I am pleased as Punch to check in with state Senator and gubernatorial candidate Barb Kirkmeyer. We are going to talk about something that has turned into.
A huge problem.
And Barb, first of all, welcome back to the show.
Well, thank you, it's great to be back on and thanks for having me.
So let's talk about HB twenty four Dash ten thirty four. This was a bill that from the outside looking in, and you can tell me where I've got it right, where I've got it wrong, it looks like another well intentioned piece of legislation that has accidentally created a huge
negative consequence. And that negative consequence for my listeners who don't know their bill numbers right off the top of the head, is that we've now seen multiple cases of people that have demonstrated a propensity to be violent being arrested and then being released because they are found unable to stand trial because of a competency issue. And this is now a huge problem. So Barb, let's start at the beginning. Where did this bill come from and were these problems ever discussed?
Let's do start there.
But first of all, let me just say this, I did vote for that bill, and I'm going to say why, but it is obvious you're right that it's got it needs to be fixed. There's it did create a huge problem. We thought we were solving another issue that had to do with the deal with the Constitution. But in this case, we need to fix this bill. And I very frankly believe that the governor should call for a special session, that we should fix it sooner rather than later. And
I'm concerned that he won't want to do that. I know the remembers folks that had asked to have this s get fixed in the special session we had in AUGUSTA. Obviously it did not get on the call, but we need to get it fixed sooner rather than later, because you're right what happened was the bill, and we talked
about this in our caucus as well. But this bill started actually with a task force who was putting together recommendations for what's called an introim commit so a committee that meets when we're not in session and they go through and have more time to really go in depth and look at bills and.
See what's made it there.
And so it came out of that infram committee and it was especially built as a necessary fix for a constitutional deficiency. In other words, way back, like I think it was nineteen seventy two, but back in the nineteen seventies, the Supreme Court had made it very clear that individuals that are deemed incompetent simply cannot just be left in jail.
It violates the Constitution.
Do process in the constitution, And you know that's been out.
There for a while.
So we we passed this bill thinking that we were addressing the constitutional concerns, looking at the length of time, the reasonable amount of time that an individual could be
staying in there. And quite honestly, when we talked about this billing and in our Republican caucus and when I mean we all voted for it on the floor in the Senate, you know, on third reading, we talked about that it was really they're either going to be in a correction facility or they're going to be in a mental institute institution, right, So it wasn't like they should be letting go or not, you know, getting back out.
On the streets. So that's where we've got a problem.
I've talked with, you know, a few district attorneys.
I've talked with obviously, the sheriff.
Of my sheriff of Well County, who rightly so is you know, ringing the alarm bell and thank you for doing that, And so, you know, we think we can come up with a fix. I've spoken with one of the prime sponsors and she's been working with the District Attorneys Association, the disability groups, victims groups, and others as well, and we've pledged to kind of try and come together to see if we can come up with a fix.
But in the meantime, we really just need to have the governor call special session and then let's get the bill fixed. But that won't solve all the issue is part of the other problem. And I've talked about this in a couple of different places, but you know, it's one thing to try and address the constitutional concerns.
Now, we need to.
Fix this hole it's in this bill. Fix this flawed law that's letting people go.
But the other problem is the next phase of this.
And as I was talking to, like, for example, some of the district's attorneys like, is the institutions that we have in the state.
We have about five hundred beds in the state.
Four hundred of them are for those that are criminally Justice involved.
The others are for civil of.
People who are involved in civil cases, and it's for people who are either mentally ill or developmentally disabled. And so what has been going on in the courts is instead of the defense having the burden to say that they are not restorable, in other words, they're incompetent, it's been put on the prosecution to have to prove that they are not competent. So again, I think there's a fixer that we can come up with. But where do
we put them? These beds are full. We've got anywhere from three hundred and sixty plus bed waiting list to get into these institutions.
It's very expensive.
