Emily Allen, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

W.Va. Elections Bill Changes Early Voting Dates, Updates Process For Disputed Races

West Virginia elections officials and advocates for voting rights are closely following 40 pages of legislation that would update several voting procedures, including those for early voting, registration and the legal process for disputed results.

With less than a week left of the regular session, the House of Delegates must decide whether Senate Bill 565, which passed the Senate 29 to 5 in March, could help West Virginia voters or harm them.

The secretary of state’s office, which helped draft the legislation, says the bill will have “no significant, major changes” to voters according to general counsel Donald Kersey. He said that the bill is an effort to increase the public’s confidence in elections.

“The point of the bill is to make it even better in West Virginia,” said Kersey. “Not only for voters to be able to participate, but also for the administrators, who have to make sure that an election is fair, and safe and secure, and accurate and reliable.”

Proposed Changes To Early, Absentee Voting

During a public hearing Monday in the House Judiciary Committee, where Senate bill 565 has been referred, most speakers focused on changes to early voting and absentee ballot deadlines.

The legislation would move the state’s early voting period up to six days before an election. Right now, the last Saturday of early voting happens two days before Election Day.

Dozens of speakers, many affiliated with voting rights and advocacy organizations, said Monday that they believe the last two days of early voting — currently the Friday and Saturday before Election Day — are most popular with working-class voters, those who lack reliable transportation and those who want as much time as possible to consider candidates.

“Eliminating them could have an effect on the voter outcome,” said George Rutherford, president of the Jefferson County chapter of the NAACP. “The legislature needs to find ways to encourage more people to vote instead of suppressing the vote.”

Senate Bill 565 does not shorten the state’s early voting period.

Data from the secretary of state’s office shows that since 2014, save for two general elections, the last Friday and Saturday were the most popular of the 10 days allotted for early voting, even if their turnout stood apart from other days by only a few percentage points.

“Sometimes things happen at the last minute and you’re not going to be in town on Election Day,” said Kathy Stoltz of the Wood County League of Women Voters, who spoke against Senate Bill 565.

The bill also would move up the deadline for absentee ballot applications, and it would shorten the time that county clerks have to wait before reaching out to voters who they suspect have moved and need to update their information.

Clerks and their representatives have spoken in favor of these changes because it would offer them more time to prepare for an election.

Patti Hamilton of the West Virginia Association of Counties said that these changes will come in handy should there be another statewide emergency, like a pandemic.

“I can assure you that 55 county clerks did not get together and decide that they were going to try to suppress anyone’s vote,” Hamilton said. “The shift in early voting just gives them a couple of extra days in case of emergency illness, Superstorm Sandy, all kinds of things can happen and get things messed up before Election Day.”

Kersey said these changes to deadlines in Senate Bill 565 also have been informed by input from the United States Postal Service. An attorney for the USPS wrote to the state on Tuesday, noting that the bill “alleviates much of the risk to voters” that their absentee ballots won’t reach their county clerks in time.

Contesting Elections

Under Senate Bill 565, county commissions and municipal bodies would no longer handle cases where someone is contesting the results of an election.

Instead, this process would begin with the circuit court. Kersey said this change follows a contentious race in the small, roughly 230-person town of Harpers Ferry.

As MetroNews reported in June 2020, the state Supreme Court of Appeals agreed to count four provisional ballots that the Town Council originally had voted against counting.

Those ballots made all the difference in a close race, resulting in two new members.

One of those new members, Nancy Singleton Case, ultimately won her election by one vote following the supreme court’s decision. Case spoke in favor of Senate Bill 565 during Monday’s public hearing.

“The current election law nearly prevented me from becoming elected at all,” Case said. “Our election became a political firestorm when the council … chose not to open four provisional ballots in order to hold on to their seats of power.”

Confidence In West Virginia Elections

Kersey said the circuit court change plays into an underlying theme of the bill to increase public confidence in West Virginia elections.

