Dana Steiner didn't mince words when she described what municipal jail time in Colorado actually looks like. Citing El Paso County Sheriff data, she told the Senate Judiciary Committee that more than 70% of municipal jail time was for "sitting, sleeping, camping, and trespass." Then she described one person charged with camping violations 149 times over two years, who spent 120 days in jail as a result.
"If cash bond is set in these cases," Steiner said, "it's not that return to court improves, it's that people stay in jail until they plead guilty."
That was the sharpest edge of a session that moved through six bills on March 9, 2026 — a session that included a unanimous vote for a bill named after a dead cyclist, a 5-2 split over mandatory minimums for sex trafficking offenses, and a contentious 4-3 vote on whether municipal courts should be able to set cash bond for defendants who keep skipping court. The committee is chaired by Sen. Mike Weissman, who on that last bill voted no — against a bill sponsored by his own colleague — and explained why in terms that made clear Colorado's carceral system is straining at the seams.
Magnus's Law: One Question That Was Never Asked
Michael White's testimony stopped the room.
His son Magnus, a 17-year-old member of the U.S. Junior national cycling team, was killed on July 29, 2023, on Highway 119 in Boulder County — struck from behind while riding in a designated bike lane on a straight road. He was 15 minutes from home, on a 10-foot shoulder, doing everything right. The driver never braked. The car drifted 300 feet into a field. Magnus died. The driver was never offered a breath test at the scene.
What emerged at trial — nearly two years later — was that the driver had been drinking at a bar until 3 a.m., drove to a friend's house, drank another half-liter of whiskey into the morning, took multiple prescription medications carrying warnings against driving, and possibly used cocaine, all of it captured on a phone. A friend had begged them not to drive. They drove anyway.
"Too many things broke that day," Michael White told the committee. "Too many things failed Magnus that day. This bill is our way of fixing one of them. It is straightforward, bipartisan, constitutional, and long overdue."
SB 26-132, now known as Magnus's Law, would require law enforcement responding to a crash involving a death or suspected serious bodily injury to offer the driver a voluntary preliminary breath test — a PBT. The driver can still decline. Officers document the response. That's it. Sen. Dylan Roberts (co-sponsor) described it as filling a gap in cases that don't immediately trigger a DUI investigation, where officers, in the chaos of a fatal crash, sometimes simply don't go down that road at all.
Jill White, Magnus's mother, described her son as a boy who wore his Team USA jacket like a uniform, who kept the national anthem on his training playlist so his teammates could warm up to it. "He wanted to lift his teammates up just the way he wanted to lift himself up," she said. The day after the World Championships — the race Magnus had been training to win — he was supposed to sign his first professional contract.
Brian Reed testified about his own crash, in which a driver who appeared to be slurring and had urinated in his pants was released from the scene without a breath test, citing a claimed disability — and who turned out to be uninsured. "A breath test was never taken," Reed said. "And because of that, the truth about that crash may never be known."
A Defense Bar Concern — and a Unanimous Vote
The only voice that wasn't fully in support came from Kiyomi Bullock of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, who testified in an amend position. Her ask was narrow but legally pointed: if an officer fails to give the required advisement before administering the voluntary PBT, the statute should explicitly bar those results from being used to establish probable cause or to request further testing.
Sen. Roberts responded that courts handle improper advisements under the existing express consent statute on a case-by-case basis, and SB 132 would work the same way. Bullock's counterargument was that the situations aren't comparable — express consent testing is mandatory once probable cause exists, while this PBT is voluntary and requested before probable cause is established. The defense bar stayed in an amend position. But after amendment L3 was adopted — which added a two-hour parameter and other provisions developed in stakeholding with the State Patrol, the State Public Defender, and others — both the State Patrol and the State Public Defender moved to neutral.
The vote was 7-0. The bill now proceeds to the full Senate floor on the regular second reading calendar.
Children in Court: Remote Testimony and a Disputed Amendment
HB 26-1103 drew some of the most striking personal testimony of the day. Sen. Cutter, the sponsor, had a clean summary of her reaction to learning current Colorado law limits remote testimony for child victims to those under 12: "I was really shocked that children don't already have the ability to testify remotely away from the perpetrator."
The bill would expand remote closed-circuit testimony to child victims and persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities up to age 18. It would also require law enforcement to notify a child advocacy center when it receives a report alleging sexual assault or abuse of a child, and to coordinate a forensic interview if deemed necessary and appropriate.
