Denver Colorado Criminal Law Blog

A shocking new development in the death penalty case of David Bueno as revelations surface that the Arapahoe County District Attorney, Carol Chambers, and her office withheld critical documents that could have exonerated Mr. Bueno.  Fortunately, Bueno, who was convicted in 2008 and sentenced to life by the jury (that refused to buy the D.A’s request for death), is still alive and can potentially benefit from this information.  Unfortunately, as noted by both the Denver Post and Westword, this isn’t the first time that Chamber’s office has been accused of ethical lapses in death penalty cases.  And considering what occured in the Timothy Masters case, you might think (incorrectly) that prosecutors would be extra careful to compy with their ethical requirements. 

In 2008, David Bueno was tried for the 2004 murder of another prisoner in the Limon Correctional Facility and convicted of murder.  Although Bueno was already serving a life sentence, Carol Chambers sought the death penalty.  The case involved the stabbing death of Jeffrey Heird, a white supremacist who had been labeled as a rat for refusing to warn fellow white inmates about a drug bust in prison.   The defenses theory was that the victim was a renegade white supremacist who was killed by other white gang members who then blamed the mruder on three Hispanic inmates, including Bueno.

It  has now come to light that the 18th Judicial District prosecutors withheld  documents consistent with the defense theory.  This new information has only come to light because the judge presiding over Bueno’s co-defendant’s case, has called the D.A. to task.  For example, prosecutors failed to disclose in the Bueno case that:

 [M]inutes after finding Heird’s body, a prison nurse found a letter written by the Aryan Nation threatening to “exterminate” white inmates who “refuse to accept their proud race”  . . . [and]  two days after Heird’s death, another white inmate was found in the same living unit with blunt chest trauma. David Hollenbeck died three days later. He was named in the Aryan Nation letter as a specific target.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as defense attorneys begin to pour over the newly disclosed evidence.  As noted by the Denver Post:

Chambers’ office had turned over 31,006 pages of evidence when Bueno’s capital murder trial began in 2008. As of this week, 65,429 pages have been disclosed. That means more evidence has come forward in the 17 months since Bueno’s conviction than before he was tried — and only, in large part, because the judge presiding over [the co-defendant's] case ordered it.

Filed under: Arapahoe County Cases, Criminal Cases, Death Penalty, Due Process, Prosecutorial Misconduct Tagged: | Criminal Law, Police Misconduct, Prosecutorial Misconduct