Meanwhile, some in the state have criticized the state’s Chief Election Officers, Mac Warner, for his support of a lawsuit questioning the results of the 2020 election.

Warner participated in a rally supporting the legal effort late last year — Kersey said Monday that Warner’s attendance was in his own personal capacity and didn’t represent his office.

Warner himself said Thursday that he supported the lawsuit because there were “improprieties” in other states where “the rules of the election were changed in the middle of the game” due to the pandemic.

The lawsuit in question, which West Virginia’s attorney general signed onto in December, was dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court for lack of standing.

Other Provisions

Senate Bill 565 also would expand absentee ballot eligibility to emergency responders who have to work away from their county during an election.

It would create a misdemeanor for anyone who interferes with someone at the polls, with the intention to delay or hinder their vote, and it would update the DMV’s process for automatically registering voters who are obtaining their driver’s licenses.

The legislation would require that anyone participating in a political robocall or “push polling” begin all of their political messages with a disclaimer, who including who paid for the content.

Emily Allen is a Report for America corps member.

W.Va. House Bill Would Regulate Social Media In Elections, ‘Deplatforming’

When Facebook pledged last year to register at least 4 million new voters nationwide, their plans included West Virginia.

The platform notified users in the Mountain State of registration deadlines, election dates and identification requirements through an online Voting Information Center. To Secretary of State Mac Warner, this risked conflicting with information that county clerks and his office were putting out to voters.

“There are too many moving parts when it comes to an election,” Warner said Thursday. “Too many different districts, too many different dates to remember … It is too complicated for any one entity to try to be in charge of all of that.”

House Bill 3307, which passed the House of Delegates on Wednesday, seeks to address this and other social media issues.

Under this legislation, Facebook and other platforms would have to get approval from the secretary of state’s office any time they intend to publish information on the elections.

The bill also requires equal space and visibility for all candidates, and it bars a company from algorithmically targeting one viewer over another based on any factor other than the fact that a viewer resides in West Virginia.

Social media companies would have to publicly disclose any favorable treatment of a candidate as an in-kind contribution.

The legislation goes on to create an appeals process for candidates who lose access to their accounts before an election, as well as protections for any personal information that candidates share with a platform.

The secretary of state’s office has seen “a lot of anecdotal evidence” of disparate treatment of candidates by social media companies, according to general counsel Chris Alder.

Alder, who helped draft some of the bill, said he and his colleagues asked Facebook for data on this but never received anything.

“Without the transparency into the data, then we have no visibility into that,” Alder said. “We can’t tell.”

Back-And-Forth On The ‘Voting Information Center’

As for working with Facebook during the 2020 election, Alder shared several emails and letters between Warner, his attorneys and Facebook.

The emails show that a representative for Facebook reached out to Warner’s office in April to verify a notification that the company was planning to send its users, regarding the state’s deadline to register to vote in the 2020 primary election.

An attorney for Warner’s office responded to Facebook the same day, pointing out that the date was a month off. West Virginia had offered its voters more time to register as a result of the pandemic — the Facebook representative said the company “must’ve completely missed this announcement.”

Following the state’s primary election in June, Warner’s office wrote Facebook, saying that while they supported Facebook’s “plan to refer users to trusted, official sources for election information,” they were “objectively concerned” about Facebook publishing its own information through the company’s “Voting Information Center” project.

Warner sent the company a list of requests, later phrased as yes-or-no questions, including “Will Facebook publish any election-related message or information to any user before the chief election official in the appropriate jurisdiction approves it?” And, “Will Facebook engage in only factual, informative speech intended to educate the public election dates, times, or statutory requirements?”

After two more written follow-up requests and a response from Facebook that Warner called “totally unresponsive” to his questions in August, the company provided specific answers on Sept. 2, 2020.

The same day, Warner was one of six secretaries of states who wrote Facebook, requesting the company discontinue its Voting Information Center and “refrain from publishing or promoting election information retrieved from or created by any source except state/territory chief election officials.”

