[T]he House has backed domestic terrorism legislation that would criminalize steps taken for a “mass attack.” Lawmakers have dropped an unpopular provision that supporters believed would scuttle the bill.
The legislation, H.25, was approved Wednesday afternoon by the House on a voice vote, with more than a smattering of voices raised in opposition. It came in response to a case against an accused would-be school shooter in which the most serious charges against him didn’t stick.
“This is a much narrower approach,” Rep. Chip Conquest, D-Wells River, a sponsor of the measure, said Wednesday, comparing the domestic terrorism bill with controversial changes to the state’s statute on criminal attempts.
“This addresses a narrower set of circumstances,” Conquest added, “but ones that are important to address, because the potential harm and the potential risk to public safety is so great in these situations where we’re talking about killing lots of people or inflicting terror on a community.”
The legislation, he said, is intended to stop “horrific acts” and allow the prosecution of them at an earlier stage than can be done currently.
That narrower approach, supported by a majority of House members, did not sit will with everyone in the chamber.
“In the effort to be reactive, we’re doing something that wouldn’t even had necessarily made a difference in the situation we’re reacting to. We don’t even know that,” Rep. Anne Donahue, R-Northfield, said on the House floor. “Yet, it’s proposing a major new crime in Vermont law.”
Rep. Susan Buckholz, D-West Hartford, was concerned about the legislation, too.
“I am worried, scared and appalled by language in this bill,” she told her House colleagues. “I’m really worried that we are running on adrenaline caused by fear in trying to do something — we’re not doing something good here.”
Rep. Janssen Willhoit, R-St. Johnsbury, spoke out in support of the measure, though he added that while it wasn’t a “great bill,” it’s “so much better” than what had been considered last week.
“I thank this body and I thank the leadership of this body for allowing us to dig deeper,” he said.
The bill advanced by the House does have some differences from a version that unanimously sailed through the Senate last month. As a result, the legislation will be sent back to the Senate for a review of the most recent changes.
Earlier in the day, the House Judiciary Committee approved recommending the legislation to the full chamber by a unanimous 11-0 vote.
Last week, that panel was far less united in its response to the case of Jack Sawyer, the 18-year-old Poultney man police said had plans to kill as many people as he could at Fair Haven Union High School before the plot was foiled.
By a 6-5 vote, the House committee approved sweeping changes to the attempt statute.
A Vermont Supreme Court ruling in that case, dealt a severe blow to Sawyer’s prosecution. The justices said merely planning a crime under state law does not rise to an attempt.
As a result, prosecutors have since dismissed the most severe charges against the Poultney teen, including three counts of attempted murder.
In its ruling, the high court invited the Legislature to make changes to the state’s attempt law to avoid a similar situation from occurring again.
Gov. Phil Scott issued a statement shortly after that court decision calling on the Legislature to do just that, and to create the domestic terrorism law.
The Senate Judiciary Committee took a look at revising the state’s attempt laws, but quickly determined it was too heavy of a lift so late in the session, and moved on to the state’s domestic terrorism statutes to try to address the situation.
The legislation adopted by that panel and later passed out of the full Senate defined “domestic terrorism” as “engaging in, or taking substantial steps to commit” a crime involving:
- causing death or serious bodily injury to multiple people.
- threatening any civilian population with mass destruction, mass killing or kidnapping.
The legislation states that a “substantial step” means “conduct that is strongly corroborative of the actor’s intent to complete the commission of the offense.”
The version passed Wednesday by the House includes the same language regarding causing death or serious bodily injury to multiple people, but changes the second one to “place any civilian population in reasonable apprehension of death or serious bodily injury.”
The House version also provides examples of such substantial steps, including lying in wait or searching for the “contemplated victim of the crime,” scoping out a location, and obtaining or fabricating materials to carrying out a crime.
The House Judiciary Committee focused a great deal over past couple of weeks on working to revise the state’s attempt laws. However, after the panel’s proposal barely squeaked out of committee it met stiff resistance in the full House.
Concerns were raised that lowering the threshold for what constitutes an attempt was not accompanied with a lowering of the penalties if convicted. This week, the panel tried to make changes in response to those criticisms, by the lowering those penalties.
However, that led a new problem: limiting judges’ abilities in certain cases to hold without bail defendants charged with serious attempt crimes, since they no longer faced the possibility of a life sentence, a constitutional prerequisite for denying bail.
That drew concerns from both victim advocates and the Vermont Attorney’s General office, who both wanted to make sure that option, as well as the possible life sentence, remained on the table when dealing with those charged with serious attempt crimes.
The House Judiciary Committee also explored linking that attempt bill, S.267, to the domestic terrorism statute, H.25, that had earlier passed the Senate. That had supporters of the domestic terrorism legislation fearing that would cause both bills to fail.
By late Wednesday morning, the House Judiciary Committee voted out a domestic terrorism bill much more like the one that passed on the Senate, and put the attempt legislation on the shelf for this session.
Rep. Maxine Grad, D-Moretown, said while the attempt revisions were unlikely to move forward imminently, she hoped that work will continue on that effort in a future legislative session.
She cautioned that the session isn’t over yet, adding, “Anything can change in this building.”
