Colorado lawmakers kill mandatory prison bill for child rapists, citing judicial discretion and cost

When the state keeps letting child rapists walk free, who is it really serving?

Three years. Three consecutive years, Colorado’s Democratic-controlled legislature has looked at the evidence, heard from survivors, and said no to mandatory prison time for adults convicted of raping children.

There is nothing that turns my stomach quite like crimes against children. Nothing. Because what distinguishes those crimes from almost every other category of human cruelty is this: the victim carries a life sentence that no one handed them, and no one can reverse.

The rapist can be rehabilitated, we’re told. The rapist deserves judicial discretion. The rapist costs too much to incarcerate.

The child? The child just has to live with it.

Senate Bill 26-111, titled with painful simplicity “Protections Against Child Rape,” died on March 18 in the Senate Judiciary Committee, 4-3, on a party-line vote. The bill wasn’t sweeping. It wasn’t radical. It said one thing: if you are convicted of sexually assaulting a child, you go to prison. You do not go home on probation. You do not get to reintegrate into the community where that child has to go on living. You go to prison.

Disappointingly, four Democrats voted to kill it.

Their objections, consistent across all three years, are twofold: mandatory sentencing removes judicial discretion, and the fiscal cost, estimated at $3.5 million in year two of implementation, is too steep given the state’s $850 million budget deficit.

Here is my take.

I’ll grant that the overincarceration argument is real. It is a genuine problem in this country and I don’t dismiss it wholesale. However, there is a hierarchy of harms, and child sexual assault sits at its apex. The argument loses its weight for me the moment you apply it here. We are not talking about mandatory minimums for drug possession. We are talking about mandatory prison time for raping a child.

And as for the money: I have a long list of things I would not want my tax dollars spent on before I got to this. Congressional junkets and foreign trips that turn into sightseeing tours. Bloated federal contracts that go unaudited for years. Subsidies for industries that don’t need them. Bureaucratic overhead in agencies that couldn’t tell you what they actually produce. Wars that Congress never approved. I would cut all of it in a heartbeat before I stood in front of a victim of child sexual assault and said: we can’t afford to lock up the man who did this to you.

Investigators with the Jefferson County Crimes Against Children Unit told the 2024 House committee that of 91 predators arrested targeting children, 73 percent received nothing more than probation or a deferred sentence. Seventy-three percent. Of those placed on probation, more than a third violated their terms, and many were given probation again.

Victim services manager Courtney Hill, who has watched this happen in real time, put it plainly: “Probation is not an appropriate sentence for someone who enjoys buying children.”

Then there is the Epstein dimension.

We have spent years, rightfully, demanding accountability for the men who abused those girls. We have watched the documentaries. We have read the flight logs. We have argued about which powerful people knew what and when. We have expressed, collectively and loudly, that this was monstrous, that these men should face the full weight of the law, that no amount of money or influence should insulate an abuser of children. It hasn’t happened yet, but I hold onto the hope it might.

However, you cannot hold that position and simultaneously shrug at legislation like this. You cannot demand that the Epstein network face accountability while your state legislature, year after year, ensures that child rapists can walk free on probation. The outrage is only coherent if it’s consistent. Either crimes against children are among the gravest offenses we prosecute, or they aren’t. You don’t get to have it both ways.

The margin is closing. This year it was 4-3. A ballot initiative targeting trafficking of minors for sexual servitude just gathered enough signatures to go directly to voters in November, because supporters have apparently concluded, reasonably, that the legislature cannot be trusted to act.

Maybe the voters will do what the Senate Judiciary Committee would not.

I hope so. Because the children who are the subject of these laws did not get a vote on what happened to them. Child rape is an incredibly serious crime. The least we can do is take it seriously.