Colorado Law Blog

This week Gov. Bill Ritter signed into law a bill requiring the installation of carbon-monoxide alarms in most homes. House Bill 1091, which becomes law July 1, requires that all new or sold residential properties have carbon-monoxide alarms on each floor of the property. Rental properties also also be required to add the alarms when tenants change.

A Denver family of four died in a vacation home in Aspen on Thanksgiving, while a University of Denver student died in her apartment in January -- all from carbon-monoxide poisoning. Relatives of Parker and Caroline Lofgren and their children, Owen, 10, and Sophie, 8, and of DU student Lauren Johnson, 23, pushed lawmakers to put measures in place to prevent future CO poisoning deaths. See Another Tragic Colorado Death Due to CO.

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Across the country, support for the death penalty is waning, and Colorado is among 11 states that have proposed bills to abolish capital punishment in 2009. This week, New Mexico became the second state to abolish the death penalty since 1976.

Colorado is one of 36 states that puts the worst of the worst to death, although the actual act of execution is rare. In the past four decades, Colorado has only put to death one person - rapist-murderer Gary Lee Davis, who kidnapped his victim in front of her children, died by injection in 1997.

The current Colorado legislature is considering a bill which would eliminate the death penalty. Colorado HB09-1274 would eliminate capital punishment and redirect the money saved by the state to investigation of "cold cases." Experts estimate that court battles in death penalty cases can reach several million dollars. Proponents of the measure argue that the financial and emotional costs for families, jurors, attorneys, and judges are too high a price in difficult economic times. More sensible spending of the estimated $4 million dollars annually that Colorado uses on the death penalty is an investment in decreasing potential crimes from undetected perpetrators.

Governor Bill Ritter unsuccessfully sought the death penalty seven times as Denver's District Attorney, and his spokesman said he supports capital punishment. But Ritter has declined, through a spokesman, to comment on pending legislation.

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Yesterday was full of memories of two promising young Coloradans, each killed by the overconsumption of alcohol at a fraternity house. A memorial service was held for former Arapahoe High School honor student Jason Wren, while the last claims in a lawsuit brought by the mother of a CU student who died of alcohol poisoning in 2004 were settled.

As he walked around with the bottle, Jason boasted that he never got sick when he got drunk. He then passed out, and his fraternity brothers put him to bed. After he stumbled out of the bed, they put him back in the bed instead of taking him to the hospital.

The mother of University of Colorado student Lynn "Gordie" Bailey, who died of acute alcohol poisoning in September 2004 following a fraternity initiation ritual, has settled her lawsuit with fraternity on the eve of the trial that was to start this week. A settlement for a confidential amount was reached with both the Chi Psi fraternity and the Alpha Psi Delta Corporation of Chi Psi, which owned the fraternity house in Boulder.

When Bailey died, his blood-alcohol level was 0.328 percent. The night before, he and 26 other Chi Psi fraternity pledges at CU were blindfolded and taken to the woods near Gold Hill, west of Boulder, as part of an initiation ritual. The pledges were told to drink large amounts of whiskey and wine, police said at the time. After he was driven back to the fraternity, Bailey lapsed into unconsciousness.

None of the fraternity members called 911 for hours afterwards. Instead, some scrawled vulgar phrases and drawings on his body.

As part of the settlement, reform measures were agreed to by the fraternity to reduce the risk that such a death could happen again.

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Dr. Scott S. Reuben, an anesthesiologist in Springfield, Mass., who practiced at Baystate Medical Center, has admitted that he never conducted the clinical trials that he wrote about in 21 journal articles dating from at least 1996. The reliability of dozens more articles he wrote is uncertain, and the common practice -- supported by his studies -- of giving patients aspirin-like drugs and neuropathic pain medicines after surgery instead of narcotics is now being questioned.

Drug companies routinely hire community physicians to conduct studies of already-approved medicines. In some cases, prosecutors have charged companies with underwriting studies of little scientific merit in hopes of persuading doctors to prescribe the medicines more often.

