A lot of our time this session was spent on HB 207 Sexual Offense Revisions and SB 144 Sexual Crimes Amendments. These bills represent a rollback of our heavily negotiated compromise with prosecution and Sen. Wilson two years ago in Sen. Wilson’s SB 167 Sexual Exploitation Amendments, instigated primarily by the AG’s office. We met with several stakeholder groups and legislators on these bills, including the AG’s office multiple times, to try and compromise again, but they were unwilling to make any changes. We tried to draft a substitute bill with Sen. Weiler, but the House pushed back on him and he did not run it. Our language would have stated that the felony offense of enticing a minor must have actually involved a minor and added a provision to sexual exploitation to include the creation of a link to a computer-based file or cloud-based file to allow repeated viewing of child sexual abuse material. We testified against both bills in committee numerous times, and although there was heated debate among committee members, both bills ended up passing. HB 207 was amended on the last day to exclude first degree felonies from the enhancements, largely due to pressure to reduce fiscal notes. The final versions of the bills do the following:

• makes aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor over 14 a 1F instead of a 2F

• increases the minimum prison term for sexual offenses by five years for each prior conviction and makes it mandatory

• amends the definition of child sexual abuse material to include a depiction of a minor over 14 years old observing or being used for sexually explicit conduct

• amends the crime of sexual exploitation of a minor to include accessing child sexual abuse material with the intent to view

HB 405 Human Trafficking and Smuggling Amendments was a top priority oppose bill for us this session from Rep. Pierucci. The original version of this bill increased several penalties, including: making human trafficking for labor, human trafficking for sexual exploitation, benefitting from human trafficking for labor or sexual exploitation, and human smuggling first degree felonies; making benefitting from human smuggling a second degree felony; establishing a mandatory prison term of 10 years for the crimes of human trafficking of a child, benefitting from child trafficking, aggravated human trafficking, aggravated human smuggling, and human trafficking of a vulnerable adult. Rep. Pierucci agreed to remove the penalty enhancements for human trafficking for labor, human smuggling, or benefitting from these two offenses, but we disagreed with her and other members of the Legislature over the mandatory minimum sentence for aggravated human trafficking. The final version still increases penalties for aggravated human trafficking, which includes, among other things, trafficking 10 or more individuals or trafficking them for longer than 30 days. We argued that this broad definition loops in a lot more behavior that may not otherwise amount to trafficking, but since the bill didn’t change the definition, only the penalty, members of the Legislature were not responsive to our request to disqualify these two elements from the mandatory minimum sentence.