human rights for all humans and public safety.

Colorado’s legal-defense community is raising questions about “what appears to be a cover-up” of systemic problems at the state lab that tests evidence in criminal cases. The pending investigation could effect thousands of people incarcerated over the last two years.

Abercrombie & Fitch surf-themed brand Hollister uses steps at many of its storefronts to create a beach shack atmosphere, steps that potential customers in wheelchairs can't exactly use in an effort to buy $40 t-shirts. It's a clear violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, but the corporate clothier isn't going without a fight.