October 10, 2025 01:50 PM UTC

Gabe Evans And Both Ways Barb Need To Talk

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• by: Colorado Pols

As FOX 31 Denver’s Alliyah Sims reports, a most unusual spectacle played out yesterday afternoon on the West Steps of the Colorado State Capitol:

Loved ones lost, cases dismissed and dangerous criminals walking free. Families and lawmakers across the state are demanding immediate change to a 2024 law they say is putting lives at risk.

People gathered outside the Colorado Supreme Court, coming with broken hearts and a clear message.

“To speak loudly and loudly against these competency laws that really just seek to prioritize the rights of a perpetrator over the victims,” said Lori Gimelshteyn, executive director of the Colorado Parent Advocacy Network.

Legislation passed in the 2024 session that made some changes to the state’s laws regarding competency to stand trial for criminal offenses has been subject to a great deal of second-guessing and partisan finger-pointing in the last few months, as a few high-profile cases and a whole lot of misinformation joined forces to open a new front in the Republican “Crimenado” campaign to terrorize the public into voting against supposedly “soft on crime” Democrats.

One of the most vocal and belligerently partisan critics of House Bill 24-1034 has been Rep. Gabe Evans, who as a freshman state representative in 2024 was one of the nine GOP votes against it in the House. Last month, when Evans teamed up with Reps. Lauren Boebert and Jeff Crank to lambaste Gov. Jared Polis while cases related to the bill were in the headlines, Evans railed against “majority Democrats” who he claimed were determined to leave your children defenseless against drooling sex predator boogeymen:

“We know that this is a unique problem to Colorado and it ties directly back to policies, laws and procedures in the state of Colorado, specifically, that are being pushed and forced into law by the ruling majority party in the state of Colorado, that are incredibly detrimental to public safety,” said Evans, who represents the state’s 8th Congressional District.

Speaking to FOX News at the beginning of this month, Evans once again portrayed this bill as an exclusively Democratic problem:

“When the government of Colorado, the governor, is signing laws that re-releases violent individuals back into the community, cops don’t feel like anyone’s got their back,” [Evans] said.

“For the last five years plus, we have seen the left double down on their anti-law enforcement rhetoric, going back to the riots of 2020,” he went on. “They are at an ideological point where they struggle to be able to actually back law enforcement and condemn political violence when it’s against conservative figures.”

“Myself and some of the other members from Colorado weighed in on this, calling on the governor to fix a lot of these laws that he has personally signed over the last few years that have made Colorado the second most dangerous state in the country,” he explained.

“Denver is a top ten most dangerous major city in the country, and it goes back to all of these laws,” said Evans. “There is, unfortunately, a lot of anti-law enforcement sentiment just nationally against law enforcement. In Colorado, the Democrats have doubled down on that.”

Back to yesterday’s rally at the Capitol, where the problem we’ve been foreshadowing becomes evident:

“In 2024, I actually voted for this bill,” said Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer. [Pols emphasis] “We were told as we read through the bill and worked through this bill that these individuals who committed these horrendous crimes would either be in a correctional facility or committed to an institution. Unfortunately, that is not what’s going on with this law. There’s a serious flaw; the law is broken and we need to fix it.”

Speaking with KOA radio’s Mandy Connell, Kirkmeyer explained her yes vote further:

KIRKMEYER: 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 bill, even 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 correctional facility or they’re going to be in the 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, my sheriff of Weld County, who rightly so is, you know, ringing the alarm bell.

I’m telling you, 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 was not the discussion. It was like we need to define what a reasonable time frame 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. [Pols emphasis]

Our goal here is not to evaluate the bill on merit, which may point to the need for a legislative fix, or may be the result of faulty and politically convenient interpretation of existing law. Either way, it’s a total lie to claim that this law’s “unintended consequences” are solely the fault of Colorado Democrats. The bill passed with solid bipartisan support in the House, and unanimous support in the Senate. It passed for legally sound reasons that Barb Kirkmeyer herself outlines above.

And why does Gabe Evans’ mislaid blame matter so much, you ask? Here’s the only part of this that’s easy to explain:

All the trash Gabe Evans talks about “soft on crime Democrats”…applies to the Republican he just endorsed for governor.

With that, Gabe Evans’ partisan blame game is fully beclowned.