DENVER — Colorado lawmakers want to create a new way to institutionalize mentally ill and disabled people who are accused of serious crimes in an effort to ensure that dangerous people are not set free when their criminal cases end.

The bipartisan effort to tweak Colorado’s competency laws is backed by major players in the criminal justice system who hope the 197-page Senate Bill 149 will plug gaps in the state’s competency system, but it’s opposed by mental health advocates and competency experts, who say the proposal is misguided and unlikely to actually solve the underlying problems in the state’s system.

“It creates a whole host of concerns around wholesale warehousing folks,” said Jennifer Turner, executive director of Bridges of Colorado, a state office aimed at connecting criminal defendants with severe mental illness to support and care. “They all have incredibly diverse needs. And responding to people by just throwing them into the same facility with the same care… can create longer-term problems because they may not be appropriately placed in that setting.”

This latest effort to reform the state’s long-troubled competency system follows a high-profile case that drew attention from Elon Musk and Gov. Jared Polis last year, in which a 21-year-old man with an intellectual disability was found incompetent to stand trial in a pair of serious criminal cases in Weld County. He was released from custody with his charges dismissed, and then was arrested again within weeks after authorities said he brought a gun onto a college campus.

The new bill aims to create a clear pathway within criminal cases for such defendants to receive treatment and remain confined until they are no longer dangerous, even when the criminal charges must be dropped. The proposal would also shift some court standards and make it easier for people to qualify for involuntary mental health care.

“What we discovered is that not only do we not have adequate placements for people, we also don’t have the mechanism for civilly committing them,” said Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat and a sponsor of the bill.

There was often a “very long pathway” for some people to get placed in a facility, she added, which is what the bill is trying to address. But she also stressed that the state needs a more robust system “that helps people before they ever enter the criminal justice system to begin with.”

Creating a new pathway to commitment

Colorado’s competency process is designed to protect the constitutional rights of people who are mentally ill or developmentally disabled by ensuring they are not prosecuted for crimes when they are too sick or too disabled to understand the court process and to help defend themselves.

Defendants who are found to be mentally incompetent cannot be tried for crimes — rather, their criminal prosecutions are paused while defendants go through treatment aimed at restoring them to competency. If defendants can’t be restored to competency, the cases against them must be dismissed.

When such criminal cases are dismissed, judges can consider whether the defendant should be ordered into involuntary mental health treatment. Colorado has a narrow definition for who qualifies for civil commitment. The person must suffer from a mental health disorder, and, as a result of that disorder, be either a danger to themselves or others, or be gravely disabled.

Current state law says that an intellectual or developmental disability alone is not enough to qualify a person for civil commitment. The new bill would create an entirely new type of civil commitment, called an “enhanced protective placement,” for defendants who live with permanent disabilities or conditions like traumatic brain injuries or Alzheimer’s disease and who face serious criminal charges but are incompetent to proceed.

Under the bill’s proposal, prosecutors could seek either an enhanced protective placement or civil commitment for a permanently incompetent defendant if they can prove the defendant has a mental illness or developmental disability, committed either homicide, a crime of violence or a felony sex offense, and poses a substantial risk of serious harm to others.

That would then trigger a process in which the Colorado Department of Human Services and its Office of Civil and Forensic Mental Health would look for a residential placement for the defendant. If the agencies can’t find a bed for the defendant, the person must be admitted to a state hospital.

The bill then sets up judicial oversight for the civil commitment — judges can terminate the commitment if they find the person is no longer a threat to others and is capable and willing to follow the law, or decide to extend a civil commitment if the person still presents a danger to the public.

“For these more dangerous people, it would be much more guaranteed the intervention happens… and the courts are more involved,” said James Karbach, spokesman for the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender.

Bill focuses on involuntary care

The effort is aimed at people like the 21-year-old defendant in the Weld County case — but such people make up just a tiny portion of defendants in competency proceedings, and competency proceedings themselves make up just a small portion of overall criminal cases, so that portion of the bill would likely impact just a handful of people each year.

Between 2021 and 2023, roughly 25 to 40 people went through the court system with cases that might fit the criteria proposed by the bill, said Jessica Dotter, senior chief of legislative policy at the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council.

The bill is largely focused on involuntary mental health care. Turner said that framing is a mistake, because the vast majority of people who’d be targeted by the bill are willing to accept care voluntarily. In 2025, Bridges worked with 120 defendants who were found incompetent and unlikely to be restored and whose criminal cases were dismissed. A full 94% of those defendants were willing to enter a placement voluntarily, she said.

