Less than 24 hours after the Senate Judiciary Committee voted down a bill to provide a minimum age for marriage in West Virginia, it was revived.
Less than 24 hours after the Senate Judiciary Committee voted down a bill to provide a minimum age for marriage in West Virginia, it was revived.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Sen. Charles Trump, R-Morgan, moved House Bill 3018 out of committee and put it back in front of the full Senate using a procedural vote. This bill makes the minimum age 18 to get married.
The Senate voted on it a second time and moved it to third reading on Friday with the right to amend.
In Senate remarks, Sen. Mike Woelfel, D-Cabell, said he supported the bill.
“What we have in this day, frequently, is called grooming,” he said. “You have men in their thirties or older who groom young girls, and the next thing you know some young girl has convinced her parents to let her get married. And it’s really close to duress. It’s an undue influence. Undue influence can set aside another contract, and it is actually grounds to set aside divorce, that may be grounds for annulment.”
As West Virginia law stands, there is no minimum age to marry. Children can marry as young as 16 in West Virginia, with parental consent. Anyone younger than that must get a judge’s waiver.
Sen. Mike Stuart, R-Kanawha, offered an alternative to 18 for discussion Friday.
“My parents married at 16,” he said. “They are disgustingly in love that they can’t keep their hands off each other. And so I would ask this body to consider a more reasonable figure of 16. I support that figure. I think our counterparts will agree to 16. I think this is about a floor as opposed to a finite number. And I just ask you to consider that over the next 24 hours.”
The bill was introduced in the House of Delegates by Del. Kayla Young, D-Kanawha. She told the committee Wednesday night that seven percent of marriages in the last decade included someone who was under 18. Young said more than 750 child marriages have been performed since 2000.
As West Virginia law stands, there is no minimum age to marry. Children can marry as young as 16 in West Virginia, with parental consent. Anyone younger than that must get a judge’s waiver.
The committee rejected a vote to report House Bill 3018 to the full Senate by a vote of nine to eight.
As West Virginia law stands, there is no minimum age to marry. Children can marry as young as 16 in West Virginia, with parental consent. Anyone younger than that must get a judge’s waiver.
This legislation would have removed these exceptions and made the age of consent for marriage 18 years old.
Del. Kayla Young, D-Kanawha, was the lead sponsor of the bill. Before the vote, she spoke to the committee, citing statistics from the Pew Research Center showing that West Virginia has the highest rate of child marriage in the country.
Young said, since 2012, seven marriages out of 100 performed in West Virginia involved someone under the age of 18. She also told the committee that 753 marriages involving children have been performed since 2000.
“I know that there are a lot of people who maybe their parents were married as a child or they had a baby when they were under 18,” Young said. “But what this bill sets out to do is to set the legal age of marriage at 18. There are a few reasons for that. The biggest reason is children don’t have the same legal rights as adults do, they can’t sign a contract, they can’t get a lease, they can’t open a bank account, they can’t get a protective order, they can’t file for divorce, because they’re under 18 years old.”
Young also spoke about the negative outcomes of marriage under 18, stating the divorce rate for people under 18 is 80 percent, which is 30 percent higher than the national average for adults.
“The last big problem is that this really undermines our statutory rape laws because right now, the age of consent for sex is 16, the age of marriage is zero. There’s no floor. All the states around us at least have a floor, we don’t have anything,” Young said. “So this would set it at 18. And the data that we’ve seen shows that there have been 41 cases that would have violated our rape laws because one of the children was under the age of 16.”
The committee had no questions for Young. However, before they could move to report the bill to the full Senate floor, Sen. Patricia Rucker, R-Jefferson, made a motion to table the bill.
That motion failed by a narrow vote of 8 in favor and 9 opposed.
The committee then returned to their pending question, of whether to report the bill to the full Senate.
The motion to report House Bill 3018 to the Senate floor failed with Sens. Mike Azinger, Laura Chapman, Mark Hunt, Patrick Martin, Mark Maynard, Patricia Rucker, David Stover, Mike Stuart and Jay Taylor voting against it.
