The Colorado Supreme Court declined to say on Monday whether a man’s conviction for an attempted child prostitution offense violated his rights under the state constitution, and only concluded that the absence of an obvious error meant his conviction should remain intact.

An El Paso County jury convicted Javier Vega Dominguez of two attempted child prostitution offenses, one of which carried a specific number of years in prison and the other resulted in a potential life sentence behind bars. The Court of Appeals previously concluded that, under Colorado’s equal protection guarantee, the fact that Vega Dominguez received two different sentences for the same underlying conduct violated his rights.

But in a May 11 opinion, the Supreme Court noted the alleged error had to be obvious at the time. Because the Court of Appeals acknowledged it was “extending the analysis” of earlier precedent to Vega Dominguez’s convictions, the Supreme Court determined there was no clear mistake that warranted reversal.

“In our view, even had the trial court erred in this regard, any error was not obvious,” wrote Justice Richard L. Gabriel.

Colorado courts have interpreted the constitutional guarantee of equal protection to forbid the state from creating two laws that criminalize identical conduct, but impose harsher consequences for one offense than the other. Under state law, patronizing a prostituted child involves a completed sex act or an agreement to perform such an act, with the potential for life in prison. Inducement of child prostitution, on the other hand, involves a person’s “word or action” to encourage a child’s prostitution.

In reviewing Vega Dominguez’s convictions for attempted patronizing and attempted inducement, a three-judge Court of Appeals panel looked at his arrangement via text message to pay a 15-year-old boy — who was actually an undercover detective — for sex acts. The judges concluded Vega Dominguez violated both laws in the same way: attempting to exchange money for sex. Yet, he was serving a possible life sentence for patronizing and only four years for inducement.

“We therefore conclude that Vega Dominguez’s conviction for attempted patronizing a prostituted child violates his right to equal protection,” wrote Judge Ted C. Tow III, adding that the violation was obvious in light of court precedent.

Senior Assistant Attorney General Jessica E. Ross argued to the Supreme Court that any error was not obvious, even if the laws theoretically prohibited the same conduct. Moreover, she cautioned against finding an equal protection violation because the effect is to constrain a prosecutor’s charging decisions and the legislature’s ability to define criminal offenses.

Colorado’s equal protection principle is “really narrowly focused on situations where the legislature has left up to the prosecutor no legislatively bound guidance for that decision,” Ross said.

Public defender Kamela Maktabi countered that, if two laws prohibit the same conduct and one carries a harsher punishment, “and there’s no distinction why one defendant gets a harsher sentence than the other, then I think it makes it more difficult for prosecutors to fulfill their mission of equal application of the law,” she said.

The Supreme Court ultimately declined to answer whether the dual convictions, in fact, violated Vega Dominguez’s right to equal protection. Instead, wrote Gabriel, the alleged, unobjected-to error needed to have been obvious through existing precedent.

“Here, no prior case had decided the question now before us on identical facts,” he wrote. “These distinctions demonstrate that any error by the trial court as to the equal protection issue (and we need not and do not opine that the trial court, in fact, erred here) did not contravene either a clear statutory command, a well-settled legal principle, or Colorado case law.”

The case is People v. Vega Dominguez.