Rep. David Klindt (R-Bethany) is concerned that partisanship has interferred with needed legislation.
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Rep. David Klindt
In May 1998, the Jefferson City News Tribune printed an Associated Press article regarding a 14-year old Gypsy girl whose parents had sold her twice. The first time she was sold, she lived in the state of California.
After she suffered a miscarriage, the people who bought her returned the girl to her parents for a partial refund and her parents resold her to someone in Arizona. After arresting the girl for panhandling outside a strip joint in Tucson, Arizona, authorities returned her to her mother in Fresno, California.
This story prompted two Missouri State Representatives, Rep. Larry Crawford (R-California) and Rep. Annie Reinhart (R-Liberty) to research Missouri’s laws regarding the buying and selling of children. What they discovered is that Missouri’s law has a loophole because it does not specifically outlaw the selling of children except for the purposes of adoption.
Current Missouri law prohibits the “trafficking in children…for purposes of adoption.” Selling a child for adoption is a Class C felony which carries a maximum prison term of ten years. Because it was too late in the 1998 legislative session to introduce new legislation, Representatives Crawford and Reinhart introduced HB 362 in January 1999. HB 362 would have made it a Class B felony to buy or sell, or attempt to buy or sell, any person less than 18 years of age. A Class B felony carries a penalty of between 10 and 20 years in prison. The bill
was referred to the House Critical Issues Committee and, after several requests, was finally given a hearing. However, the chairman of the Committee expressed his opinion that HB 362 was unnecessary and the selling of children was already covered under current law.
As a result, the bill died in committee and was never referred to the full House for debate and consideration.
On August 13, 1999, the Kansas City Star reported that a Ray County woman sold her nine-month-old daughter to raise bail money for a former boyfriend. Associate Circuit Judge David Busch threw out the child-trafficking charge on the grounds that the Ray County Prosecutor failed to show probable cause that the sale of the baby was permanent or for the purposes of adoption. This situation slipped through the loophole in Missouri law.
After the article in the Kansas City Star, three Democratic State Represenatives are now saying that legislators need to reexamine Missouri’s laws on child trafficking and close any loopholes to protect children. If partisanship hadn’t interfered with HB 362 in the 1999 legislative session and the bill had been passed, the loophole would have already been closed.