Tom Feeney is Protecting Children from Predators

I believe the sexual exploitation of children is one of the most vicious crimes conceivable, a violation of mankind's most basic duty to protect the innocent.

Last year, Congress passed the Children's Safety Act to help protect children from the perpetrators of these vile crimes by strengthening notification requirements for sex offenders and increasing criminal penalties. 

In 2003, I joined President Bush in the Rose Garden at the White House to watch him sign the PROTECT Act into law.  This legislation was designed to protect children from sexual predators while strengthening law enforcement’s ability to keep these criminals off the street.  The PROTECT Act implemented a national Amber Alert communication system, provided judges the discretion to extend the term for supervision of released sex offenders to up to a maximum of life, and extended the statute of limitations for child abductions and sex crimes to the life of the child victim.

A key component of this bill was called the Feeney Amendment which I authored and added to the Child Abduction Prevention Act, a bill which passed the House of Representatives 400 to 25 and the Senate by 98 - 0.   My amendment worked to ensure that those who commit sexual crimes against our nation's children would receive the full and intended punishment prescribed by the federal sentencing guidelines.  Too often, similar crimes have drastically different punishments based simply on a judge's sole discretion or geographic location.

The Feeney Amendment sought to preserve the commission’s ability to consider and promulgate such departure grounds so that courts could apply them uniformly.  Some downward departure practices, based upon the whim of individual judges, threatened to return federal criminal sentencing to the rampant disparity which existed prior to the implementation of the guidelines.  The Feeney Amendment restored that original congressional intent and was long overdue.

I am also:

• Fighting to hold liberal judges accountable for being unreasonably lenient on sex offenders.
• Supporting the Children Protection and Safety Act to create a public national sex offender registry and make it a felony to fail to register and update data.
• A cosponsor of the Internet Safety Act and the Kids Act to crack down on child pornography.