UPDATED: 1:09 a.m. to
include information on Senate passage of the bill.
MADISON, Wis. – The Legislature passed two noteworthy
bills on Wednesday.
The Senate, in a rare burst of bipartisanship,
unanimously agreed there ought to be criminal consequences for creeps who shoot
“upskirt” photos and videos of unsuspecting women in public
places.
But a
bill that would put a stop to predawn, paramilitary-style raids on the
homes of citizens suspected of campaign finance violations received a cold
reception from Democrats.
“This happened in America,” state Rep. Joe Sanfelippo,
R-New Berlin, said of the raids during heated floor debate in the Assembly that
featured plenty of hyperbole – or hyper-bul, as Milwaukee Democrat Christine
Sinicki repeatedly pronounced the word.
“This bill is about people being terrorized in their own
home,” Sanfelippo added.
But the raids on
conservative targets and their families, people who were not charged with
any wrongdoing in the lengthy probe, seemed superfluous to Assembly Democrats.
The Republican-led measure passed in both the Assembly and
Senate with unified opposition from Democrat lawmakers.
The minority party attempted to paint the bill as a free
ride for politicians because the proposal gets Wisconsin’s controversial John
Doe procedure out of the partisan business of political crime investigations.
“There’s a reason we call it the Corrupt Politician
Protection Act,” said state Rep. Gary Hebl, D-Sun Prairie, repeating an erroneous and, as
Assembly Speaker Robin
Vos described it, hyperbolic narrative.
The bill’s co-author, state Rep. Dave Craig, R-Town
of Vernon, said bribery and other political crimes will still be investigated,
but through other means than a John Doe law that demands secrecy of targets and
threatens them with imprisonment if they violate the procedure’s gag orders.
Under Assembly Bill 68, targets and witnesses in a John Doe
investigation would no longer be bound by such secrecy, although prosecutors
and judges would.
The measure limits the use of John Doe probes to serious
felonies and abuse of public trust by law enforcement officials. It sets time
limits on investigations, allowing extensions with the approval of a panel of
Wisconsin’s chief judges. And prosecutors would have to provide a general
summary of the costs.
The Senate passed the same version early Wednesday
morning along party lines after a lengthy delay.
“Today, the State of Wisconsin moved one step closer to
end secret, unconstitutional, and open-ended investigations using the John Doe
process,” state Sen. Tom Tiffany, R-Hazelhurst, who labored for months
alongside Craig to keep the bills on track, said in a statement following the
Senate’s post-midnight passage.
Investigators in the political John Doe,
launched in August 2012 by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, a
Democrat, have yet to disclose the full tally of a probe estimated to be in the
millions of dollars. Nor has the state Government Accountability Board, the state’s political
speech regulator that worked closely with Chisholm and his assistants.
The GAB doesn’t have to disclose those costs under a
confidentiality provision woven into state law.
Craig and the proposal’s supporters said the high profile
political John Doe investigation was just one of 195 such probes around the
state last year – many of them secret, all of them subject to abuse.
While the minority party sees the reform legislation as
Republicans protecting their own, the bill has the backing of Attorney General Brad Schimel, a
Republican, and the state Public Defender’s Office, certainly not known for its
conservative ideals.
Vos told his colleagues on the other side of the aisle
that they too would support the bill if they could only shed their “Walker
Derangement Syndrome.”
The left’s charge is that, because Gov. Scott Walker’s
campaign was targeted in the John Doe probe, the legislation is all about
protecting the Republican from similar investigations moving forward.
But critics of the political John Doe note that dozens of
conservatives were also targeted, and their only “crime” was their political
point of view and their engagement in politics. Several courts have ruled that
the prosecutors showed no probable cause of wrongdoing, including the state
Supreme Court, which ruled the investigation was unconstitutional and ordered
it shut down.
“Is it fair to raid someone’s home and not allow them to
even call a lawyer? … That’s what you want to stand up for,” Vos, R-Rochester
said. The John Doe law, as it stands, “allows for unconstitutional
investigations, it curbs free speech and is ripe for abuse.”
State Rep. Fred Kessler,
D-Milwaukee, was apoplectic on the point of the predawn raids. He had no time
for accounts of a 16-year-old boy who was at home alone when armed law
enforcement raided his home, rooted through his family’s possessions and told
him he could not contact his parents, grandfather or an attorney.
“That’s how warrants are executed all over,” Kessler said
of the Oct. 3, 2013, raids. Kessler, a former Milwaukee County judge, said the
element of surprise is critical when dealing with individuals accused of a
crime.
State Rep. Jim Ott, R-Mequon, agreed that the search warrants in the
political John Doe probe were “properly executed.”
“They were properly executed if you were investigating a
murderer or a rapist or a child trafficker,” he said. “What we are saying is,
it is not proper to invade people’s home for, what? Because you suspect they
might be involved in a campaign finance crime?”
“Can you imagine if your homes were invaded with a search
warrant in the middle of the night?”
Perhaps the Democrats cannot. The political John Doe
investigation, it appears, did not target any groups or politicians on the
left, even though liberal organizations and lawmakers are suspected of being
engaged in the same kinds of coordination acts that prosecutors incorrectly had
deemed illegal.
The bipartisan bill that ends a legal loophole and criminalizes
“upskirting” now heads to the governor’s desk.
The bill to reform Wisconsin’s ancient John Doe law
passed the Assembly along party lines.
Craig called Tuesday a “great day” for the First
Amendment in Wisconsin.
“No longer will witnesses before John Doe proceedings be
unable to discuss events with their friends and family members as investigators
indefinitely look into the most intimate aspects of their lives,” Craig said in
a statement.
Tiffany added that it’s the Legislature’s job to “protect
the rights of citizens against abusive prosecutors, and the John Doe Reform
Bill works to preserve those rights to the fullest extent.”
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