Fourteen-year-old Ali Dominguez testified by phone. When she was nine, she testified against her father. "Every time I looked over at him, I froze," she said. "His whole family was there and crying. And then they would try to speak to me while I was on the stand, I felt like I was being guilt tripped. And since then, I've been diagnosed with anxiety and PTSD. Last week, I was put on medication for my anxiety."
Ashley Jellison of the Colorado Children's Alliance noted that remote testimony is already allowed in 49 states and at the federal level, and that the bill does not lower the burden of proof or weaken due process.
The controversy was in the amendment. Rachel Pickerel Hawkins — a Colorado mother whose own children are victims in an active criminal case — raised two sharp objections to a pending amendment Sen. Cutter had flagged. The amendment would change CAC notification from within 24 hours to within one week, and would add language giving law enforcement discretion over whether a forensic interview occurs at all. "Street level officers should not be the gatekeepers," Hawkins said. Elizabeth Moran of the ARC of Colorado, supporting the bill on behalf of Coloradans with intellectual and developmental disabilities, agreed: "A week is a really long time" for a vulnerable person to go without advocacy supports in place.
Sen. Cutter described the amendment as addressing the need for CACs to receive referrals for credible allegations "rather than preliminary or potentially basically reports." Amendment L008 — raising the standard for reporting to CACs to require reasonable suspicion — was adopted. The bill passed 7-0 and was placed on the consent calendar.
SB 75: Mandatory Minimums and the Gap That Could Trap Victims
The committee also voted on SB 26-75, which would align penalties for commercial sexual activity offenses — including human trafficking — with other statutes. Sen. Pelton (Vice Chair, sponsor) argued the bill reflects what prosecutors and victim advocates have asked for, and what the public would expect.
Two senators voted no — and neither did so lightly.
Sen. Katie Wallace said she agreed that human trafficking should be harshly sentenced. But mandatory minimums, she argued, transfer power from judges to prosecutors in ways that don't actually produce safety. "I worry this bill is taking away the court's ability to consider all aspects of a case, its victims, its defendants, every other specific circumstance, in exchange for a purported feeling of safety that decades of tough on crime policies have never actually produced for us."
She also quoted directly from the bill's fiscal note, which projected approximately $1.7 million in capital construction costs to add prison bed space — costs not yet included in the bill's appropriation. "Not yet well included in the cost of this bill," Wallace said, "is the likelihood of building whole new prisons for whole new beds."
Sen. Henriksen's objection was different, and more structural. He doesn't dispute that some people who engage in commercial sexual activity should spend decades in prison. His concern is the gap the mandatory minimum structure creates for victims who are coerced into criminal behavior by their traffickers — people who may have little or no genuine free will. "What we've created is in many cases... an ability for zero penalty or 10 years and nothing in between," he said. "And that becomes a really problematic piece."
Two amendments were adopted before the vote: L001 aligns the definition of commercial sexual activity with other statutes and federal law, and removes a spousal exemption; L5 removes entirely a bond-consideration provision that had generated significant debate the previous week. The bill passed 5-2 and now moves to the Appropriations Committee, where the $1.7 million fiscal note will need to be addressed.
The Cash Bond Fight — and a Chair Who Voted No
The session's most fractious bill was SB 26-112. As amended, it allows municipal courts to impose a monetary bond condition after a defendant has failed to appear three or more times in the same case — giving judges discretion, not a mandate, and including carve-outs for defendants who couldn't appear due to hospitalization or other legitimate reasons.
Sponsor Sen. Lynda Zamora Wilson framed this as a narrow accountability tool targeting deliberate, repeated non-appearance. Municipal judges who testified — including judges from Westminster and Colorado Springs — reported that failure-to-appear rates had risen approximately 20% in Westminster since mandatory personal recognizance bonds were instituted, and that Westminster's FTA rate on PR bonds now exceeds its appearance rate. One judge described approximately 1,000 Colorado Springs defendants with at least two open cases and five FTAs — including one defendant with 24 open cases.
Opponents, including the Denver and Aurora Municipal Public Defenders and the Colorado Freedom Fund, argued the bill punishes poverty and homelessness. Over 80% of Denver Municipal Public Defender clients have mental health conditions, substance use disorders, or traumatic brain injuries. More than half are unhoused. Steiner's El Paso County data showed that the majority of municipal jail time is for conduct like sitting, sleeping, and camping.
