The first week of the special session on public safety may have seen more criticism for what lawmakers didn’t do than what they did.
Only a bill to fund the special session made it through both houses of the Tennessee General Assembly and members are unexpectedly opting to return for a second week.
Republican leaders in the Senate tabled every other bill during the first week with the exception of three members passed Wednesday.
- Senate Bill 7086 requires court clerks file information for background checks electronically within 72 business hours.
- Senate Bill 7088 requires the TBI to submit an annual report on child and human trafficking crimes and trends.
- Senate Bill 7085 requires handgun safety courses to contain instruction on safe firearms storage, expands a program to provide free firearm locks to Tennessee residents, creates a campaign to encourage gun lock use, and exempts firearm safes and firearm safety devices from sales taxes.
Senators returned briefly on Thursday to schedule a session for Monday to take any additional votes needed on the three bills to align with changes the House might make to the legislation.
House Majority Leader William Lamberth, R-Portland, expressed his frustration at the Senate’s limited action Thursday evening.
“I wish our colleagues in the other chamber were still here, they were only here briefly today,” said Lamberth.
House Passes Base-Hits
House leaders have taken a different approach to the special session, passing 9 bills and advancing another 18 to the floor for a vote Monday.
Representative Lamberth sponsored 6 of the 8 bills House members passed Thursday night. None of them bring large changes to mental health or public safety policy and Lamberth himself described them as “base hits” that combine to make a difference.
“I just wanted to bring some stuff that’s going to make a difference but isn’t so massive that we get all tripped around the axle and arguing about it. I wanted stuff that’s going to be base hits,” said Lamberth. “I wanted to bring stuff that’s simple, straightforward, and is going to help people so that’s what I tried to do.”
Lamberth’s bills include:
- House Bill 7070 funds the special session.
- House Bill 7002 requires schools to develop safety response procedures that distinguish whether an emergency is a fire, inclement weather, or an active shooter situation.
- House Bill 7003 expands the eligibility for filing a petition to obtain a lifetime order of protection to include victims of aggravated stalking and especially aggravated stalking.
- House Bill 7004 requires courts to notify local law enforcement agencies when an individual is released from court-ordered emergency evaluation, treatment, or care.
- House Bill 7007 specifies that reports of county medical examiners and autopsy reports of victims of violent crime who are minors are not public documents.
- House Bill 7027 requires the state to pay the cost of a court-ordered mental health evaluation and treatment for criminal defendants who have been charged with a misdemeanor and are believed to be incompetent to stand trial or for whom there is a question about mental capacity at the time of the offense.
Lamberth’s bills passed comfortably though House Democrats did have comments to make on a few of them including House Bill 7004.
Multiple Democrats wanted to make it clear that mental illness is not a large contributor to mass shootings.
“This is not and should not be portrayed as a solution to ending violence and gun violence. Only 4 percent of interpersonal violence is attributable to mental illness alone,” said Representative John Ray Clemmons, D-Nashville.
House bill 7007 provided the most emotional discussion when Representative Rebecca Alexander, R-Jonesborough read a letter from the family of a Covenant School shooting victim in support of keeping autopsy reports of children who are victims of violent crime private.
“No one questions what happened to the 6 victims the day of the Covenant shooting or how they died, there is no compelling public interest to know any details of their injuries and death other than the cause of death listed on their death certificates,” said Alexander. “This has nothing to do with open records, free speech, or governmental oversight. This has everything to do with retraumatizing and revictimizing those of us who had to go to a hospital and identify the broken bodies of our children.”
House members also approved House Bill 7061 to require the Tennessee Department of Education to notify school districts each year of state and federal grant programs available to expand mental health services and House Bill 7071 to require the TBI to submit a report on the number of mass shootings that occur Tennessee each year.
The latter attracted some push back from House Democrats because the legislation would exclude underlying criminal offense like gang activity or domestic violence from the report. Representative Bud Hulsey, R-Kingsport said those exceptions were made for a reason.
“It’s not in the typical venue of what we could consider a mass shooting, for example what happened at Covenant or what happens with a mass shooting in a mall in a general public place. That is orchestrated from a whole different motive,“ said Representative Bud Hulsey, R-Kingsport.
Representative Antonio Parkinson, D-Memphis, questioned whether those exclusions would end up excluding useful data.