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

Illegal To Censor Based On ‘Political’ Or ‘Religious’ Speech

Much of the debate on the bill Wednesday focused on the bill’s “Stop Social Media Censorship Act,” which would apply year-round to all users — not just candidates and groups involved in elections.

This section of the bill would make it illegal for any social media platform, which is not affiliated with a political party and has more than 1 million subscribers, to delete, censor or algorithmically reduce the visibility of any of its users based on their political or religious speech.

The legislation defines political speech as “discussion of social issues” or those relating to state government and public administration.

Religious speech would be “a set of unproven answers, truth claims, faith-based assumptions, and naked assertions that attempt to explain such greater questions as how the world was created, what constitutes right and wrong actions by humans, and what happens after death.”

The bill does not bar platforms from deleting any users who call for immediate acts of violence, create obscene content or content involving false personations, criminal conduct or the bullying of minors. Any platform that deletes someone by legal order also is safe, or those that accidentally delete a user through operational error.

House Technology and Infrastructure Chairman Daniel Linville, R-Cabell, said the legislation is meant to “level the playing field” for social media companies, which by federal law are offered more protections from liability for what their users say online, compared to what print and broadcast media outlets face for their content.

Linville is the bill’s lead sponsor.

“I totally understand that partisan politics can be alleged in trying to work with this,” Linville said Thursday. “We have attempted to craft a bill that does not favor one side or the other.”

Debate on Wednesday included support from freshman Del. Todd Longanacre, R-Greenbrier, who told others in the House he struggled understanding why he lost access to his personal Facebook account last September.

(Longanacre said he still had a campaign page that was moderated by someone else.)

After questions from other delegates, all Democrats, Longanacre described Facebook activity in which he likened the Black Lives Matter movement to a domestic terrorism organization and followed a Q-Anon related page. Del. Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, also asked about a post that Pushkin said had been reported to the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks anti-Semitic remarks.

Del. Evan Hansen, D-Monongalia, said he agreed that the role of social media platforms in elections is an “emerging issue we need to tackle,” but said this was “not that bill.”

“This includes some provisions that go way above and beyond what’s reasonable, and perhaps what’s even legal,” Hansen said, questioning whether this affected a company’s First Amendment rights.

Del. Shawn Fluharty, D-Ohio, questioned whether the legislation would affect the state’s efforts to attract larger tech companies to West Virginia to do their business here.

“You know, we talked about bringing tech companies to West Virginia, we even formed a tech caucus,” Fluharty said. “And then we’re running legislation that says tech companies can’t operate their companies how they deem fit.”

The legislation passed Wednesday 72 to 28.

It now awaits consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Emily Allen is a Report for America corps member.

W.Va. House Passes 400-Page Bill For Criminal Sentencing Reform

A bill to rewrite state law for hundreds of criminal offenses cleared the House of Delegates following less than half an hour of debate Wednesday.

Over the course of nearly 400 pages, House Bill 2017 updates hundreds of crimes and replaces the state’s process for sentencing with a six-felony, three-misdemeanor system of sentencing ranges.

The legislation alters Chapter 61 for “Crimes and Their Punishment,” but doesn’t deal with Chapter 60a for the Uniform Controlled Substances Act, which contains drug crimes, or Chapter 62 for criminal procedure.

“This is a great bill,” said Del. Brandon Steele, R-Raleigh, who is its lead sponsor. “It’s a great starting place for us to update, modernize our code, as many of our sister states around the country have done over the past 20 years.”

However, by introducing a new “determinate” sentencing system that provides judges ranges they can choose from for sentencing — therefore, giving greater discretion to the court — the West Virginia Prosecuting Attorneys Association has said the bill will restrict their ability to promise predictability and structure to victims who testify in court against their abusers.

