The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously advanced SB26-149, a sweeping mental health competency bill creating new civil commitment pathways for individuals found incompetent to proceed and non-restorable to competency, after adopting seven amendments negotiated among more than a dozen stakeholder groups.
The Minority Lieder co-prime sponsor acknowledged that while the bill came close to full stakeholder agreement, 'I know I'm hearing today there's still some work potentially be done with hospitals. We haven't got absolute 100% consensus.' The co-prime sponsor stated an intent to 'continue to work on this policy and make it as good as possible.'
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“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.”
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Sign in to subscribeGood afternoon. The Senate Judiciary Committee will come to order on Monday 20th April. Ms. Jensen, please start us off with a roll call. Senators Carson? President Dougherty. Here. Ken Rickson. Here. Wallace. Present. Zamora Wilson. Present. Roberts. Here. Mr. Chair. Here. All right, everyone's present. We have just one bill on our age today. That is SB149, which is back before us in an action only posture. We had considerable witness testimony about this a week ago. I do want to note in the event that anyone was listening in or here for House Bill 1123 that will be heard Wednesday. We did change that from today to Wednesday, sometime on Friday, the official calendar updated accordingly. There were a few pages on the legislative website that for some unfortunate reason and did not update. So apologize for any confusion. But we are not hearing 1123 today. With that we have a little bill numbered 149 and just a few amendments. So committee, here's how we're going to proceed. We will invite the sponsors to make any comments about how we got from last week to today of a general nature and then to get into the details of…
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