The senator from Boulder paused before her closing argument, and what she said next was both a warning and a plea.
"Most people who have a serious mental illness or who have a neurocognitive disorder or a developmental disability are not violent. They are fine human beings, and their illness doesn't take them in that direction. But there are some people who are, and it isn't good for them if they don't get the care that they need, and it isn't good for the rest of society."
That was the core of SB26-149, a sweeping rewrite of how Colorado handles people who are found incompetent to stand trial and cannot be restored to competency — a legal and human limbo that affects some of the state's most seriously ill residents and has baffled legislatures across the country for decades. On April 20, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 7-0 to send it to the Appropriations Committee, capping weeks of brutal stakeholder negotiation with a rare moment of unanimous agreement.
But unanimity, in this case, masked enormous complexity — and at least a few unresolved fights still ahead.
A Gap Nobody Was Fixing
To understand what SB26-149 is trying to do, you have to understand the legal corner Colorado has painted itself into.
In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Jackson v. Indiana that states cannot indefinitely confine criminal defendants solely because they are incompetent to stand trial. Senator John Carson, a Republican who ultimately voted for the bill, walked his colleagues through the facts of that case — and why he believed it didn't settle the harder question Colorado is now confronting.
"That case was a unanimous Supreme Court decision. And you can understand why it was unanimous because the individual involved there, Theon Jackson, was deaf, he was a mute, he could not read, he was mentally deficient, and he was charged with the huge crime of stealing a woman's purse with $4 in it."
The population SB26-149 targets is different: people who are seriously mentally ill, found incompetent to proceed, deemed unlikely ever to be restored to competency — and who have committed serious, often violent crimes. Under current Colorado law, when someone in that category reaches the end of what the criminal system can do with them, the state has no clean pathway. They can't be tried. They can't be meaningfully released. And the system has no dedicated legal structure to hold them in treatment.
The chair of the committee, Senator Dylan Roberts, put it with characteristic bluntness. He had been calling this issue, since his first exposure to it roughly 17 or 18 years ago, "the saddest thing in the world that nobody knows about." He noted that when he raised the topic with a colleague who had spent about a decade working in and around health care policy, it hadn't come up once in that person's career. He studied criminal law and criminal procedure in law school, he said — and competency never came up there either.
Forty Amendments, Seven Survivors
The bill did not arrive at this hearing polished and uncontested. It arrived having survived a near-death experience.
When SB26-149 was introduced on March 26 and heard by the committee the week before, the sponsors — the senator referred to throughout the hearing as "Senator Mobley" (identified in official bill records as Senator Judy Amabile) and the Senate Minority Leader, who co-prime sponsored the bill — were confronted with what one of them described as "dozens, three dozens probably worth of proposed amendments." The fiscal note from the introduced version was, in the Minority Leader's own telling, "unacceptable" — exceeding the budget set-aside by something like five times.
So they paused. They didn't run the amendments in committee last week. Instead, they went back into the room with public defenders, district attorneys, Disability Law Colorado, county attorneys, the governor's office, the Department of Human Services, the Behavioral Health Administration, the Health Care Policy and Financing office, Bridges, the judicial department, and hospitals — and they negotiated. For a week.
Forty amendments collapsed into seven. Seven amendments were presented to the committee Monday and adopted, almost without discussion, one after another.
"To watch the effort that went into this very important policy, the drafter has just been amazing. To work with fiscal analysts, to spend time with the public defenders and the DA's — a place I just don't spend much time at all — has been quite a life experience for me," the Minority Leader said in closing.
The co-prime sponsor, for her part, singled out drafter Shelby Ross by name — "I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say it by name, but I mean, I don't think we could have pulled all this together without her."
What the Bill Actually Does
The headline provision — what the co-prime sponsor called "the dangerous pathway" — creates a dedicated civil commitment process for the 25 to 50 people per year Colorado currently has no clean legal answer for: individuals who are found incompetent to proceed, deemed non-restorable to competency, and who have committed serious crimes.
For this narrow population, the bill builds a civil commitment pathway that doesn't exist today in any organized statutory form. The civil system — not the criminal system — would then govern their confinement and treatment.
Beyond that core, the bill also addresses civil certification processes, a new "enhanced protective placement" for people in this category, and outpatient certification pathways. A five-year sunset on the enhanced protective placement was added at the request of disability advocates — forcing the legislature to revisit whether the system is actually working before letting it become permanent. A SMART Act hearing with a data component was built in for the same reason.
