The guy who killed the Colorado prisons chief and a pizza delivery guy in Colorado

benefited from a series of errors in the criminal justice system before he became a suspect in the slaying[s].

He got out of prison four years early because of a clerical error in a rural courthouse. He slipped his ankle bracelet and violated the terms of his parole last month, but authorities didn’t put out a warrant for his arrest until after the killings of pizza deliveryman Nathan Leon and corrections chief Tom Clements.

The clerical error: he was supposed to get four extra years for punching a prison guard in the face and threatening to kill his family, but the judge didn’t say the word “consecutive” when he sentenced the guy, because the plea deal already articulated that it was to be consecutive. Because the judge didn’t say the word, the clerk didn’t indicate it on the form sent to the prison. So they made it concurrent, meaning he got zero extra punishment for that crime, though he had agreed to four more years.

Meanwhile, after three murders in Texas suspected of being orchestrated by the Aryan Brotherhood, a federal prosecutor in Texas has given up on an Aryan Brotherhood case out of concerns for his safety and that of his family.

A federal prosecutor in a major case in Houston against the notorious Aryan Brotherhood of Texas prison gang has withdrawn from the case over security concerns in the wake of the weekend murders of a Dallas-area district attorney and his wife, said a source familiar with the case.

Jay Hileman, an assistant U.S. Attorney, had been assigned to the case.

The case will still be prosecuted, just by someone else.

It’s a tough system with dangerous people.

UPDATE: Commenters are providing links that say this happened at a hotel, not a mountain house as reported in the initial story I linked. Read the comments for the latest updates.