And you know, in our budget situation, I know last year in the budget the Joint Budget Committee, we added additional dollars to this area. Quite frankly, not enough, not enough. We're going to have to prioritize this area, you know. And so I tell folks, you know, when you want to keep voting against the budget, you're also voting against things like this about you know, increasing bedspace. You're voting against the Department of Corrections, You're voting against judicial getting funding.
It's like, we have to fund these things and we're going to have to find the money for it, and it's it'll be tough. I mean, from my perspective, it's a must have. It's not a pet project of any kind. This is a must have that we have to do. But we got to fix the first problem first, and that's fixing the flaw in the in the bill, in the law, and the governor needs to call special session.
Okay, let's talk about the second part of this, because the first part seems like a no brainer, right.
That I don't understand.
I think so anyone could have any issue was saying we need to make sure the dangerous people are not getting released back onto the streets. It does seem to me that there's something wrong, and you sort of referenced it. There's something wrong with the way people are declared unable to stand trial or or not competent to stand trial.
There seems to be something there that mechanism, because once someone is determined to be unable to stand trial because of competency, it seems like it's far too hard to get them to a point. Let and I'm going to use the example of Ephraim oh gosh, what's his last name? I can't remember his last name. The guy who was
just Collins. It's from something even from something from d whatever it is, but just getting that guy, because that guy went on TV with CBS four and is like, I'm not even getting a chance to plead my case. And Sheriff Steve Reem said on my show that from his interactions, this guy does not meet the classic standard that most people would think of as someone like and I'm going to use Robert Deer, the guy who's been accused of shooting up the Planned parenthood in Colorado Springs.
He's been incarcerated since twenty six teen, because he is completely detached from reality, right, Like I think most people think when you hear not competent to stand trial, you're thinking someone with serious mental illness instead of they just don't seem to understand that they're now in the judicial system, which the second case feels that way.
Does that make sense, Yes, it does.
So there's a difference between being you know, a mental illness and being able to be treatable. And then there's also the developmentally disabled, So someone with like a very low IQ, right, like, you know, I don't know what this individual in Wild County with our IQ is, but when I talked to the sheriff, it sounds like he's got a very low IQ and they're developmentally disabled, right, and so that's.
That's the difference.
But like I said, when I was talking with different district attorneys, their comment was, look, we need to kind of flip the burden here and habits where the presumption needs to be reversed that defendants should have to demonstrate competency or the defense should have to demonstrate compency rather than forcing prosecutors to prove incompetence. And that's causing an issue. And I think that's where we can fix the law. But the next question is then where do they go?
Right?
You know, certainly if they're having a lesser crime, like if it was you know, shoplifting.
Or a non violent but not just some left or.
Lesser crime that's more of a misdemeanor type thing, you know, there are probably other suitable places for them to go to get resources and services, especially if it's mental illness.
But if it is developmentally.
Disabled and they just aren't capable of understanding, we're going to need to find a location for them. But we can't just be letting them out on the streets, especially if they are violent, you know, and have a very low IQ kind of thing. And that's what's going on here. So we're going to have to figure out how to increase.
The number of beds.
And you know that we have in these institutions and probably the ones either in Fort Logan are Pueblo. I mean, that's where we have our two institutions in the state of Colorado.
And it's very expensive.
And I will tell you right now we're under a consent to cree because of that waiting list we already have, so we're already paying out money to essentially stay out of compliance, which I don't like. And we've been trying to figure this out at the Joint Budget Committee. But at the same time, we don't have the we haven't been a well find the funding.
We have a workforce shortage.
I mean, we don't have people who want to work there, right and I wouldn't either, quite frankly.
But so that's part of the other issue is trying to figure out especially after COVID.
I mean, our issue got exasperated with COVID because of you know, people being furloughed and being left not at the state, not being furloughed at the state. But like you know, these types of medical and behavior health providers, you know, things just got moved around and got switched around, and now things have gotten a lot more expensive. It's more expensive to hire people we contract out with these beds, you know, to get the right workforce there. But it
it is extremely difficult to do that. And that's the next step. And by no means trying to make any kind of excuse.