The bill also increases the minimum jail time requirements for more than 200 felonies. Lawmakers who worked on the bill and support it say this was an “unintended consequence,” but they made no amendments or suggestions to change this.

The legislation passed the House on the last day possible, with only 10 days left to the rest of the legislative session — despite the fact lawmakers have been working on the bill since April 2020, according to attorneys for the committee.

Debate on Wednesday was capped at 30 minutes at the request of House Majority Leader Amy Summers, who said delegates had the option to attend an optional Q&A on the bill Monday night.

Del. Joey Garcia, D-Marion, said Wednesday the way the bill increases sentencing time contradicts different reform-related legislation the Legislature has already agreed to pass.

“That’s going to increase the amount of time, the amount of people that are in our regional jails, and that are in our prison system,” Garcia said. “Even after we’ve been working on all of these different efforts for reforms — we’ve worked on re-entry, we’ve worked on housing, we’ve worked on jobs, we’ve worked on diversion. All of these things are good things. But this is a fundamental change to how our system works on a day-in and day-out basis.”

Advocates for criminal justice reform, including West Virginia chapters of Americans for Prosperity and the Center on Budget and Policy, say the revamped code will lead to an expensive increase in incarcerated populations.

Steele said Wednesday on the House floor that he had spoken to several criminal justice-related groups and people working in the field while working on this bill, with four other delegates from the House Judiciary committee. His remarks come as some from those groups, such as the West Virginia Prosecuting Attorneys Association, say they didn’t learn about this bill until the legislative session began.

Delegates who voted against the bill Wednesday — the bill passed 76 to 22 — asked why the House couldn’t wait on a sentencing commission that the Legislature agreed to create in 2020.

The 13-member group, consisting of public defenders, law enforcement officials, prosecutors, judges, state officials and lawmakers, is tasked with studying criminal laws for a report that will come out in January 2022. They’ll meet for the second time this year on April 9, 2021.

Steele has said that the bill isn’t an attempt to undercut the commission’s work, and that the group can still consider chapters 60a and 62.

The bill now awaits the Senate for consideration.

Emily Allen is a Report for America corps member.

Stakeholders Say New Bill For Criminal Law Rewrite Lacked Input, Transparency

Last spring, a small, bipartisan group of West Virginia lawmakers embarked on an enormous task — the rewriting of several hundred pages of criminal law.

Every one to two weeks, the five House delegates would meet over a video conferencing app to consider a new section of crimes. They tackled everything from homicide to the improper disposal of an abandoned refrigerator, from human trafficking to computer hacking.

They also created a new, tiered sentencing system for the hundreds of penalties listed in Chapter 61 of state code for “Crimes and Their Punishment.”

“This was billed from the beginning as one of the top items that would be run and dealt with,” said former Del. Joe Canestraro, one of the group members. Canestraro, a Democrat, is now Marshall County prosecutor.

But instead, House Bill 2017 — a 400-page culmination of the group’s work — was among the first introduced and the last considered, passing the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, March 25, just one day before the deadline for bills to be sent to the House floor.

Stakeholders in the criminal justice system, most prominently including the West Virginia Prosecuting Attorneys Association but also organizations for victims rights, the formerly incarcerated and alternative sentencing, say they weren’t given a chance to weigh in on legislation that will drastically alter their jobs and the experiences of those they work with.

Nor were all of these groups notified until February, they say, that this was something the House was working on, despite it being a priority among lawmakers.

For the incarcerated, the bill guarantees at least three months of new jail time for more than 200 offenses, while creating four new life sentences. For victims, the bill takes away some of the predictability prosecutors can offer to those who testify against their abusers.

“It’s probably going to have some enormous human costs and fiscal costs, at a time when our state is budget-strapped and when other states have been trying to find a way to reduce the prison population,” said Quenton King, a criminal justice policy analyst for the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy.

Judges Get More Leeway, Victims Less Predictability

Currently, each crime listed in state code comes with its own required jail time and fines for a judge to impose.