“You run into some murky waters because if there’s a mall shooting, and it’s gang related, where four of them were gang members and two others were not or three others were not. So that’s seven people shot but it’s not a mass shooting,” said Parkinson. “It gives me concerns that we are trying to manipulate the numbers so that we can show us with less mass shootings than actually take place.”
Bills up for Discussion Monday
House members plan to reconvene at 2 PM Monday afternoon where they’ll take up the remaining 18 bills. Those include Senate Bills 7086, 7088, and 7085, along with:
- House Bill 7072 directs the administrative office of the courts to develop a centralized system of case management, document management, electronic case filing, electronic payment methods, data reporting, and any other capability deemed necessary for collection and reporting of all state and local court public case level data.
- House Bill 7036 changes prerequisites for emergency detention and admission to a treatment facility from “immediate” substantial likelihood of serious harm to “imminent” substantial likelihood of serious harm.
- House Bill 7033 requires a public bail hearing before a defendant, who has been arrested or held to answer for a bailable offense, may be admitted to bail.
- House Bill 7032 requires health insurance carriers, including TennCare providers, to provide mental health services and treatment to the same extent that the carriers and providers provide alcoholism and drug dependence services and treatment.
- House Bill 7038 requires the Tennessee Department of Education to establish a school safety alert grant program to provide grants to school districts to offset expenses incurred by the installation of safety alert systems.
- House Bill 7006 authorizes the Tennessee Department of Mental Health & Substance Abuse Services to direct available state funds to contract with additional private service providers to provide inpatient psychiatric services for uninsured individuals.
- House Bill 7030 expands the offenses for which a juvenile court may transfer a child to be tried as an adult in criminal court, if the child was 16 years of age or more at the time of the offense, to include burglary involving the theft of a firearm or an attempt to commit such offense. Additionally adds an appeal process for a criminal court to review a juvenile court’s determination for such transfers.
- House Bill 7026 requires a court that makes mental health adjudications regarding children to enter a standing and continuing order instructing the juvenile court clerk to collect and report certain information regarding children who have been adjudicated as a mental defective or judicially committed to a mental institution within three business days.
- House Bill 7008 requires a qualified mental health professional or behavior analyst to take certain steps to warn or protect an identified victim or group of people when the professional determines that a service recipient has made an actual threat of bodily harm or has an intention to commit such harm.
- House Bill 7005 clarifies that a private school serving students in any of the grades pre-kindergarten through twelve is authorized to adopt a handgun carry policy for the private school’s property.
- House Bill 7034 raises from a Class A misdemeanor to a Class E felony knowingly violating an order of protection or a restraining order issued due to domestic abuse when based on stalking; raises the classification range for stalking from a Class A misdemeanor or Class E felony to a Class E or D felony; raises the classification of aggravated stalking from a Class E to a Class D felony; requires a court to order a mental health assessment of a defendant’s need for mental health treatment if convicted of a stalking offense; requires the sentence to include the defendant undergoing treatment and monitoring of drug intake if the assessment indicates that the defendant is in need of and amenable to treatment.
- House Bill 7023 authorizes a law enforcement agency to assign a law enforcement officer to serve as a school resource officer at a school within a local board of education’s control that has not entered into a memorandum of understanding with a law enforcement agency to assign a school resource officer to the school.
- House Bill 7063 authorizes school districts and public charter schools to employ retired law enforcement officers and honorably discharged veterans of the United States armed forces to serve as school resource officers on school premises.
- House Bill 7035 establishes a loan forgiveness program for psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors.
- House Bill 7073 requires a juvenile court to impose a blended sentence on a child adjudicated delinquent for certain offenses; defines blended sentencing as a combination of any disposition otherwise provided for juveniles and a period of an adult disposition to be served after the child turns 19 and which ends on or before the child’s 24th birthday; requires the juvenile court to hold a transfer hearing if a juvenile offender is 16 or more but less than 18 at the time of the alleged conduct and is alleged to have committed certain offenses; requires the juvenile court to transfer the juvenile to adult criminal court for disposition as if the juvenile were an adult if the court makes certain findings; provides for an automatic de novo review by the criminal court of a juvenile court’s decision denying a transfer to adult criminal court.
