Committee hears proposal to raise penalties and streamline counts for child sexual imagery offenses

Senator Mary Delaney James told the committee SB 221 increases penalties when victims are particularly young and adds higher punishments for cases with enormous image volumes. The bill would also permit prosecutors to batch counts when terabytes of images make individual counts impractical.

Sponsors argued prosecutors are routinely encountering cases with hundreds of thousands of images and that charging each element individually is impractical; the bill would allow representative counts in initial pleadings while preserving discovery and defense rights. Supporters framed the measure as an alignment with federal law and an effort to treat the crimes as the severe harms they are.

The committee asked about batching thresholds and how defense counsel would get discovery on specific files; sponsors said batching is limited to initial pleadings and does not foreclose full evidentiary review later in the process. No vote was taken at the hearing.