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Committee debates rewording and penalties for desecration, concealment-of-body offenses
Summary
Committee counsel presented a redraft that moves certain concealment and desecration actions from a felony subsection to a different subsection tied to intent to conceal, lowers penalties for some offenses, and proposes mens rea wording changes; practitioners pressed for clearer phrasing to ensure the correct mental-state elements apply.
Ben Novogrovsky, counsel in the Office of Legislative Council, walked the Judiciary Committee through substantive redrafting of a criminal statute concerning desecration, concealment and related acts.
Novogrovsky said the office moved language such as “hides, desecrates, or otherwise concealed” out of the statute's subsection a — which previously carried a five-year penalty — and into subsection b with an added element: intent to conceal a crime, apprehension, or conviction. That change, he said, means prosecutors must prove a specific objective to charge the higher-level offense.
He also described an amendment to an existing provision, identified in the transcript as 52.11, that removes an imprisonment penalty for a certain related offense and replaces it with a fine.
Committee members discussed mens rea — the required mental state — and the placement of modifying words. Several practitioners and committee members said the draft's phrasing was ambiguous about what “knowingly” modified. Marshall Paul of the Office of the Defender General recommended more explicit wording so the statute clearly ties the knowledge element to the absence of legal authorization. Paul urged language along the lines of an order requiring an adjudication: “notwithstanding subsection 1 of this section, an order of adjudication issued pursuant to subdivision 5229 of this title,” and separately advocated for the phrasing “no person shall, knowingly that they do not have legal authorization, intentionally burn, mutilate, disfigure, or dismember” to avoid interpretive canons that could create ambiguity.
Novogrovsky and other attorneys agreed to adopt clearer commas and phrasing in the clean draft. Multiple committee members noted three attorneys in Novogrovsky's office had reviewed the language; Attorney Childs and Attorney McBurner were named as reviewers in the transcript.
No formal vote on the redraft occurred during the recorded session; committee members planned to take the cleaned-up version to a vote the following day.