Most of these sentences are “indeterminate,” and include the minimum number of years that someone has to wait before they’re parole eligible, along with the maximum amount of time someone might have to spend behind bars.

House Bill 2017 scraps all of the state’s indeterminate sentencing requirements and replaces them with a series of “determinate” options. The legislation offers more discretion to judges than what currently exists by handing them a span of years they can pick from, depending on the severity of the crime.

“You have to trust your judges and prosecutors here,” said lead sponsor Del. Brandon Steele during a presentation of the bill to other House members on Monday. Steele, a Republican from Raleigh County, did not respond to multiple requests for comment over the last month and a half.

The legislation creates six classes of felonies and three misdemeanors, each class having its own range of years from which a judge can pick.

The worst kind of felony is a class 1, requiring life in prison with the chance to parole after 15 years, depending on the jury. The lightest felony, a class 6, allows a judge to choose from a one to five-year range.

Judges also can decide, before sentencing, to reduce charges against someone facing a class 6 felony to a class one misdemeanor, according to the bill. That would result in less required jail time.

“The whole philosophy behind this bill is you quit being mad at who you’re mad at and over-punishing them, and you look at who you’re afraid of,” Steele said. “Who are you afraid of?”

While Steele said Monday that class 6 felonies consist mostly of financial and property-related crimes, president Perri DeChristopher of the West Virginia Prosecuting Attorneys Association said the classification also encompasses sexual assault in the third degree, sexual abuse in the first degree, and certain charges related to the distribution of child porn.

“Some of these offenses are offenses like third-offense domestic battery, where someone has been convicted of domestic battery several times, and some of those offenses include abuse of a child,” said DeChristopher in testimony to the House Judiciary Committee Thursday.

She also decried the same mechanism that Steele insisted would offer prosecutors more leeway — the large ranges of years that a judge has to choose from under House Bill 2017’s new sentencing system.

“For a class 2 felony, the range is a 45-year difference,” DeChristopher said Thursday. “That does not give us the predictability that we can really suggest to a victim or witnesses to say, ‘if we go to trial, this is what could happen.’ Nor does it help the defendants.”

Overcrowded Jails And Millions In Debt

Of the hundreds of offenses addressed in House Bill 2017 — the bill amends all of Chapter 61 but leaves Chapter 60, which contains most of the state’s drug crimes, mostly untouched — the ranges proposed make it harder for some people to get out of prison or jail.

For more than 200 felony charges, the proposed sentencing system means people will have to wait at least three more months behind bars before they’re eligible for parole.

Del. David Kelly, R-Tyler, was a member of House Bill 2017’s working group and is a co-sponsor for the legislation. He said the increase in proposed jail time was an “unintended consequence,” but still supported the bill’s passage Thursday.

“Clearly, there’s no perfect bill,” Kelly told the committee. “But the current code isn’t perfect, so we need to pass this now.”

If this bill becomes law, King with the WVCBP says the state risks further overcrowding in its regional jails, where more than half of the population was incarcerated pre-trial on Monday, and where nearly a third of the jail population has been sentenced to prison and is still waiting to be transferred.

“We’ve seen this in the last few years,” King said. “This bill is going to create new, even larger backlogs in jails. Just right now, there’s 6,000 people in jail, and a third of those should actually be in prison.”

King has studied the impacts of jail overcrowding on county budgets — in 2019, counties were billed more than $44 million for regional jail costs, for which the state also pays about half. From 2015 to 2019, counties fell behind on jail costs by roughly $2.3 million per year, which King said indicates they’re “incarcerating beyond their ability to pay.”

Director Jason Huffman from the West Virginia chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative-minded political advocacy group, said this is one of the largest reasons the AFP opposes House Bill 2017.

“This legislation, the way it increases the time that folks will spend incarcerated, that’s going to have a negative fiscal impact for counties that are already struggling with their jail bills,” said Huffman.

