WASHINGTON, April 10 — Congress approved creation of a national kidnapping alert system today as part of a bill intended to reduce abductions and sex crimes involving children.
Despite reservations over some sentencing provisions, the House and Senate voted overwhelmingly to send the bill to President Bush for his signature. The vote in the House was 400 to 25; the Senate adopted it 98 to 0.
Under the measure already endorsed by the president, those convicted of kidnapping and sex offenses would face new penalties, including a mandatory life sentence for those convicted of child sex offenses twice. The bill allows prosecutors new use of wiretaps in suspected child sex crime cases and seeks to overcome constitutional objections to restrictions on Internet pornography.
Fueling much of the support for the bill was its establishment of a national Amber Alert network to notify the public of child abductions quickly by providing grants and assistance to states that establish such systems. The alerts, named for Amber Hageerman, a 9-year-old Texas girl who was kidnapped and murdered in 1996, have been credited with the quick capture of kidnappers and the rescue of the victims.
The measure "contains the best ideas to prevent and punish sexual predation of our American children," the House majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay, said.
Senate Democrats circulated a letter from Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist containing objections to the bill and raised concerns about provisions they said restrict judicial discretion in imposing jail sentences for all types of crimes.
"We strongly support the Amber Alert system," said the Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota. "It ought to be passed. But it ought not pass with the blow that it causes to the sentencing guidelines infrastructure that we have in our country today."
The measure was agreed to in a negotiating session between House and Senate Republicans this week as they raced to reach a deal on the alerts before a two-week recess. Its sponsors came under political and public pressure to act after the parents of a kidnapped Utah girl recently reunited with her family called for establishing a national Amber Alert system.
The episode caused a round of Congressional finger-pointing over who was responsible for holding up the creation of the system.
In the House, Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, insisted on allowing the Amber Alert system to move through Congress only as part of the anticrime measure that he said would help prevent abductions. "The overarching goal of this comprehensive package is to stop those who prey on children before they can harm children," Mr. Sensenbrenner said today.
A late inclusion in the bill was an effort to limit judges in granting lesser sentences than those called for in the guidelines. The measure would require judges to discard the guidelines only for clearly specified grounds and report such judgments to a national sentencing commission.
In his letter, Chief Justice Rehnquist said the Judicial Conference of the United States believed that the provision "would do serious harm to the basic structure of the sentencing guideline system and would seriously impair the ability of courts to impose just and responsible sentences."
Hours after the House action, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, urged his colleagues to put aside partisan disputes and adopt the measure, including the new rules on sentence reductions. "This problem is perhaps most glaring in the area of sexual crimes and kidnapping crimes," Mr. Hatch said.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the judiciary panel, cited Chief Justice Rehnquist's position and argued against the bill, saying the sentencing changes had not been reviewed sufficiently and signaled that Congress did not trust the very judges it confirmed. Mr. Kennedy ultimately voted for the bill.
Other provisions of the bill would allow lifetime supervision of sex offenders released from prison, extend the statute of limitations for child abductions and sex crimes, deny pretrial release of those charged with such crimes and increase penalties for child kidnapping.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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