Colorado law allows probation for child sex assault: A third attempt to require prison time

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice

Correction: This story originally identified Sen. Marc Snyder by the wrong first name. His name is Marc, not Chris. We regret the error.

Editor’s update: The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to take up SB26-111 today at 1:30 p.m. Coloradans can watch live here.

Seventy percent of people convicted of sexually assaulting a child in Colorado walk out of court on probation.

Not prison—probation.

Current law allows judges to impose probation for some child sexual assault convictions, and in certain cases prison is not required unless there are repeat offenses. SB26-111 would require prison time for anyone convicted.

The bill has failed twice.

A third attempt this year

Reps. Brandi Bradley and Regina English have been working on versions of this bill since 2024.

The first bill was House Bill 24-1092—an attempt to strip probation eligibility from seven crimes connected to child trafficking. State Affairs killed it. 

The committee killed it over an equity argument Bradley still struggles to repeat: if traffickers who don’t physically touch children can’t get probation, it’s unfair to also deny it to people who rape them. 

The next session they narrowed it—one crime, one focus. It was Bradley’s pre-file priority bill—the first she designated for the 2025 session—which should have guaranteed an early hearing date. Instead, Judiciary Chair Rep. Javier Mabrey filed continuances without telling the sponsors, pushing the bill down the calendar week after week while opponents organized.

Bradley went to the clerk’s office. “She said that there were extensions filed unbeknownst to me by the chair of Judiciary—that the majority leader signed off on,” she said. “They didn’t even have to talk to me about it. They kept pushing my bill.”

When Mabrey finally scheduled the hearing in March, the bill was last on the docket. Bradley asked him to move it. Child victims were coming to testify. That request was rejected.

Witness testimony started around 1 a.m. The vote was at 3.

“He made these people wait until 9 p.m. to start committee, and then finally into witness testimony at about one o’clock in the morning,” Bradley said. “You tell me that’s someone who wants to protect children.”

They voted 6–5. The bill was done.

Bradley described what happened after hours of testimony stretched late into the night.

“I sat next to a woman who stayed with me till three o’clock in the morning,” Bradley said. “I drove her to her car. That was a victim of child rape.”

This year the bill moved to the Senate. Rich signed on as prime sponsor. 

As Bradley and English wrote in the Denver Gazette last year, they view the issue as straightforward: children are being raped, and in many cases, the offenders are not going to prison.

Rich didn’t need time to think it over when Bradley approached her. “I just can’t think of a worse crime than raping a child,” she said. “And I couldn’t even get my head around it—that it died in House Judiciary last year by one vote.”

Support that disappeared

Rich had Democrat support in the Senate when she agreed to carry the bill. It vanished.

Sen. Marc Snyder had co-sponsored the 2025 version of the bill in the House and agreed to join Rich as a Senate co-sponsor in 2026.

“Senator Snyder went around town all last summer at town halls saying, ‘Oh yeah, I believe in putting child rapists in jail’—but would not get on this bill with her,” Bradley said. “Then he bailed.”

Rich’s other Senate co-sponsor withdrew after committing to the bill. Today she goes into Judiciary alone.

“At the time when I said I’d try it in the Senate, I had bipartisan support,” Rich said. “And then of course my co-prime bailed and then all of a sudden everybody was saying no. I’ll be in Judiciary by myself this afternoon.”

An unlikely partnership

In the House, the dynamic looks nothing like that.

Bradley and English shouldn’t be close. Bradley and English are usually on opposite sides of the vote.

“I told her we’re not supposed to be friends,” Bradley said. “She said, how do you know that?”

The bill is where the differences stopped. “There’s not a lot we vote the same on, but when it comes to kids, she just has such a passion for protecting them. There’s no other thing that should be more bipartisan than protecting babies from getting sexually assaulted by adults,” Bradley said.

English raised five kids. “I have 11 grandchildren and one on the way,” English said. “And shame on you if you violate any one of them. The police should get to them before I get to them.”

She doesn’t soften her case. “Taking probation off the table is not a lot to ask, especially for this particular crime,” English said. “They have just served a child a lifetime sentence for violating them in a way where they can’t protect themselves. Shame on us for not protecting them if this bill doesn’t pass.”

What it would cost

The fiscal note puts the bill’s cost at $3.5 million per year starting in FY 2027-28—about 56 additional offenders per year going to prison instead of probation. Opponents have leaned on that number. Bradley has heard it.

“We just spent 104 million on pregnant people on Medicaid,” she said, pointing to the Cover All Coloradans program that ballooned to more than six times its projected cost. “We pay for men to look like women through taxpayer funds. We have the money. Put these child rapists in jail. Stop gaslighting the people of Colorado.”

Rich framed it in moral terms, pointing to a line she said captures the imbalance. “Mercy is to the guilty, but cruelty to the innocent,” she said. “A child is going to live with this for the rest of their lives. They’ll never be the same.”

The next test

She heads into Senate Judiciary today without Democratic support. Rich is going in without Democratic Senate support, up against the same committee dynamics that ended the bill before.

Bradley thinks if this bill ever reached the full House floor, it would pass. It has never gotten there.

“It’s these Democrats in charge of Judiciary that are the gatekeepers of getting this out,” she said. “The governor can sue Trump 50 times but he can’t make his way down here to protect the children of Colorado.”

English has been through this before. “This is one crime that we don’t need to be politicking about,” she said. “We need to send a strong message not only to the perpetrators, but the kids of Colorado — that we see them and we hear them.”

“If it fails, nothing changes,” Rich said. “The perpetrators still walk. The children still suffer. But if it passes, we’re giving these kids hope that we care about them and that we see them and they matter.”

“People have got to get off their couches and testify,” Bradley said. “They can come in person, testify remotely or send emails. Everyone knows somebody who’s been victimized. Those are the people we’re fighting for.”