We have got to fix this.
We cannot let, you know, violent criminals just because they're developmentally disabled out on the streets.
We've got to figure out where they go. And we also have to follow our constitution.
Amen to that. Now, let me ask this question to the point that Colorado, and it's not just Colorado, okay. We know back in the you know, fifties, sixties, and seventies, of the nineteen hundreds. Back in the nineteen hundreds, as the kids today say, we had a big emptying out of mental institutions of all kinds, state, federal, everybody kind of said, oh, we've got all these new medications and we're going to just give people medications and they're going
to be okay in the community. The reality is is that we have underinvested for decades, right, we have underinvested, and now we've got this situation, which is criminal situations, but we also have on the streets of our cities here in Colorado evidence of a significant population of people with severe mental illness. They are self medicated with.
Drugs and alcohol.
So we need to be having a conversation not just about the criminal element, but we need to be having a conversation about what are we going to do in a meaningful way to help people who are stuck in the throes of addiction have an opportunity to come out of that addiction and get help for that mental illness while also being protected in an environment that protects themselves and the general public.
You're exactly right.
And part of the issue is, and I've been having this struggle with this as well, is we created a behavior Health Administration, and this is where we were supposed to be combining things from all these departments and creating this new administration that was going to figure out this system of care and how do we get behavioral health.
Services to folks.
I quite frankly don't really know what our return on investment has been for the over billion of dollars that we have put into this administration, into this department, and I think there needs to be some discussions there about where are we really putting the funds and how do
we fix how do we fix this issue? I mean, maybe we need to be pulling some of those funds over to assist with the issue with the beds that we have in our institutions where we have a lack of beds, I mean, because we do not we do not want to get into the situation that we were in with our juvenile detention facilities and beds, where we literally had a cap on the number of beds that we could have, and just this year we finally were able to get that cap increase because what was happening
is we were to put someone into that situation, into that bed, we were letting someone else go.
And we do not want to be in that situation either.
So we are literally, quite literally going to have to sit down and get this figured out. Like I said, the easiest part, and I'm not going to say it's really easy, but the easiest part of this is fixing the law. The most difficult, difficult part is I don't even think it's finding the funding. I think it's finding the workforce to increase the number of beds that we have in our institutions so that we can get that wait list down. I know the woman who runs this office,
she has worked for district attorneys. She understands what the situation is. And if we don't get it down, you know, quite frankly, we just get posed with another lawsuit, which doesn't do any good.
We know what the problem is. We're trying to fix it. Another lawsuit just doesn't happen.
But you know, sometimes you just can't get those acl you guys to suffer the loss. But you know, we've got to. We've just got to get under control, and we've got to. We will we can find the funding. I know we will go and work to find the funding because this is a must have, a must fund. It's that workforce shortage is what is scaring me. And I don't know where we find that well.
I mean this is when when I had then candidate Mayor Mike Johnson now Mayor Mike Johnston on the show, and he was talking about creating all these micro communities and hotels and all of this stuff for homeless people. My number one question for him was who is going to work there? Where are you going to find the staff? Where are you going to find the trained staff? This is not exactly you can't just PLoP a new high school graduate into this position. These are people that have
to be highly trained. They have to understand how to deal with mentally ill people that could be violent.
I mean, I'm with you on this.
I think that this is a huge, huge issue and one that I fear, and I'm going to be honest, I fear that nothing significant is going to happen until someone's family member gets murdered or someone gets, you know, attacked on the streets by someone who should not have been out. We've already seen some high profile cases of this, but maybe the wrong people are being attacked maybe, you know.
I don't wish that on anyone, to be clear, but I really worry that we're going to let this go and let this go and let this go, and someone's going to die because of it.
