CO - Denver Post article, shows eight amendment violation, for lack of treatment

Original Article

11/05/2013

By Will Bassler

An article in the Denver Post on November 3, 2013 was titled “Unintended effect of 1998 Colorado law: More sex offenders in for life”. This article brought to light that Colorado has not been offering treatment, as is required by law to people who have been sentenced for crimes. These people can only be released after receiving effective treatment and the state is not offering that treatment supposedly because of facilities and financial issues.

I responded back to the writer of the article, in hopes that he would do a follow-up article showing that the state of Colorado is not only acting irresponsibly but they are also opening themselves up to multimillion dollar lawsuits based on prior federal court decisions.

In reading your recent story in the Denver Post “Unintended effect of 1998 Colorado law” I thought about posting a response in the comments section , but realized my response would be way too long, especially considering I would be using direct quotes from a federal case stating that the state of Colorado cannot use the excuse of the necessity of funds, facilities or staff to justify lack of treatment. Also, the fact that in the same case the federal court has stated that just because someone commits a crime you cannot declare them mentally ill and require them to be in treatment.

The second part of this is the fact that there is a constitutional issue here that most people don’t want to deal with. Because of the Constitution and Bill of Rights of this country you’re allowed to dislike, even outright hate, a person or group that is all well and good. You have that right under the Constitution, what you do not have is the right force your ideas or Moral values, on other individuals. Just because of your dislike or fear of a group of people this does not give you the right to take away their constitutional protections. As soon as you start doing that you are destroying the very fabric that this country was built on and you become as un-American as somebody in another country burning an American flag or flying a plane into the World Trade Center. Think about it, if you want to retain your constitutional rights you have to fight to make sure that everyone keeps theirs, even the people that you dislike or hate.

Consider this information from federal cases.

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