After the bill was rejected, Sen. Mike Woefel, D-Cabell, asked to speak to the committee.
“I just wanted to remind everyone in the room that this is National Women’s Day,” he said.
Young tweeted the following statement after the vote.
“Senate Judiciary voted down HB3018, the bill to end Child Marriage in WV,” she wrote. “They first moved to table the bill without discussion, which failed, so they killed the bill instead. For now, there will be no floor for the age of marriage in WV, endangering our kids.”
A bill increasing penalties for drug traffickers was largely the focus of the House floor session Friday. The bill is part of the House leadership’s plans to crack down on people selling drugs in West Virginia to curb the substance abuse epidemic.
House Bill 2648 would increase the penalties for trafficking or manufacturing a controlled substance while in the presence of a minor, making it a felony. The bill carries a penalty of a three year prison term without the ability to receive parole.
The state Division of Corrections was asked to estimate the cost of the bill, but in the fiscal note, the division said they were unable to estimate how many new offenders would be sentenced. The division did say, however, that each new offender would cost the state about $28,000 per year.
The high cost was a concern for some lawmakers, including Delegate Larry Rowe, a Democrat from Kanawha County. Rowe says it’s unlikely most of the people convicted under the bill would be major drug traffickers, but addicts who need treatment.
Credit Perry Bennett / West Virginia Legislative Photography
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West Virginia Legislative Photography
Del. Larry Rowe, D-Kanawha.
“Every single day we’ve been in here, except the first few, we have had a bill to raise the penalties on a crime that already exists,” Rowe noted, “We’ve just got to stop doing it, and the economic argument’s very, very wise. We are spending a fortune on corrections; we are being ruined by the amounts of money we spend on corrections as crisis response, when we ought to be spending that same amount of money on prevention.”
Delegate Kelli Sobonya, a Republican from Cabell County, is one of the sponsors of the bill. She argued protecting children in the state, no matter the cost, is what’s important.
“We can talk about the cost of incarceration, but you know, we pass legislation and penalties for two reasons, to be used as a deterrent if it’s high enough, it can be a deterrent, hopefully, you know, people won’t do that behavior, but you know, most likely addicts, they’re gonna do it anyway, because they’re addicted. They make those bad decisions, because they do have an addiction,” Sobonya said, “But you know, for instances like this, I think, you know, that parents need to be held responsible for endangering their children.”
Delegate Mike Pushkin, a Democrat from Kanawha County, opposed the bill, because he says it does nothing to assist in the treatment of addiction, which is where lawmakers should be focused if they want to curb substance abuse in the state.
“These folks aren’t thinking in the long term. They’re not thinking about the penalty, they’re thinking about what’s right in front of ‘em,” Pushkin explained, “And, while I wish this bill, this legislation, would put an end to these stories that we’re hearing; I’m afraid that it will not, and what it will do is put a lot more people who could possibly benefit from treatment; it’s gonna give them longer sentences; not allow them to parole.”
Credit Perry Bennett / West Virginia Legislative Photography
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West Virginia Legislative Photography
Del. John Shott, R-Mercer, House Judiciary Chair.
Several lawmakers questioned House Judiciary Chair John Shott about hypothetical situations that could come up should the bill take effect. Shott says while those situations may deserve consideration, the law allows local prosecutors some discretion.
“There’s always a hypothetical that pulls at your heartstring in these cases,” Shott noted, “There’s always a hypothetical, but those hypotheticals are based on the absolute worst case scenario. They’re based on an assumption that our prosecutors don’t deserve our trust, they’re based on the assumption that we don’t have any trust or confidence in the legal system to do the right thing, or the common sense and good judgement of our jurors to see through our situation, and do the proper result, or in our judges.”
After over an hour of debate, House Bill 2648 passed 85 to 12 and now moves onto the Senate for consideration.
