Colorado Democrats’ conflicting criminal justice stances boil over in fight over human-trafficking bill

Long-simmering tensions between some Colorado House and Senate Democrats boiled out into public this month when Sen. Dylan Roberts accused the lower chamber of continually undermining “pro-victim” legislation.

At hand was a bill to strengthen laws against human trafficking. The Senate version sought to classify the crime as automatically violent, which would make it subject to tougher sentencing guidelines. House lawmakers narrowed that provision and inserted language that would allow victims who later were drawn into trafficking to better defend themselves in court.

For Roberts, the change was an acute example of ideological maneuvering by a key House committee. For him, the broader language made the punishment commensurate with the “heinous” crime and acknowledged the coercive, inherently violent nature of human trafficking.

“This Senate has continuously sent good criminal justice bills to the House, only to see them significantly weakened by the House Judiciary Committee,” Roberts, a former prosecutor who lives in Frisco, said in a floor speech last week.

The flashpoint reflects intraparty tensions that have lingered between the progressive House and the more moderate Senate since last year. The split has surfaced not just between the judiciary committees and on criminal justice bills, but also has been evident on housing policy.

House lawmakers defended their work on the human trafficking bill and on justice issues more broadly. While Roberts, a key swing vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is generally more aligned with law enforcement’s positions, many House Democrats have made well known their aversion to policies that would send more people to prison.

Both chambers have wide Democratic majorities, but at times each has acted as a check on the other, often to the frustration of lawmakers and their allies who get caught in the middle.

One House Democrat last year, voicing the irritation of many progressives, quipped that the Senate “is where our dreams go to die.” Rep. Jennifer Bacon, a Denver Democrat, referred to the Senate as the “red room of death” — a nod to its red walls and carpet. More sweeping legislation typically is introduced in the House, while lobbyists who seek to blunt or kill reform often train their focus on the Senate.

Progressive Democrats in the House say they may disagree — bitterly — with the Senate’s approach, but that’s the system.

And it cuts both ways.

“If we were mad about the Senate, then we should just want a single-chamber legislature, and we don’t have that. We have two chambers for a reason,” said Bacon, who serves as vice chair of the House Judiciary Committee. “And even though we hate it, it’s for (things) like this” — differences in approach.

“Yeah, it makes me mad,” she added. “But you know what? I’m not going to be mad at the constitution. I think there are other things that we can work on to help each other. At the end of the day, this is also still politics.”

Part of the difference between the House and Senate committees can be attributed to simple math, lawmakers said: The House Judiciary Committee holds an 8-3 Democratic voting advantage, and several of its members are among the most progressive legislators in the Capitol. Its Senate counterpart has a bare 3-2 majority — with Roberts, and his willingness to shoot down bills that fly too far from his view of balance — given an effective veto.

The margins also highlight the different views of the lawmakers on the high-profile committees.

While Roberts told fellow senators that “pro-victim” bills had been “weakened” by House Judiciary in his speech, House members see things differently. They counter that, perhaps — given the shades of gray inherent in many criminal proceedings and the country’s lengthy history of racial disparities — they have a different idea of who could be a victim in America’s legal system.

“For too long, we’ve defined ‘victim’ as one type of person,” Rep. Leslie Herod, a Denver Democrat and member of the House committee, said in an interview. “… I think our definition of ‘victim’ is reflecting a broader understanding of who victims are in our communities.”

Fight over human trafficking

Senate Bill 35 is the human trafficking legislation that sparked Roberts’ ire.

The measure already had cleared the Senate when its House sponsors sought to tweak it in front of the House Judiciary Committee. They wanted to give trafficking victims who were later caught up in the trafficking of other people a chance to mount a better defense and not automatically face lengthy sentences.

Majority Leader Monica Duran, a Wheat Ridge Democrat and the trafficking bill’s co-sponsor, said she supported the amendment — to assuage concerns from House Judiciary members but also because of feedback she’d received from survivors and advocates.

Because the House amended the bill, the Senate had to agree to the tweaks for it to pass. Sens. Byron Pelton and Rhonda Fields, the sponsors in that chamber, had urged their colleagues to accept the changes. Duran said she spoke with both of them before offering the amendment in committee.

Their motivation was not complete agreement with the amendments, Pelton said, but to keep the bill alive. (Pelton, a Sterling Republican, later mounted a separate protest against the changes by proposing a series of doomed, pro-prosecution budget amendments.)

But Roberts instead called for a conference committee to force House and Senate members to hash out their differences on the bill. Fields, Pelton and the rest of the Senate agreed.

The House, however, did not — after Duran and her Republican co-sponsor, Rep. Ty Winter, defended the latest version of the bill on the House floor. The Senate ultimately accepted the House version, not wanting to lose other aspects of the bill over the fight.

Roberts remains unsatisfied.

He said the final bill was “still good work” that will help victims of human trafficking, but it could have been better — and he noted that the tougher Senate version passed that chamber on a 34-1 vote.

He’d hoped to find compromise, he said, adding: “I didn’t draw a hard line, the House did.”

“(The impasse) puts us in an impossible position of passing something that is marginally better for public safety and crime victims, but not everything that we could do — and not everything that I think reflects the conscience of the full legislature,” Roberts said in an interview. In his view, bills clearing the committee “might only be representative of a very small group of legislators on one committee in the House.”

Other crime and gun bills have died in House

Roberts listed other bills that underscore the standoff, including a bill last year to increase penalties for drug dealers whose customers die from use; it passed the Senate and failed at the House Judiciary Committee. Another bill he sponsored this year, which aimed to stop the unbonded pretrial release of some violent offenders, likewise died there, before it could ever be heard in the Senate.

He highlighted recent fights over gun policy, too: A proposal to increase penalties for people who steal guns failed, while the House committee approved a bill to add penalties for gun owners who failed to secure their firearms when stored in a car. (The penalty is a $500 maximum fine and is not a criminal charge.)

“Most regular people in Colorado would be shocked to know about some of the votes and amendments that are happening in House Judiciary Committee,” Roberts said. “… I don’t think that those decisions are reflective of where the large majorities of Coloradans are, on both sides of the aisle.”