FEATURED

Three House bills asking how best to protect the vulnerable head to the Senate

• By Arianna Hunt & Sanjida Tanim, TheStatehouseFile.com

Age verification for adult content, school-bus stop-arm violations and guardian ad litems—three bills passed from their third readings in the Indiana Senate to the House Wednesday morning.

Senate Bill 30

Three bills passed from their third readings in the Indiana Senate to the House Wednesday morning.

In a third reading, the Senate discussed Senate Bill 30, co-authored by Sen. Rick Niemeyer, R-Lowell, Sen. James Buck, R-Kokomo, and Sen. Dan Dernulc, R-Highland.

SB 30 holds the registered owner of a car accountable for a school bus stop-arm violation (driving around a school bus when its stop arm is out) but provides some defense if the owner was not driving the car at the time of the incident.

“The violations in this state are staggering numbers not getting prosecuted because we don’t have the image of the driver,” Niemeyer said.

Niemeyer highlighted the importance of obtaining images of both the license plate and the driver to strengthen prosecution efforts.

Minority Leader Greg Taylor, D-Indianapolis, expressed gratitude for the inclusion of a defense for individuals who were not driving the vehicle, noting the importance of protecting those who may be unfairly implicated.

“This is good common-sense legislation to help curb, hopefully, give a disincentive for people driving around these buses,” said Taylor.

Sen. David Vinzant, D-Hobart, demonstrated the urgency for effective measures, citing instances of vehicles maneuvering around buses by driving through yards.

“Some of the numbers are just astonishingly, we’re not killing more kids than we are, and the fact that we even have people driving around these buses is a terrible thing to do,” Vinzant said.

Last April, over 6,000 Indiana school bus drivers participated in a study for a day. They reported 2,091 violations, according to the National School Bus Illegal Passing Driver Survey.

The proposed legislation also introduces a class B infraction, potentially carrying fines of up to $1,000, depending on the severity of the violation.

Niemeyer addressed concerns from law enforcement and prosecutors, acknowledging their challenges in pursuing prosecutions without clear identification of the driver but also stressing the need for a more sustainable solution.

The bill passed to the House on a 33-12 vote.

Senate Bill 17 

Senate Bill 17 would prevent minors from accessing pornography online by requiring anyone logging on to those websites to verify their age by providing their ID to be authenticated by a third-party vendor.

“Just like any other thing that we do that requires people to be able to verify their age, like to purchase a pack of cigarettes, vote and many other things,” said Sen. Mike Bohacek, R-Michiana Shores.“The ID that you produced, that is verified by a third-party vendor, once your ID is verified and your age is verified and that information is immediately redacted.”

Although there are penalties in place for third-party vendors that do not immediately delete the information through fines and infractions, Sen. Greg Taylor argued against the bill, saying that the guard rails in place are not enough.

“When I verify my age through a verifying agency, what confidence do any of us have that they will not take our personal information and sell it?” said Taylor. “That is the only bad thing about this bill.”

Taylor says that in other states with similar bills, their efforts to see if their information is being sold is impossible because the third-party vendors are out of the country.

“When these people verify their age, which is required under this piece of legislation, they found that most of the age verification companies are not United States companies,” said Taylor. “Most of them came from places like the Philippines, China and other nations that we can never access if our information is actually given.”

He also argued that several witnesses during the committee said that the goal of this legislation was to stop adult entertainment sites from actually doing business in Indiana.

“But what about the law-abiding citizens who should be able to enjoy these sites because they are adults?” said Taylor.

“We can no longer afford to pretend that the pornography that is accessible to minors today is as mildly graphic and difficult to find as it was in the 1980s,” said Sen. Spencer Deery, R-West Lafayette.

The bill passed to the House in a 44-1 vote, with Taylor being the sole “no.”

Senate Bill 16

Senate Bill 16 would require “a court to appoint a guardian ad litem in an adoption proceeding if a parent of the child has an intellectual disability and is subject to a guardianship” in LaPorte, Marshall and Starke counties.

Generally, an ad litem is a guardian appointed by court to represent the best interests of a child. In this case, the ad litem would represent the parent who has an intellectual disability.

“So when they deliver that child, the GAL [guardian ad litem] would help represent them and their interests during that transition period,” said bill author Bohacek.

“In many cases, these moms don’t want to say who they had a relationship with that resulted in the pregnancy, and many cases, it could be a family member or to protect the family member that is their guardian, and perhaps a GAL will be able to get that information out.”