Legislators compromise on child abuse, mobile home bills

Jennifer Coleman

Friday, May 28, 1999 | 9:39 a.m.

CARSON CITY - Family members of a child abuser would be exempt from jail terms for not reporting the crime under a compromise reached on Nevada's proposed "Sherrice Iverson" bill.

The only exception to the compromise, reached Thursday, would be cases in which one of the parents is the abuser. Then the other parent must report any knowledge of the crime.

Anyone elsecould be penalized for failing to tell police after learning that a child is being violently or sexually abused. AB267 would impose six-month jail terms on anyone 18 or older who fails to alert officers.

The bill authored by Assemblyman Richard Perkins, D-Henderson, was prompted by the reported unwillingness of David Cash to do anything when he witnessed 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson being brutalized in a bathroom stall at the Primm Valley hotel in May 1997.

Cash's friend, Jeremy Strohmeyer, got a no-parole life prison term last year for raping and killing Sherrice.

But Cash, now a student at the University of California, Berkeley, couldn't be charged under current Nevada law.

Assemblywoman Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, said there were philosophical differences between the Senate and Assembly on the family exemption.

Sen. Maurice Washington, R-Sparks, said requiring families to turn each other in would tear families apart.

"You'd be turning family members against each other, you're pitting them against each other," Washington said.

"Seems to me you're saving them from each other," countered Assemblyman John Carpenter, R-Elko. "The family members should have the biggest burden to report."

Washington argued that common sense will eventually prevail if a family member knows a child is being abused.

"I'm not willing to go on the assumption that eventually somebody's going to do the right thing because they've worked out all their emotional stress," said Assemblyman Bernie Anderson.

Sen. Mark James, R-Las Vegas, said the bill wasn't designed to deal with the family situation, but to extend Nevada's Good Samaritan law.

"I don't want to make criminals of families because they didn't report," he said, adding that the situation within a family is too complex and too different from other situations.

Results of other conference committees included:

-An agreement on AB477, which would require landlords of mobile home parks to clear snow and otherwise maintain the park.

-Assembly conferees discussing a proposed ban on traffic cameras at intersections want to add an amendment that prohibits children from riding in the back of pickup trucks. The amendment mirrors AB157, by Assemblywoman Ellen Koivisto, D-Las Vegas, which failed in the Senate.