Holly's Law: How One Client's Fight Changed Colorado Law

Last week, Governor Polis signed HB26-1020 into law. It passed both chambers unanimously. And it started with a phone call from a grandmother named Holly.

Holly Bennet came to Stout Law after Boulder police found a crushed pill in her purse while she was hospitalized in septic shock. A $2 colorimetric field test said it was cocaine. It wasn't. It was her prescription medication.

The Boulder DA's office offered diversion if she'd plead guilty. Holly refused. She knew she hadn't done anything wrong.

We took her case, fought the charges, and got independent lab testing that confirmed what Holly had been saying all along: there were no drugs. But by then, she'd spent a year and a half under the weight of a felony charge. She took out a second mortgage on her home to fund her defense.

Holly's story isn't unusual. A 2024 report from the University of Pennsylvania's Quattrone Center found that nearly 30,000 Americans are wrongfully arrested each year based on false positives from these same cheap field tests. The false positive rate runs as high as 40%. Sugar, vitamins, even bird droppings have triggered positive results. And roughly 90% of prosecutors accept guilty pleas in these cases without ever running a confirmatory lab test.

That's the part that got us. The system wasn't just failing Holly. It was failing thousands of people who didn't have the resources or the stubbornness to fight back.

After Holly's case resolved, we connected with the Korey Wise Innocence Project at CU Law and the Reason Foundation, who were already doing critical work on this issue. Representatives Jennifer Bacon and Lindsay Gilchrist, along with Senators Lisa Frizell and Matt Ball, carried the bill. The coalition that came together (Quattrone Center, Innocence Project, Roadside Drug Test Alliance, and others) made it possible to push this across the finish line with zero opposition.

Here's what the new law does: for low-level drug possession cases based on a field test, officers must now issue a summons and release rather than arrest and book. Courts must inform defendants about the known error rates of these tests and their right to request confirmatory lab testing from an accredited forensic lab before accepting a plea.

Simple reforms. But ones that will keep people out of jail while the system figures out whether it actually has a case.

We're proud of the small part Stout Law played in this. Holly was the client who wouldn't back down. The researchers, advocates, and legislators did the heavy lifting to turn her experience into systemic change. Colorado is now the first state in the country to pass a law like this.

Holly deserved better from the system. Now, because of her fight, the next person will get it.