The same day that House Bill 2017 passed the judiciary committee, Huffman’s group wrote lawmakers letters, saying the legislation “unnecessarily increases penalties which are already sufficiently punitive” and that the changes “will not make our communities safer.”

Waiting On The Sentencing Commission

Weeks before attorneys for the House Judiciary Committee say Steele’s group began meeting in April 2020, the governor signed House Bill 4004 into law.

This bill created a brand new West Virginia Sentencing Commission, to study and recommend well-informed changes to the state’s criminal statutes.

Before passing House Bill 2017 out of committee Thursday — an event that took more than five hours of explanation, testimony and debate — several lawmakers, mostly Democrat, asked why the House couldn’t just wait on the commission’s first report, which is due Jan. 22, 2022.

“This is a big deal. This is 150 years of the entire criminal law of the state of West Virginia,” said Del. Chad Lovejoy, D-Cabell. “I know we’re in a rush to kind of get things done, but sometimes, getting it done right is more important than getting it done first.”

In the end, a majority of members agreed to advance the legislation.

“There were some of us that weren’t about to sit around and let a year go to waste,” Steele said on Monday. “It wasn’t in a manner to undercut anybody, but to get the ball rolling, to make sure that we were working on something.”

Del. Kelly, who helped create and sponsor House Bill 2017, was the lead sponsor behind House Bill 4004 last year. He said there’s still work the group can do even after this bill passes.

To Canestraro, the 12-member sentencing commission might’ve made a more informed proposal.

“This was the work of five people,” he said of House Bill 2017. “It really did not have much input from all of the interested parties who work in the real world, in the criminal justice system.”

The West Virginia House of Delegates will consider amendments to House Bill 2017 during its floor session Tuesday, March 30. All bills in the House have until Wednesday to pass onto the next chamber in time for the end of the legislative session.

Emily Allen is a Report for America corps member.

Work-Sharing Bill For Unemployment Benefits Passes W.Va. House

Throughout this coronavirus pandemic, several companies across West Virginia have had to lay off their employees. Many of these positions are difficult to rehire, and are often the kinds of jobs where workers make too much to earn partial unemployment if they’re working less than full-time.

House Bill 3294, which passed the House of Delegates unanimously Thursday, creates an optional work-sharing program for West Virginia employers who would rather temporarily reduce their workers’ hours than lay them off.

If the bill becomes law, employers could follow a work-sharing plan for up to a year, reducing their workers’ hours by 10 to 60 percent. Workers would be able to backfill some of their losses with unemployment insurance, while still keeping their health plans and retirement benefits.

All plans are subject to approval from Workforce West Virginia, which oversees the state’s program for unemployment insurance benefits.

The legislation combines a couple bills that lawmakers were planning to introduce this year for the state’s unemployment program. It also creates an Unemployment Insurance Program Integrity Act to investigate and recover overpayments.

“I think a lot of issues were brought to light after some of the experiences that we had during the pandemic,” said lead sponsor and House Judiciary Chair Moore Capito. “But I think we’ve found some legislation here that, going forward, is going to help West Virginia in the in the workforce area.”

The legislation calls on Workforce West Virginia to have a work-sharing program up and running by July 2023.

Co-sponsor Del. Kayla Young, D-Kanawha, first introduced a work-sharing proposal in her House Bill 2924. Young is a small business owner who said she found herself unemployed last March as the state first began shutting down for the pandemic.

“The system just wasn’t built for what we dealt with last year,” Young said.

Although the bill’s work-sharing program is open to all contributing employers who pay into an unemployment insurance trust fund, Young said this legislation will especially help employees in manufacturing and coal mining.

“Oftentimes these businesses, they pay too much for partial unemployment to ever kick in,” Young said. “So it’s just a way for people to retain employees.”

Not only does the bill come with endorsement from the West Virginia Manufacturers’ Association, but in other states, the concept has drawn support from the U.S. Department of Labor, which has made funding available for states interested in setting up a short-time compensation program for work-sharing.

