Dewhurst Finally Gets It Done
April 25th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Last week, Jessica’s Law was gathering dust in the Senate without popular support from senators, and the budget conference committee was stalled because Lt. Gov. Dewhurst hadn’t named his conferees. Skeptics wondered, as BurkaBlog reported, if the lite guv wasn’t holding the budget hostage to his “Texas tough” pet project.
Dewhurst put an end to such ridiculous speculation today, by naming his delegates to the budget conference committee (Ogden, Zaffirini, Duncan, Whitmire and Williams) on the day after senators passed House Bill 8, Jessica’s Law, 30-1. Glad we cleared that up.
The House sent HB 8 over to the Senate in early March, after it was rushed through the committee process and passed overwhelmingly on the floor. The hype quickly deflated once the ball was in Dewhurst’s court. From March 6 to April 24, the bill sat untouched in the Senate, while its sponsor, Sen. Bob Deuell let Dewhurst do his best to take the lead.
If this is one of the accomplishments Dewhurst is planning to campaign on someday, it’s also given us an interesting look at the kind of governor he’d make. Largely unresponsive to prosecutors and victims’ groups, for one. For another, he proved capable of sucking the wind from of a measure that was fast-tracked through the House. Until yesterday, he was just about the only one in the Capitol who couldn’t get his enhancement bill passed.
After months of insisting that the bill include 25-year mandatory minimums for child sex offenders, he softened his stance a little over the weekend, giving prosecutors a choice in whether to pursue the longer penalty. The death penalty language in the bill was reworded over the weekend as well.
To be eligible for the death penalty under the Senate’s version of the bill, a criminal must twice commit a child sex crime with a weapon involved, or by kidnapping — a “super-aggravated crime”, as Shannon Edmonds of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association puts it. “Frankly, I think most prosecutors would be fine if the death penalty wasn’t in there at all,” he says.
The circumstances for offering the death penalty are different in the House version, which ties it to repeat cases of “continuous sexual abuse of a child.” In practical terms, it’s unlikely either will produce many new death sentences, but nobody really knows for sure because states only recently started to make some sex offenses capital crimes. “There’s no way to know how the cases are going to flesh out in court, or how often they’re going to apply,” Edmonds says.
Applying the death penalty at all in child sex abuse cases is of dubious constitutionality (though probably even less constitutional under the House version), and across the country just one person has been sent to death row under a Jessica’s Law-type penalty. The Supreme Court ruled against the death penalty in a rape case 30 years ago, but has yet to hear a case where the crime involved a child. Smart move, then, to play up the less measurable impact of the law as a deterrence in the official press release.
Still, walking away from this legislative ordeal with the the death penalty in there at all is a win for Dewhurst, who can tell voters in 2010 that he’s the toughest one of all. Who’s going to remember three years from now how weak he looked trying to get the law passed?
May 16th, 2007 at 8:33 am
[…] priorities, accomplishments, ability to work with lawmakers. His handling of Jessica’s Law didn’t impress, but Tuesday he did himself one better, managing to alienate an entire body of […]
May 16th, 2007 at 8:33 am
[…] priorities, accomplishments, ability to work with lawmakers. His handling of Jessica’s Law didn’t impress, but Tuesday he did himself one better, managing to alienate an entire body of […]