Death penalty, alcohol servers, church closures: Some lower-profile Ky. bills to track
With only a few days left in the Kentucky General Assembly’s 2022 session, the public’s attention is naturally focused on big issues like tax cuts, medical marijuana, sports betting and abortion restrictions.
However, lawmakers are moving plenty of other important bills. Among them are measures intended to weed out bad actors in law enforcement, decide who should be spared the death penalty, lock up child abusers for longer and settle arguments over intoxicating hemp products and church closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here are seven subjects to watch as the legislature approaches its April 14 adjournment.
▪ House Bill 269 would take the death penalty off the table in criminal trials if the defendant has a documented history and diagnosis of severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. It would not be applied retroactively to the 26 prisoners currently on Kentucky’s Death Row.
It’s impossible to guess how many future death-eligible defendants would be diverted to other penalties, likely life imprisonment, as a result of the bill.
The bill has cleared the House and the Senate Judiciary Committee and awaits action on the Senate floor.
▪ Senate Bill 163 would change existing rules to make most felons eligible for a Kentucky Educational Excellence Scholarship (KEES), to help pay for college. People convicted of violent offenses and aggravated drug trafficking would be excluded.
According to the ACLU of Kentucky, which supports the bill, the state’s public defenders have represented more than 3,000 teenagers charged with felonies over the last two years. Youths were charged most often with wanton endangerment, criminal mischief and burglary.
The bill has cleared the Senate and awaits action in the House Education Committee.
▪ House Bill 43 would limit the powers of government to regulate churches, in response to state shutdown orders that closed churches, schools and most businesses during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
The bill says religious services should be treated as “essential services” during future states of emergency because they are necessary to the health and welfare of the public. Churches, mosques, synagogues and other houses of worship would have to be given the same freedom to operate as other essential services, such as groceries and hospitals.
The bill creates a cause of action to allow churches to sue the government for interference, waiving the usual sovereign immunity that blocks such litigation against a public entity.
That part of the bill has given some lawmakers pause, although they generally support the measure.
“Guys, I think we’re headed down a dangerous road in response to a dangerous action,” Sen. Chris McDaniel, R-Ryland Heights, said at a Senate committee hearing.
“You’re opening up for interpretation with this what is actually constituted as religious expression and a right of action against the state that currently exists, and I think that we may be opening ourselves up to some unintended consequences that have not been thought through very well with this,” McDaniel said.
The bill has cleared the House and the Senate State and Local Government Committee and awaits action on the Senate floor.
▪ Two bills would make training mandatory for Kentuckians in certain law enforcement jobs that have been the subject of scandalous headlines about abusive conduct — sometimes fatally abusive.
House Bill 439 would require deputy jailers to complete an 80-hour basic training course and continuing education in subjects like the health and welfare of inmates, substance abuse, inmate searches, suicide prevention and stress management. In a number of cases, Kentucky deputy jailers have been charged with harming or killing inmates.
The bill, assigned to the House Local Government Committee for a hearing, has started to get House floor readings, which suggests it could be voted out of committee and the full House shortly.
House Bill 239 would require training and law enforcement certification for elected constables and their deputy constables who take office after Jan. 1 if they assume police powers. There have been high-profile cases in Kentucky of constables abusing the powers of their office.
“Of course, not all constables are bad. But unfortunately, there’s been too many headlines to ignore the fact that constables without proper law enforcement training can be a serious problem,” the sponsor, Rep. Adam Koenig, R-Erlanger, said in the House in February.
The bill has cleared the House and awaits action in the Senate State and Local Government Committee.
▪ Senate Bill 170 tries to settle a fight over a compound derived from hemp known as Delta-8 THC.
The bill would ban production of intoxicating hemp-derived products, including Delta-8 THC. (This is not to be confused with the more intoxicating Delta-9 THC, derived from cannabis rather than hemp.)
The Kentucky Hemp Association is battling Kentucky State Police in court over raids of shops selling hemp products as part of a crackdown on Delta-8 THC. Hemp growers are on one side of this debate, with state police and the Kentucky Department of Agriculture on the other.
The Agriculture Department has argued that non-intoxicating hemp is legal to grow in Kentucky, but Delta-8 THC is “an intoxicating synthetic substance,” the production of which requires dangerous chemicals to be added.
However, a Boone Circuit Court judge recently issued a temporary injunction against the state, arguing that Kentucky has not explicitly made Delta-8 THC illegal. So that’s what the Senate bill seeks to do.
The bill has cleared the Senate and awaits action in the House.
▪ House Bill 263 would increase the penalties for certain crimes when the victim is younger than 12.
More specifically, it would elevate the Class C felony of criminal abuse to a Class B felony in such cases. So the punishment would bump from a range of 5-to-10 years in prison up to 10-to-20 years.
This would be called Kami’s Law, to honor a Louisville girl left permanently disabled after her mother’s boyfriend — Paul Raque, a state prison corrections officer — threw her to the ground in 2016 when she was only 9 months old, causing her to suffer brain damage and a heart attack.
Raque served less than five years of his 10-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to criminal abuse and assault.
The bill has cleared the House and Senate and awaits the governor’s signature.
▪ You can’t legally drink alcohol until you’re 21, which — in Kentucky — means you can’t hold a job at restaurants where you serve alcohol. But House Bill 252 would lower the minimum server age to 18. For bartending jobs, which is even more hands-on with the booze, the minimum age would be 20.
The bill would let people as young as 18 work in the warehouse of alcohol wholesalers and distributors as long as another employee on site is at least 21.
Supporters of the bill say the restaurant industry is desperate for employees, and under existing law, it can’t even consider applicants for certain jobs if they are 18, 19 and 20 — prime working age for such jobs. Most states have a minimum serving age of either 18 or, in a handful of states, 19 or even 17.
The bill has cleared the House and Senate and should be sent to the governor’s desk for his signature in coming days.
This story was originally published March 21, 2022 at 2:37 PM.
