Ohio Senate Ready To Pass Anti-Terrorism Bill
Full Senate Expected To Vote Later Wednesday

Associated Press | March 9, 2005

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Lawmakers say an anti-terrorism bill beefs up the state's ability to respond to terrorism while civil liberties groups worry it goes too far.

The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved legislation Wednesday that for the first time would allow Ohioans to be arrested for not telling police officers their name, address and age. The full Senate was scheduled to vote on it later in the day.

The constitutionality of such laws was upheld last year by the U.S. Supreme Court, which said people who refuse to give their names to police can be arrested, even if they've done nothing wrong.

Under current law, police could arrest someone if they suspected the person had committed a crime, but they couldn't force the person to identify himself.

"This bill would for the first time say, 'You can, because the Supreme Court said you can,"' said the bill's sponsor, Sen. Jeff Jacobson, a Dayton-area Republican.

The bill would also place new limits on the state open records law by prohibiting public disclosure of assessments of security risks by chemical companies and other "critical infrastructure facilities."

In addition, prosecutors and judges would be required to inform the federal government if a person convicted of a crime is also an illegal alien. And villages, cities and other municipalities would be banned from passing laws that hinder state or federal investigations into terrorism.

The ACLU said Wednesday that provisions of the bill wrongly link terrorism with immigrants.

"Equating immigrants and aliens with terrorists -- that's a dangerous thing to do," said Jeffrey Gamso, legal director for the ACLU of Ohio. "It effectively writes discrimination into the laws of Ohio."

Jacobson defended the inclusion of some issues involving immigrants.

"The issue has been around for a while that the INS did not do a good job of dealing with non-citizen felons," Jacobson said. "After 9-11, the issue gained more salience and it is a problem."

The bill improves the state's ability to help find terrorists and stop the flow of money to terrorist causes, Jacobson said.

"I do not feel in any way, shape or form it violates civil liberties or pushes the envelope too far," Jacobson said Tuesday.

The Ohio chapter of the American Civil Liberties called the bill an unnecessary expansion of police powers.

Like the federal Patriot Act, the bill "effects a needless expansion of wide-ranging police powers which threatens the very rights and freedoms that we are struggling to protect," Gamso told lawmakers last month.

The bill creates a new misdemeanor crime that allows police to arrest individuals for not identifying themselves if police believe the person committed a crime or witnessed one. The crime carries a punishment of up to one month in jail.

A former version of the bill required people to identify themselves to police if they were stopped at "terrorist sensitive sites." The version of the bill to be voted on Wednesday narrows that to "critical transportation" sites such as airports, train stations or ports.

Identification would be required only if police were stopping everyone at the site, along the same lines as a drunken driving checkpoint.

The new version of the bill also narrows the list of questions that applicants for certain state licenses must answer regarding any potential connections to terrorist groups.

The latest version of the bill contains several improvements, including a provision that makes clear that police officers can help federal agents respond to terrorist acts, said Sen. Marc Dann of Youngstown, the Senate Judicary Committee's top-ranking Democrat.

"I'm not sure that the case has been made that there's a compelling need for the bill," he said Tuesday. "But there are some individual aspects that will help law enforcement that may be enough to get me to vote for the bill."

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