A weekly dive into the pages of Colorado Politics’ predecessor, The Colorado Statesman, which started in 1898:

Forty Years Ago This Week: State Democratic Chairman Mark Hogan said that after due consideration he’d decided to withdraw his candidacy for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee.

Hogan said that the prospect of a four-year full-time job in Washington didn’t appeal to him as his wife, Nancy, wanted to stay in Colorado. 

Anyway, the DNC chair position had already turned into a hotly contested race between Gov. Bill Clinton and finance officer Chuck Mannat.

“It would keep me in a state of suspended animation,” Hogan said, “and I’ve still got business interests in Colorado.”

Hogan was part owner and chairman of the board of the Rockies hockey team.

“I don’t plan on interfering with the coaches or general managers. Since I bought into the Rockies, under my dynamic leadership they’ve lost two games, Hogan joked.”

Thirty Years Ago: After the release from prison of Robert Thiret, who had served just six and a half years of a ten-year sentence for abducting and molesting a three-year-old girl, Sen. Ray Powers, R-Colorado Springs, decided to throw his support behind a piece of child abuse legislation by Sen. Bill Owens, R-Aurora, giving him a key vote that was likely to bring others with it. 

But the incident alone wasn’t what prompted Powers to move into Owens’s column, he said, because he had been an advocate for tough penalties against child abusers for years – though they promoted keeping those convicted behind bars. Owens’s legislation came at the issue from a slightly different direction.

The bill, scheduled to be introduced at the start of the 1991 session, sought to require persons convicted of sexual crimes against children to register immediately with local law enforcement authorities upon their release from prison.

“Given the extremely high recidivism rate of child abusers, the purpose of Sen. Owens’s proposal is to allow law enforcement authorities to know where convicted sex offenders live,” Powers wrote in a letter to The Colorado Statesman. “I have placed the protection of children against abuse at the top of my legislative agenda for the past several years.”

Powers had sponsored legislation in the past that would have stiffened penalties against child abusers and allowed prosecutors to ask a jury to impose the death penalty if the child had died. Though Powers’s bills did not pass the General Assembly, he made it clear in his conversation with reporters that it would have doubled the sentence of offenders like Thiret.

“I’m hopeful that Sen. Owens’s bill will make it through the General Assembly,” Powers wrote. “I don’t think many of us have much tolerance for child abusers.”

… In other news, after the murder of Diane Wetherill, longtime aide to Denver City Councilman Bob Crider, in February, The Colorado Statesman chose the Gateway Battered Women’s shelter as the recipient of their holiday charitable contribution.

Wetherill was shot twice in a domestic violence incident and died of her injuries. 

From 1987-1990, 350 Front Range residents were killed in domestic violence incidents, it was reported. The Gateway Battered Women’s Shelter sought to bridge the gap in services to people in need, serving over 7,000 women and children in 1989 and 10,000 in 1990.

Ten Years Ago: Justice Monica Marquez became the first Latina and lesbian woman appointed to the Colorado Supreme Court in a momentous and moving ceremony where her father, retired Senior Judge Jose D.L. Marquez, proudly administered the oath of office.

Chief Justice Michael Bender told the assembled audience that it was “heart warming that so many friends, family, dignitaries and public officials have turned out to honor our newest justice.”

Among those in attendance were two judges that Marquez had clerked for: Michael Ponsor of the Massachusetts U.S. District Court and Judge David Ebel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

“She had the whole package,” Ebel said of Marquez’s intellect, compassion and genuineness. “I knew wherever she went she would rise to the top. I knew she’d be an important influence in Colorado.” 

In 2002 Marquez became deputy attorney general and in 2009 was named head of the state services section, which represents nine of the state’s 16 executive branch agencies.

After taking her seat on the bench, Marquez addressed the court and the audience, “There are singular moments remembered vividly and treasured forever, and I look around today and know this is one of those moments. I look forward, with gratitude, to the adventure that awaits.”

Rachael Wright is the author of the Captain Savva Mystery series, with degrees in Political Science and History from Colorado Mesa University, and is a contributing writer to Colorado Politics and the Colorado Springs Gazette.