Bill will add additional steps when law enforcement serves protection orders - WSMV 4

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) - New legislation could help better protect people that already want law enforcement to keep them safe from potentially dangerous people in their lives.

HB2533, sponsored by Rep. Bob Ramsey, R-Maryville, will require some law enforcement to take additional steps before or during serving an order of protection to a person. Ramsey said there is nothing in the state requiring that a sheriff or deputy check for outstanding criminal warrants of a person they’re serving a summon or order of protection and his bill changes that.

“My general sort of question is that when the sheriff’s office is serving orders of protection, and they aren’t checking for warrants, how many other individuals have slipped through the cracks there,” Alex Youn said. Youn is a family member of two women who were murdered in Middle Tennessee last year by a man who had an outstanding criminal warrant.

Youn knows firsthand what kind of difference HB2533 can make.

“I wanted to make sure that no one, no family, had to endure what we had to go through,” Youn said as he emotionally testified in front of a House committee about the bill.

Youn’s sister Marie Varsos and his mother Deborah Sisco were murdered in April 2021 by his brother-in-law. The women were killed a few weeks after Youn said his brother-in-law walked in a sheriff’s office to accept an order of protection and walked out the sheriff’s office without anyone checking for his brother-in-law’s outstanding criminal warrants.

“It was really troubling to me,” Youn said. “For me, that is something where law enforcement could have intervened earlier to not only restrain him and potentially intervened a little bit earlier to sort of inoculate the situation, but he actually left that office feeling more empowered and felt like anything he had done wrong really didn’t matter.”

Ramsey hopes his bill addresses the missing link.

“These two ladies did everything that they were required to do. The system just failed,” Ramsey said. “There is nothing requiring that in the state and the person that serve the warrant was within, I suppose, their scope of ability and responsibility, which we need to change that. We need to change that we need to make them responsible to check for those outstanding warrants.”

In Ramsey’s bill, it requires a sheriff or deputy sheriff, before or at the time of serving an order of protection, to make reasonable efforts to determine whether the person being served has an outstanding criminal warrant.

If there is an outstanding criminal warrant, the sheriff or sheriff deputy should either serve the criminal warrant and keep the person for recommended 12 hours or notify the agency holding the warrant of the person’s location.

“It’s not rocket science. It’s out there and it’s available, and I think the emphasis is put on you will make these preparations and check the potential for outstanding warrants,” Ramsey said.

“My mother was very much someone who didn’t like the light shined on her. She always cared about others. She was a community leader and was always about building people up,” Youn said. “My sister, she was very shy, very athletic, very smart. She was a pharmacist for Walgreens and had her doctoral degree. She volunteered her time to give COVID vaccines to the elderly. She had a quick with it personality.”

Ramsey said there are four bills, including his, going through the legislature to address the loopholes related to domestic violence.

“That has initiated four bills to try to correct the system that failed these people, and I’m just proud to have one of those bills,” Ramsey said. “That’s what these four are about. These are just pitfalls that nobody really anticipated in the process when people try to go through an adequate process and try to do what they’re supposed to do and fall through the cracks.”

“These bills that are before the state legislature right now aren’t going to bring my sister back, but I am hopeful that they might prevent other individuals from doing harm to other family members like my mother and sister,” Youn said. “I think at the end of the day, my brother-in-law was going to kill my sister no matter what. I think that the number of loopholes that we have found since their passing, if they are addressed through the state legislature, I think they are a combination, I think they could allow my mother and sister to still be here today.”

The bill has bipartisan support.

Ramsey said the bill is headed to the Calendar and Rules Committee by the end of March and is expected to be on the House floor for a vote early in April. A version of the bill passed the Senate by a vote of 32-0.

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source: https://www.wsmv.com/2022/03/23/bill-will-add-additional-steps-when-law-enforcement-serves-protection-orders/

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