Well, and I hope and pray that does not happen. And I know you don't want it to happen either. I don't think anyone does. And you're right, I think one of the other things, though, maybe one of the fixes that we can do in the law is when this was determined back again, I think I know it was back in the seventies that you can't just leave
people sit in jail. There has to be a reasonable standard, a reasonable amount of time, So you can't just leave them there in a correctional facility, either in a county jail or in a state correctional facility indefinitely. But again, I think if one, if we go back and look at what the district attorneys are saying, where we you know, put the burden onto the defense that we presume people are restorable until the defense says no, this individual is not.
That would help.
If we've tried some other things with you know, ensuring that we can get legal guardians appointed. But we also started another program it's called the Bridges program, and I don't know how successful it is.
We started in the last couple of.
Years as well, but it's like a court appointed individual that would be on every case like this to ensure that these individuals are one getting the services that they need and getting place and that we find placements for it. But I think the other part of the law that maybe we need to look at and probably.
Change is the amount of days.
You know, the Supreme Court didn't say in their rulings back in the seventies that it had to be sixty days or ninety days or one hundred and you know, twenty days or anything of that nature. They just said it needs to be a reasonable time frame, and maybe we need to redefine what reasonable time frame is as well.
I don't know. I am not an attorney.
That's why I talked to the district attorneys a lot, and would talk to my county attorney a lot all the time.
But I think maybe that's.
Another area where we can help fix this law and maybe start at least giving us a little bit more time to figure out how we find the funding and then where do we get the workforce from.
I mean, that's part. It's going to increase the funding.
And you know, again I'm not trying to shrink my responsibility here.
We're going to have to go find it. That's just all there is to it.
Well, I'm speaking with Senator Barb kirk State Senator Barb Kirkmeyer and given at real candidate. A lot of people on the tech signe are saying, how did you guys not see this problem coming.
How when you passed.
The bill, did nobody go, hey, we could let some dangerous people out of jailed. Was that never a consideration?
I'm telling you in all the conversations I had, now, I was not in the Interim committee. I didn't you know, I didn't see all of the task force recommendations. I'm not on the Judiciary committee that I think this is. That's the committee that it went through.
On the Senate side.
I do know we had conversations about this in our Republican caucus, and that's that was not the discussion. It was like, we need to find what a reasonable timeframe is. We need to ensure that we are adhering to the Constitution, because again, if we're leaving these individuals, whether it's mental illness or developmentally disabled folks in our correctional facilities, it just keeps setting us up for more lawsuits and that's not solving the problem either.
So no, we did not.
I mean, at no point did I hear anybody have that kind of discussion.
Doesn't mean it didn't happen.
It just means I'm telling you I was not a part of that conversation. And maybe it happened in committee. I'm not sure. I just know on the Senate floor it passed unanimously. So I'm thinking, you know, we're all thinking the same thing that we are putting in what we believe to be a necessary fixed for constitutional deficiency. But clearly the application of this law has clearly exasperated Colorado's public safety issues that we have. And you know,
I'm just going to sit again. The governor needs to call a special session. This is not one of those things that can wait until January or February for us to go in and get in session and fix the law.
I mean, my gosh, we are not back in session till the middle of January.
It takes at least three days and then another few days to get things signed. I mean, at a minimum, we're talking February first, if you ask me.
And I think that's way too long to wait.
I know people don't like to have special sessions, but I think, too darn bad. Let's all get back to work and let's fix this flaw on the bill and at least fix the first step, and then let the JBC, along with whoever else wants to, let's go look at let's find that funding, and let's see what we can do with regard to the bed issue.
All right, Senator Barb Kirkmeyer, I appreciate the time today and your willingness to just come on and say, look, you know, we've solved one problem while creating another one, which is kind of exactly what happened the worst problem.
Yeah, it is exactly what happened.
Yeah. Well, I mean my friend Laura Carno, who has a book called Government Ruins Everything. I'm just saying in this case, maybe it. Barbara, a free fut your time today. We'll see again soon.
Thank you so much, thanks for letting me on