How last bill of 2022’s session died in Senate

The very last bill to be voted on in Colorado’s 2022 legislative session was designed to make sure the state never lets another child experience what Lorenzo Montoya went through.

Montoya was 14 years old in 2000 when he was taken into questioning by Denver police detectives who suspected him in the killing of a Skinner Middle School teacher named Emily Johnson.

He didn’t kill her. Again and again, that’s what he told detectives.

But over a period of hours, first with Montoya’s mom present and later alone with the child, the police planted a narrative in the child’s mind. They claimed they’d already retrieved fingerprints, shoe prints and hair samples to back it up. Confused and under enormous pressure, Montoya relented and gave a coerced confession. He was convicted of murder and spent the rest of his childhood and most of his 20s incarcerated, before being exonerated in 2014.

It is legal in Colorado and all states but Oregon, Illinois and Utah for police to lie to people, children and adults alike, during interrogations. They can say they have video footage that does not exist, that they’ve collected DNA evidence they don’t have. They can promise that confessing to a crime is in someone’s best interest, whether or not that is true.

Senate Bill 23 was meant to prevent that. Under this bill, courts would no longer have been able to admit information, including confessions, obtained through what the bill’s title termed “deceptive tactics.”

Police fought it hard, arguing they need that tool to be able to solve certain crimes. Prosecutors opposed the measure and so did Republican lawmakers.

Speaking for his fellow 21 elected district attorneys, Boulder’s Michael Dougherty told Colorado’s Senate Judiciary Committee in February, “Let’s say a detective is interviewing somebody in custody who’s believed to have committed a murder outside the Capitol. The detective falsely says, ‘I have video of you doing it.’ And then the person says, ‘OK, you got me. I did it.’ This bill really highlights, is that appropriate or not? Should that be allowed or not? Should law enforcement be allowed to take that step? And there are a lot of reasons why the answer is yes.”

Despite opposition, the trio of Democratic women of color sponsoring the bill kept it alive all the way until the final 45 minutes of the 2,870-hour legislative session.

By then, Capitol denizens had their vacations booked and their champagne ready to pop. SB22-23 was the only legislative business standing between them and an eightmonth recess.

Reps. Serena Gonzalesgutierrez and Jennifer Bacon, the House sponsors, had counted enough votes to pass the bill. It had been amended against their wishes earlier in the week, but the Senate on Wednesday evening restored it to near its original form. The sponsors were one vote away from sending it to the governor’s desk.

It was after 11 p.m. and the session, per the state constitution, had to end by midnight. Republicans were ready to stall the bill as long as it took to make sure it didn’t pass. Democratic leadership had tools to counter a delay and force a vote, but declined to use them.

The representatives stepped to the lectern to regretfully ask that their bill be tabled for the year. Twenty-two minutes later, House Speaker Alec Garnett banged the gavel to signify the session was over, and the House erupted in cheers.

The death of SB22-23 was a fitting end to a session that saw law enforcement gain back a substantial amount of political power it had lost a few years ago, when the Democrats who run the state Capitol were more willing to challenge police and prosecutors. And it was arguably the most notable casualty of a chaotic final stretch of the session that saw Democrats lop off portions of their agenda because they mismanaged the 120-day clock and allowed a fractured House GOP to stumble into significant leverage.

The leader of the House GOP, Republican Hugh Mckean, of Loveland, knows his side got lucky in the final hour of the session.

“What they could’ve done is pass that bill no matter what,” he said.

“Yeah,” Gonzales-gutierrez said in a separate interview. “We could’ve totally done it and been ruthless to them.”

Now the reformers are left angry and confused about why the bill sat unmoving on the calendar for so long and why it, of all Democratic policies, was among the late-session sacrifices.

One big reason the calendar was jammed up at the end of the session is that Democrats waited for months, until the back 60 days, to introduce or advance a slew of the year’s most controversial bills. Only in the final days of lawmaking did they pass keystone bills to combat fentanyl (HB22-1326), to allow county government workers to unionize (SB22-230) and to protect election systems from officials motivated to act on Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen (SB22-153).

Each of these bills, among many others, was subject to lengthy debate. The longer the session dragged on, the greater opening Republicans had to stall on all kinds of bills — even minor ones they supported — in order to slow the session’s progress and thus to slow Democratic priorities. That project began midway through the session but became all-hands-ondeck on Monday, May 9, the third-to-last day before closing. While the Senate worked mostly in peace, Republicans in the House started delaying every bill that came up by forcing the bills to be read aloud and word-for-word, by bringing hopeless amendments and by making long speeches.

The House delays stretched for almost a full day, until around 4 a.m. Tuesday, when Democratic Speaker Garnett, agreed to a series of concessions so that Republicans would drop the stall.

One of those concessions gutted SB22-23 such that it lost virtually all of its teeth. Existing language would be replaced by what amounted to a whole new bill calling for law enforcement to adopt written policies about how to interrogate kids in custody. There was nothing in the new language to compel the change that the bill sponsors sought.

The bill’s Senate sponsor, Denver Democrat Julie Gonzales, said she is clear on what happened.

“Speaker Garnett sacrificed that bill in order to keep DAS and Republicans at peace,” Gonzales said in an interview the day after the session ended.

That’s “outrageous,” Garnett

told The Denver Post, insisting he hadn’t acted over the heads of Gonzalesgutierrez and Bacon.

The last hour of the session was also the last hour of Garnett’s time in the legislature. He’s term-limited in the House and, though he considered it for a while, he’s decided not to run for mayor of Denver in 2023. He said he refused to have his final policy decision at the Capitol involve forcing a vote on SB22-23 when doing so would require limiting debate by “calling the question” — that is, cutting off remarks and forcing a vote.