Postmortem for HB0198

Ritual Abuse Enhancement Legislation Dies In House

In the aftermath of a 10-1 Judiciary Committee vote in favor of Rep. Ken Ivory’s HB0196, which would have created a ritual abuse enhancement for crimes against children, including rape of a child, object rape of a child, and aggravated sexual abuse of a child which would have raised the punishment to life in prison for any actor who committed those crimes in the course of ritual abuse, or a training or practice to perform a ritual. The bill also removed the discretion of courts to impose suspended sentences, grant probation, or otherwise shorten sentences for anyone convicted of a first degree felony involving aggravated murder, murder, child kidnapping, aggravated kidnapping, rape, rape of a child, object rape, forcible sodomy, sodomy on a child, forcible sexual abuse, aggravated sexual abuse of a child, aggravated sexual assault, or any second degree felony involving ritual abuse of a child.

It was a bill that would have placed Utah in the companies of other states who had passed ritual abuse statutes, such as California, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, and Texas. Montana also has a ritual abuse statute.

The initial prospects for the bill were less than positive, as legislators were inclined to dismiss ritual abuse as an isolated phenomenon not meriting separate treatment under the law. In fact, legislators were of the mind that ritual abuse was already covered under existing criminal statutes. HB0196 was designed to provide enhancements to those statutes which would have provided far stiffer penalties for perpetrators convicted of those crimes if they committed the crime as part of a ritual abuse scheme. HB0196 was based in the notion that ritual abuse was so sadistic and severe as to merit elevated treatment under criminal statutes.

Survivors and advocates mounted an effort to convince legislators that ritual abuse was real, and far more common than previously believed. They were largely successful given the 10-1 committee vote before the Judiciary Committee in favor of HB0196, which had the effect of moving HB0196 to its third and final reading before the Rules Committee on Day 41 of the legislative session, which was Monday, February 26th.

From there, HB0196 should have proceeded to the House floor for a vote, where it would have likely passed and been sent to the Senate during the final three days of the current session. It was not sent to the floor, because the matter of the bill’s cost was not addressed by the Appropriations Committee in a timely fashion. The bill was estimated to cost $97,000 annually in perpetuity after Fiscal Year 2026. The exact breakdown of the cost was as follows: $95,000 for the Department of Corrections, $1,900 for the Board of Pardons and Parole, and $100 for the Courts in terms of case processing.

In the aftermath of Rep. Ivory’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee, which yielded a 10-1 vote in favor of the bill, Rep. Ivory made no mention of the fact that the funding package for the bill had not been secured via the Appropriations Committee. He would have known at that time that without the funding, the bill was essentially dead on arrival regardless of the Judiciary Committee’s vote and the Rules Committee’s reading of the bill. After all, Rep. Ken Ivory is a seasoned, multi-term legislator who managed to attain funding for other bills in the current session.

He received the fiscal note for HB0196 on January 31, 2024, which gave him ample time to push for the bill’s funding package to be approved by the Appropriations Committee. With regards to HB0029, the Sensitive Materials Amendments, Rep. Ivory managed to procure the necessary appropriations even though the fiscal note for that bill did not come through until February 21, 2024. He was able to do the same for HB0059, HB0211, and HJR019.

The absurdity of the outcome was and is obvious: Rep. Ivory put forth legislation the matter of sexual abuse consistent with his past efforts, for which IRA and others have repeatedly lauded him, and in all likelihood he believed that the bills would go nowhere, which is what they had done in the past. The difference between this legislative session and prior legislative sessions was simple: the involvement of influential individuals and their groups, specifically a prominent partner in the nonprofit sector, who managed to get the bill before the Judiciary Committee for a hearing with a favorable recommendation via a 10-1 vote on February 21, 2024.

This sent the bill to the Rules Committee for the third reading required before it could reach the House floor with a day to spare, with one problem: the day that the bill underwent its third reading was the same day the House Executive Appropriations Committee met for its final session before Day 42, and the clear stipulation of the House legislative calendar is as follows:

House Rules preclude passing legislation without a House Standing Committee recommendation and require legislation to be on the third reading calendar for at least one day before it can be read a third time. Because of these rules and because the House may not consider House legislation after Day 42, it is recommended that House Standing Committees consider only Senate legislation during each committee’s last meeting.

It was high theater, but Ken Ivory and everyone else knew that Day 41 was too late for the Appropriations Committee to take up the bill, as Day 42 was the cut off date for the House to consider its own legislation. Therefore, on Day 41, the Appropriations Committee would have been looking at Senate legislation, not House legislation. Despite the fact that Ken Ivory had plenty of time from January 31st to February 26 to take care of the appropriations issue, he did not.

He simply allowed survivors and advocates to attend the Judiciary Committee hearing on February 21st with the hope that their testimony and newfound support from a nonprofit with influence would be the difference in getting HB0196 passed. Ivory knew or should have known that HB0196 ad a fatal issue with regards to the appropriations issue that would serve as a ready made excuse for House leadership to avoid bringing the bill to the floor for debate and a vote.

There is a saying that IRA has printed before: the government will plead incompetence to avoid conviction on corruption. That is exactly what happened with regards to HB0196. Politics can be either an exercise in the fulfilment of the best hope and idealism citizens have to offer, or it can be a fulfilment of their most cynical and pessimistic beliefs. Unfortunately, the latter was true with regards to how HB0196 played out in this legislative session.

Conclusion

In failure, there are hard but valuable lessons. Those of us who advocated for HB0196 have learned a valuable lesson about Rep. Ivory, who introduced a staggering amount of bills and proposed legislative amendments in this session, much to the chagrin and irritation of his House colleagues. We have learned that in order to succeed, we will likely need a different sponsor for the legislation we are seeking to implement in terms of reform. We have learned that we were able to convince ten members of the Judiciary Committee that ritual abuse is real, and merits an enhanced treatment under the criminal code. The lone member who voted no, Rep. King, later switched his vote to a yes and pledged to argue in favor of the bill on the House floor.

We will be leveraging these realities to our advantage in future legislative sessions. Public policy reform is a game of increments, with each inch of ground gained in hard fought and sometimes heartbreaking battles. To the survivors, IRA apologizes for our collective failure to deliver the hoped for and long overdue reforms you deserved. We will be back with the benefit of hard lessons from this experience. We are not going away or giving up.

We will see you in the next legislative session. To those who worked on this legislation and advocated for its passage, thank you. Keep fighting. We will prevail.