Bridges found placements for 60% of those people, but could not find placements for 34% of the group because of systemic barriers like regulations and finances, not because the group members were unwilling to receive care. Just 6% of defendants refused care, she said, and those cases included defendants with only misdemeanor charges.

“It’s rare that no beds exist,” Turner said. “We just can’t access the beds.”

The proposed new process, which orders that a placement be found for a defendant, doesn’t do anything to actually solve the regulatory and financial barriers that block people from care, Turner said. The process of finding a placement routinely takes longer than the timeframe proposed by the bill.

“It’s assuming the individual is in an involuntary space, and all we need to do is order them into a placement and a placement will magically exist for them,” she said.

Bridges workers have spent 21 months trying to find a placement for one client — someone who would be a target of the proposed bill — and that person has been turned down by 64 facilities, Turner said, noting there is an “entanglement of state, federal and local regulations that inadvertently support risk-averse decision making by agencies which are meant to be society’s safety net.”

“That person is in their mid-30s, they are mortified at what happened, they have voluntarily agreed to live in locked memory care for the rest of their life,” she said. “…Even though this person has really proven they will be stable in the appropriate care, even though they are agreeing to something that is a heavy-duty version of a life sentence, they’ve still been refused care at 64 facilities. This bill does nothing to address the barriers that individual is facing.”

Rather than focusing on the “tail end of the legal process,” lawmakers could effect more change by reducing the state’s regulatory barriers, giving financial incentives to providers with existing beds and streamlining access to Medicaid and other benefits, she said.

But others said ensuring that dangerous individuals aren’t set free is a step in the right direction, even if it doesn’t solve the broader systemic issues.

“The timing of this is incredibly hard, but we have to find ways to make improvements,” Karbach said. “We are not going to solve the problem of an inadequate system of care for the mentally ill in this bill completely. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find a way to make some improvements.”

When a long-term care placement can’t be found, the bill would default to sending defendants to the state mental health hospital in Pueblo — a facility that is perpetually full and understaffed. The bill would essentially prioritize people committed under the new process over those waiting for competency restoration services, potentially lengthening the competency waitlist, said Jack Johnson, public policy liaison at Disability Law Colorado.

The judicial oversight also raises concern, Johnson said.

“A judge could theoretically overrule the medical professional’s decision and leave you in a world where you are indefinitely incarcerated and no longer receiving treatment,” he said. “That is a huge area of concern for us as it relates to people’s civil liberties.”

The impact on the waitlist might be mitigated by the small number of people going through the new process each year. Across the state in 2025, only five people faced Class 1 or Class 2 felonies, were found permanently incompetent to proceed, and saw their cases dismissed, Turner said. Four of the five were successfully placed into long-term care through Bridges or other legal mechanisms, she said. Only one of those people was released without a plan for care, and that person was not assigned a Bridges liaison, she said.

‘There’s infinite need’

Capacity at the state hospital remains a significant concern, Karbach said.

Amabile said lawmakers are proposing to convert a facility in Pueblo to serve people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. In all, that should create between 15 and 18 new beds. Lawmakers also want to contract with nursing homes and private mental hospitals to open more space as the state needs.

“There’s infinite need, almost, for these kinds of placements,” Amabile said. “It’s about the level of security. So these most secure placements are what we’re lacking, especially in the nursing home and regional center space.”

Even in a cash-strapped budget year, lawmakers are trying to set aside millions of dollars to fund the bill. Amabile said the money set aside is about $9.6 million this year, $23.2 million next year and about $28 million after that.

But the bill’s current estimated cost far exceeds that. Amabile said the bill, as it’s written now, likely costs “hundreds of millions of dollars.” She said the bill will be amended to narrow its definition so it only captures people with specific needs, which will help trim the costs.

The bill has significant legislative heft behind it: Sen. Cleave Simpson, the Senate’s Republican minority leader, is sponsoring the bill with Amabile. The House’s top Democrat and Republican lawmakers — Speaker Julie McCluskie and Minority Leader Jarvis Caldwell — will take the reins if and when the bill reaches the lower chamber.

Through spokesman Eric Maruyama, Polis declined an interview request. Maruyama said the bill was part of the governor’s effort to lower Colorado’s crime rates.

“An important part of that is making sure that those who pose a danger to themselves and others are not released, which is what we want to see in this bill,” Maruyama said. “Governor Polis appreciates the work of the sponsors to protect public safety and improve our competency system, and looks forward to continued conversations to bring this bill to a place that the state can successfully implement.”

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