For the second year in a row, District 39 Rep. Dana McLean is pushing for rape laws to be redefined in Mississippi.
McLean is the author of House Bill 995, which she calls “The Rape Bill.” It would entirely repeal the statute that states rape inside marriages cannot occur, and it modifies language currently stating rape can only happen to women.
“Currently on the books, (rape) is to forcibly ravish a female of previously chaste character,” McLean told The Dispatch. “It’s like something out of the 1800s, very antiquated. My bill redefines rape and makes it consistent with the sexual assault and battery statutes currently on the book. It also takes away the spousal defense — there’s a threshold defense that if you’re married to the victim, that’s a defense, so we really need to remove that marital defense. Most states have done that because it doesn’t matter if you’re married or not, you must still have consent.”
Last year, it passed the House with “overwhelming” support, but it died in the Senate.
This year it passed 117-0 in the House of Representatives, and the Senate passed it with an amendment.
It went back to the House for concurrence, but instead they invited conference. When conference is invited, three from the House and three from the Senate come together to try to “hammer out the differences and come to a compromise,” McLean said.
On Tuesday, the House chose its three representatives for conference: Bryant Clark (D-District 47), Angela Cockerham (I-District 96) and Donnie Scoggin (R-District 89).
Scott Colom, 16th Circuit district attorney, said the current way the law defines rape is limited and allows questions into the character of victims, so perpetrators tend to be prosecuted under sexual battery laws.
“There’s a specific statute that defines rape, and it historically has some language in there about chastity,” Colom said. “It was also limited to women, and there has been some stuff about spousal privilege that was really disgusting. … There’s a sexual battery statute that says you can’t have sex without somebody’s consent. … Typically we prosecuted under that statute because you avoid all the issues the rape statute carries, and the sexual battery statute carries up to 30 years mandatory.”
Getting rid of the “spousal” and “chaste character” language and making clear victim gender does not matter would make the rape statute more viable for prosecution, which could carry a life sentence, Colom said.
The bill does seek to replace passages in the current statute to which Colom refers, such as “assault with the intent to forcibly ravish a female of previously chaste character.”
“Being sexually assaulted, being raped is like getting cancer that you’re going to have to live with the rest of your life,” Colom said. “It’s one of the worst things that can happen to somebody, and anything we can do as a society, as the state of Mississippi, as prosecutors, certainly as the DA — I’m going to do everything I can. I can’t remove that cancer, but I can at least ensure that cancer doesn’t go to anybody else by having them be raped or sexually assaulted. I can make sure that the person who gets that cancer at least gets the treatment of knowing that we’re going to get them justice. That’s the seriousness in which I view rapes and sexual assaults.”
McLean is also a co-sponsor of House Bill 485 that would ensure consistent protocol on how to process rape kits. She said this is also the second year in a row of her trying to get such a bill passed.
The bill passed the House 117-0, then was amended and passed 52-0 by the Senate. The House has invited conference for the bill and named its conferees on Wednesday: Edward Blackmon (D-District 57), Angela Cockerham (I-District 96) and John Thomas “Trey” Lamar (R-District 8).
“Right now there are no guidelines on how long a police investigator can hold on to a rape kit before it has to go to the crime lab, how many days there is to process that,” McLean said. “There’s nothing like that, so there have been rape kits sitting in refrigerators at hospitals and police stations that have never been processed. There’s a backlog of rape kits, and I think they found 50 rape kits at an area Jackson hospital that have been sitting there for a year and a half. Out of those 50, there were 15 that were from children. … Both of these bills are in conference, so hopefully we can get them out.”
The 2023 state legislative session closes April 2. If both bills pass and Gov. Tate Reeves signs them into law, they will go into effect on July 1.
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