Dr. Reuben's activities were spotted by Baystate Medical Center after questions were raised about two study abstracts that he filed last spring. It was then determined that he had not received approval to conduct human research. Baystate investigators concluded that Dr. Reuben had concocted data for 21 studies, and the health system asked the journals in which those studies were published to withdraw them.

Dr. Steve Shafer, the editor in chief of Anesthesia & Analgesia, which published many of the papers, said he was considering withdrawing any study in which Dr. Reuben served a pivotal role. Dr. Reuben has been described as " one of the most prolific investigators in the area of postoperative pain management." How was your pain management after your last surgery?

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The Supreme Court yesterday ruled that consumers can sometimes resist credit card companies' push to move their dispute over finance charges and late fees to arbitration. The justices voted 5-4 Monday in favor of Betty Vaden in her dispute with Discover Bank.

But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the majority, said state courts sometimes are the proper place for such lawsuits. "Here, the controversy between Discover and Vaden was triggered by Discover's garden-variety, state-law debt-collection claim against Vaden," Ginsburg said.

Many credit card customer service agreements require disagreements over charges to be resolved using binding arbitration because it is cheaper and faster than a lawsuit, a requirement typically buried in the very fine print. But a study by the Public Citizen consumer advocacy group found that arbitrators often rule in favor of the credit card companies.

In the Discover case, the issue was whether a federal court could step into what had been a state court lawsuit to order the parties into arbitration. This is the second surprise victory for consumers in recent weeks, following the Supreme Court decision in Wyeth to not allow preemption of state tort laws for claims against pharmaceutical companies.

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Parents of an 18-year-old Ohio man who suffered a brain injury while snowboarding have filed a lawsuit against doctors at a northwestern Pennsylvania hospital alleging that the staff intentionally killed the young man so as to harvest his organs. The lawsuit claims that Hamot Medical Center doctors and a representative of the Center For Organ Recovery and Education caused Gregory Jacobs' death by administering medication and by removing his breathing tube, causing him to suffocate.

Jacobs fell on March 8, 2007, while snowboarding at Peek 'n Peak Ski Resort in Findley Lake, N.Y., and was flown to the Erie hospital, the lawsuit said. The suit claims Hamot contacted the Center for Organ Recovery and Education about the donation of Jacobs' organs even though his parents, who were at the hospital, wanted him to live. The parents believe that CORE directed that Jacobs' organs be removed in the absence of a valid consent.

The complaint alleges that the patient was alive before defendants started surgery and suffocated him in order to harvest his organs. And he "experienced neither a cessation of cardiac activity nor a cessation of brain activities when surgeons began the procedures for removing his vital organs."

The suit alleges that the Center for Organ Recovery and Education benefited by obtaining Jacobs' organs "for transfer and sale to other individuals, who then paid money, a portion of which went to CORE, for the wrongful procurement of the organs."

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The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a request to review the case involving Luke Perkins. That means that a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that said the Thompson district was doing enough to meet Luke's needs will stand.

Luke's parents, Jeff and Julie Perkins, had argued that Berthoud Elementary was not doing enough to help Luke after he enrolled there in 2002. They instead enrolled him at the private Boston Higashi School for Autism and sued to have the district pay for his tuition.

At the trial level, Judge Walker Miller dismissed the school district's appeal that the cost of tuition at the private Boston Higashi School for Autism was above and beyond the "free adequate public education" required of all school districts. Miller upheld an Individuals With Disability Education Act requirement, which says that students be educated in the "least restrictive appropriate educational environment."

The boy has been attending the Boston school since January 2004, and the Thompson School District has been footing his tuition along with other fees. Counselors at the public school had worked with his parents, but Luke's disabilities were severe and getting worse. At home and at school, Luke had extremely destructive behavior.

The Board of Education won its appeal in the 10th Circuit Court and the Perkins sought review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

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