News Archive

Senate Bill 12 began life in the Indiana General Assembly with language that named 10 classes of people who would receive extra protection against bias-motivated crimes, including race, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and age. Those classes were removed from the bill during a second reading, with the objecting senators arguing that specificity ran the risk of excluding a class, arguing in favor of generic language. Professor Robert Katz has called the new, stripped-down version vague and vacuous in interviews with Indianapolis television stations WXIN and WTHR.

The latest version of the bill is not only vague, but creates problems for a defendant's due process, Professor Katz said in the WXIN story. “It doesn’t give people who might be prosecuted and punished under the law with advance notice as to what would trigger an aggravated penalty,” he said. Professor Katz also believes that would make it easier to overturn a sentence on appeal. This story also appeared on a Fox News affiliate in Salt Lake City.

Professor Katz was at the Senate committee meeting when the original bill passed.

"I think they took an excellent, solid bill and made it vacuous," he told WTHR for a new story. "It's problematic because we don't know how it's going to be interpreted. You're passing a law with an open-ended term and it gives judges, whose job it is to interpret the term, no guidance to define it. It's a way of kicking the can from the legislature to the judiciary."

Professor Katz is an expert on the law of nonprofit organizations. He teaches courses on the law of nonprofit and healthcare organizations, trusts and estates, the First Amendment, and law and religion. He also serves as co-counsel in civil rights litigation.