Scott Adkins, commissioner for Workforce West Virginia, said the state plans to apply for up to $500,000 in implementation grants from the USDOL.

There’s also a chance the state could apply for new funding that the USDOL began offering after the pandemic hit, which could potentially pay for up to three years of unemployment benefits as described in the bill.

There are 26 states that offer work-sharing plans to their employers according to the USDOL. That includes the neighboring states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland.

House Bill 3294 now moves onto the Senate for further consideration.

Emily Allen is a Report for America corps member.

Senate Judiciary Committee Walks Back Eligibility In Restorative Justice Bill

A bill expanding who is allowed to participate in the state’s juvenile restorative justice program passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee Monday — but not without an amendment, scaling back that eligibility.

In restorative justice programs, participants who have committed a crime meet with their victims, and they address the crime in a safe, mediated environment.

In West Virginia, if a juvenile is referred to and successfully completes a restorative justice program, the state will drop all related criminal charges against that juvenile.

Current state law only allows juveniles facing nonviolent misdemeanors to participate. While the House of Delegates voted unanimously in February to open up the program to all juveniles under House Bill 2094, regardless of their charges, the Senate Judiciary committee voted Monday to step back and extend the program to juveniles facing misdemeanor charges of battery or assault, leaving out violent felonies.

“I see the symmetry that it can bring together, the victim and the perpetrator, and it might drive something home to a kid that the system itself can’t,” said Sen. Mike Woelfel, D-Cabell. “You just haven’t really sold me on the fact that we shouldn’t have adjudications on violent felonies.”

Woelfel, a Huntington-area attorney who has worked with victims of violent crimes, was the one who proposed keeping the new violent misdemeanors instead of nixing violent crimes altogether, which the committee was prepared to do.

But, Woelfel said Monday he wasn’t comfortable offering juveniles facing harsher crimes a route to avoid adjudication.

“Doesn’t society have a right for someone who committed a dangerous felony to have some punishment?” Woelfel said.

Del. Dianna Graves, R-Kanawha and the bill’s lead sponsor, said she initially included all crimes in the bill because nationally, other programs have demonstrated that the harsher the sentence, the more effective the program.

That, and no matter what the crime is, the entire process is contingent upon the victim’s desire to participate. Graves said Monday the Senate committee’s changes might take away a victim’s option to safely confront someone who has harmed them.

“When I first introduced this, the version that I had two years ago excluded violent crimes, because, quite frankly, it made me uneasy,” Graves said. “But as I continued researching it, and speaking to experts, what I came to understand was, the victims want this opportunity to confront.”

Kenneth Lang, a criminal justice professor at Glenville State College and a retired homicide detective, agreed Monday with the benefits of restorative justice programs to victims.

“It causes the offender to realize, to address questions about what happened, why it happened,” Lang told senators. “And, what needs to be done to correct, or to right, that wrong.”

Restorative justice isn’t always used as a diversionary tool, Lang said. In other states dealing with adults in the criminal justice system, the process happens after someone is convicted for their crimes.

While working on House Bill 2094, Graves told senators that she researched a juvenile restorative justice program in Colorado.

A third-party review of Colorado’s program found that of the roughly 1,200 juveniles who completed the restorative justice program, roughly 90 percent stayed out of the juvenile justice system for at least a year after finishing.

More than two thirds of the victims who participated were directly affected by a juvenile’s crime. Others were “surrogate victims,” who either witnessed the crime in question or have been impacted by a similar crime.

In West Virginia, the state Department of Health and Human Resources provides funding to two restorative programs — the National Youth Advocate program, which serves 12 counties, and the Juvenile Mediation Program, which works with juveniles in the northern panhandle.

While proponents for House Bill 2094 advocate for opening a restorative justice program in more counties, the bill offers the state no additional funding.

Emily Allen is a Report for America corps member.