The legal terrain was itself contested. Chair Weissman argued that CRS 16-4-113 — a state statute restricting monetary bonds for petty offenses — applies equally to municipal and county courts. Judge Flanagan pushed back, saying that's not how municipal courts have read the statute. A third witness, Rebecca Wallace, argued the disparity claim was "flatly inaccurate, except in a reverse way," contending the statute actually more limits state courts than municipal courts. The exchange did not reach resolution.
Then Weissman explained why he was voting no — and the explanation landed like a budget memo dropped into a policy debate. "Part of the DOC capacity issue is that our jail backlog, folks who are legally in the custody of Department of Corrections but aren't there yet, are backed up in a county jail cell somewhere, is over 700," he said. "By historic standards, that's extremely high. I sat Friday with some executive branch senior staff who think it could go to 1,000 or 1,500 bluntly by that point."
Amendment L5, sponsored by Sen. Henriksen, narrowed the bill to petty offenses for theft, criminal mischief, and arson — or comparable municipal offenses — before the final vote. It passed 4-3, with Sens. Daugherty, Wallace, and Weissman voting no.
Restitution That Outlives the Sentence
HB 26-1017, sponsored by Sen. Weissman, moved through with less friction but one of the more devastating pieces of personal testimony of the day.
Aaron Simpson told the committee that when he was 22, he drove recklessly and caused a crash that seriously injured people. He was sentenced to 12 years. Since his release, he has earned a computer science degree and maintained steady employment. But his restitution order — $298,000 at sentencing — has grown to nearly half a million dollars. "The Court ultimately ordered 298,000 in restitution only about 6,000 of that was owed directly to the people I hurt," he said. "The other 293,000 went to insurance companies and government agencies that had already compensated the victims with interest. My balance today is approaching half a million dollars."
The bill focuses restitution on natural person victims, treating insurance companies as victims only when they are first-party victims — for instance, when fraud is committed against the insurer, or when insurer-owned property is vandalized. It passed 5-2, with Sens. Carson and Zamora Wilson voting no.
School Safety Lockboxes: A Quiet Unanimity
SB 26-104, sponsored by Sens. Liston and Snyder, requires schools to install secure exterior key boxes giving law enforcement emergency access to buildings, internal keys, access cards, and building layouts during an active threat. Sen. Liston cited a Department of Justice report on the Uvalde shooting, which found that responding officers lacked keys to locked doors. Sen. Snyder cited the UNLV shooting, in which more than 500 security doors were damaged by law enforcement trying to reach locked areas.
Neil Zipser of Knox Company testified that the boxes run between $300 and $400 for a standard facility, up to $800 for a larger one, and that four states currently have key box legislation with nine more states having legislation pending. Four amendments were adopted, adding flexibility: schools with existing compliant systems don't need new boxes; schools may use alternative emergency access plans; the implementation deadline was extended from 2028 to 2030; and schools aren't required to install boxes if they apply for but don't receive state funding. The bill passed 7-0. Sen. Snyder indicated a technical amendment will be brought on second reading.
What Happens Next — and Why It Matters
SB 132 (Magnus's Law) now moves to the full Senate floor. If it passes both chambers and is signed, every law enforcement officer responding to a fatal or serious-injury crash in Colorado will be required to offer a voluntary breath test — a procedural step that did not happen the day Magnus White was killed, and that his family spent two years waiting for the truth without.
SB 75 moves to Appropriations, where the committee will have to decide whether to fund the projected $1.7 million in new prison construction the mandatory minimums would require. If it passes and is signed, commercial sexual activity offenses will carry mandatory minimum sentences in Colorado — a change prosecutors and victim advocates support, and one that two senators believe will sweep up trafficking victims alongside their perpetrators.
SB 112 heads to the full Senate floor in amended form, narrowed to petty theft, criminal mischief, and arson offenses. If it passes and is signed, municipal judges will have new discretion to set cash bond for defendants with three or more failures to appear — in a state where, as its own committee chair noted, the corrections system is already buckling under a jail backlog that could reach 1,500 people.
HB 1103 goes to the full Senate on the consent calendar. If it passes, Colorado will join 49 other states in allowing child victims up to age 18 to testify via closed-circuit television — meaning a 14-year-old like Ali Dominguez, diagnosed with PTSD after testifying against her father, might not have had to look at him at all.