A jury found former state Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis guilty on Wednesday of three counts of forgery and one charge of attempting to influence a public servant, all felonies that stemmed from allegations that she mistreated aides while in office.
Each forgery charge carries the potential of one to three years in prison. The attempt to influence a public servant charge carries a potential sentence of two to six years. The prosecuting attorney said the state would seek probation, however.
The case originated with accusations that Jaquez Lewis, a Longmont Democrat, mistreated her aides while she served in the state legislature. But the matter became a felony criminal case because of steps she took to avoid punishment by the Senate Ethics Committee.
Her Senate colleagues convened the ethics committee in January 2025 to investigate a litany of accusations that Jaquez Lewis tried to withhold pay from one aide and used others to perform work around her house. If found to violate Senate rules, Jaquez Lewis could have faced an expulsion vote.
She instead resigned her seat in February, hours before the committee revealed that she submitted several letters of support, purportedly from former staffers. But the staffers did not write them.
The falsely attributed letters drew the attention of the Denver District Attorney’s Office, which brought the felony charges against Jaquez Lewis.
“These are public documents, in a public hearing, and these people’s reputations matter. (Jaquez Lewis) does not get to use their name to advance her own interest,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Robert Nitido said in his closing arguments Wednesday. “… She was backed into a corner, and she decided to do the only thing she knew to do, and that was to create support out of whole cloth.
“She did not do it out of some fear response. She did it to convince a committee to vote the way she would like.”
In testimony Wednesday morning, Jaquez Lewis admitted to submitting the letters in the name of her former aides. She said one case was a simple mistake of mixing up a former aide, who would have been OK with the letter being in her name, with a different aide who has the same first name. In two other instances, Jaquez Lewis said she thought she was representing the thoughts of the former aides, even though they did not directly authorize the letters.
“I ran out of time. I was not working on the letters, until the very end. I was overwhelmed, and I had to get it in,” Jaquez Lewis said during her testimony.
Her attorney, Craig Lewis Truman, emphasized the stress that Jaquez Lewis felt in the Capitol, compounded by an ethics committee that Jaquez Lewis felt was biased against her.
“Do you think she would put it all on the line for a letter to these kangaroo courts? Or was it because she was under the gun?” Truman said to jurors before their deliberations began.
Jaquez Lewis first joined the state legislature in 2019. She became a senator in 2021. She was reelected in 2024.
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