Amendment L39, one of the more consequential of the seven, gave the system operational flexibility to move people between hospitals, regional centers, and nursing homes without requiring judicial review of each transfer — while preserving judicial oversight for terminating a placement entirely. That flexibility, the co-prime sponsor explained, was what allowed the fiscal note to drop: without it, the state would potentially have needed to build new facilities.
Amendment L40 — the omnibus amendment that ran longer than many standalone bills — restored civil certification language and the definition of "danger to others" to current statute after earlier drafts had tried to change it. The co-prime sponsor was candid: "we found there was a lot of resistance to that." Hospitals and Disability Law Colorado both wanted the rollback.
The Tensions That Didn't Go Away
The Minority Leader was careful not to oversell the consensus. "I know I'm hearing today there's still some work potentially be done with hospitals. We haven't got absolute 100% consensus," he acknowledged. His co-prime sponsor reinforced that commitment to keep working: "I want to ensure them that we are going to continue to work on this policy and make it as good as possible."
The co-prime sponsor also described narrowing the scope of protective placement for people with neurocognitive disorders as a change that "made some people happy and made some people sad" — the kind of diplomatic phrasing that signals a compromise where nobody fully won.
Senator Carson offered the most pointed note of unease, even as he announced his support. He raised the scenario that the bill's civil commitment pathway ultimately relies on judicial determinations — and courts can change those determinations.
"I presume, I guess they're released at that point, which may not be, really, encouraging to the public or to victims of violent crimes," Carson said of a situation in which a court eventually determines a confined person is no longer a risk or no longer incompetent.
He called it "probably the best situation we can get to with the state of the law" — the kind of endorsement that sounds like a shrug but, in a committee room, counts as a yes vote.
The Money Problem Is Not Solved
The fiscal note remains a live issue. The introduced bill blew past its budget set-aside by a staggering margin. The weeks of negotiation — the flexibility amendments, the narrowed placement criteria, the outpatient pathways that let people skip emergency rooms — were in large part about driving that number down.
On the day of the hearing, an updated fiscal estimate came in. The co-prime sponsor told the committee it was "still a very high fiscal note" but that it now comes in "really well within the set aside that's already in the budget." She was careful to add: "it's not finalized yet."
That means SB26-149's next stop — the Appropriations Committee — is not a formality. The bill's survival will depend on whether the cost estimates hold, whether the budget set-aside is enough, and whether appropriators agree the investment is worth making.
Senator Roberts, in his closing remarks, laid out the three-sided dilemma the bill has been trying to thread: public safety, civil liberties, and financial cost. "As we build a system that tries to respond to the first two," he said, "the fact that the financial costs of providing this kind of care or in the alternative confinement can run away in a shocking fashion. Hundreds of thousands of dollars per bed or daily rates that get pretty challenging for a state like in our situation."
That tension — between what's right and what Colorado can afford — doesn't resolve in committee.
A Bipartisan Vote With No Illusions
The final roll call was clean: Senators Carson, Daugherty, Hinrichsen, Wallace, Zamora Wilson, Roberts, and Weissman all voted yes. Seven to zero. No dissent, no abstentions.
But the 7-0 vote obscured what the co-prime sponsor articulated plainly: the stakeholder coalition is real but imperfect, the fiscal note is promising but unfinished, and the hospitals haven't fully signed on. She was direct about the tension between making stakeholders happy and keeping the bill's mission intact.
"Of course it's important to make the stakeholders happy. They are the ones that have to implement the bill. They're the ones that are impacted by it. But also we do have this overarching goal of making sure that people who need care get into care and that public safety is addressed in a very comprehensive way. And so we don't want to let go of the bigger picture on this."
That is the bet at the center of SB26-149: that a bill carefully negotiated among competing interests can hold together when it reaches the floor, the other chamber, and ultimately the governor's desk.
What Happens Next
SB26-149 now moves to the Senate Committee on Appropriations, where its still-evolving fiscal note will face scrutiny. If it clears Appropriations, it goes to the full Senate for a floor vote, and if it passes the Senate, it travels to the House — where the entire process of committee hearings, amendments, and votes begins again.
If this bill ultimately becomes law, the 25 to 50 Coloradans per year who are found incompetent to proceed, deemed non-restorable, and have committed serious crimes will finally have a defined legal pathway — civil commitment with treatment, oversight, and a process for eventual review — rather than falling through the gap between the criminal and civil systems. For the communities where those individuals have committed crimes, it offers a structured answer to a question that currently has none. For the individuals themselves, it offers the possibility of care instead of a legal void.
If it dies in Appropriations or on the floor, Colorado returns to a system that Senator Roberts has been calling the saddest thing in the world that nobody knows about — and that the rest of the world, it turns out, hasn't solved either.