Tim Scott: “I too have compassion for Aimee. Her tragedy reminds us that we need to do all we can to prevent situations like this…”

“I too have compassion for Aimee. Her tragedy reminds us that we need to do all we can to prevent situations like this from happening in the future. However, this bill does not do that, and that is why I rise in opposition to the bill. The bill provides that if certain convicts are released from one State and then go to another State and commit certain crimes, that the first State will have to pay the second State's costs associated with that crime. But, if the State has adopted one of numerous truth-in-sentencing schemes, then they do not have to pay. Well, Mr. Speaker, no one seriously thinks that the payments by the State would deter a murderer from committing an additional crime, and no one can honestly believe that the incentives in the bill will provoke a State into adopting a truth in sentencing scheme, because the costs associated with the crime are measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and worse, and some of these sentencing schemes, when Virginia adopted Truth in Sentencing, it cost billions, not hundreds of thousands, not millions; billions. So that no State is going to implement this program because of this bill.”