S.C. bill could raise age to bring child abuse charges

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - In South Carolina, to charge someone with homicide by child abuse the victim must be under the age of 11 and some lawmakers want to raise that age to 18.

State Senator for District 1, Oconee and Pickens Counties, Thomas Alexander pre-filed the senate bill that could make the change after a meeting with a group of solicitors.

“Certainly, my hope and desire that we’d have broad bipartisan to address again, what I think is probably oversight. That is, we’ve addressed the laws over the years of making up to 18 being a minor, somehow, this was not included in those updates,” Alexander says.

MORE FROM NEWS 12:

• Access to health care emerges as a top priority in S.C.
• S.C. lawmakers keep a close watch on rising insurance costs

Fourteenth Circuit Solicitor Duffie Stone says the low age requirement directly impacted a case he tried in 2023. Thirteen-year-old Cristina Pangalangan died after her mother and mother’s boyfriend left her in a hot car for hours.

“I think most I think most people would assume that someone [who] is 13 years old is considered a child for the purpose of that statute. So, I don’t think that’s a major shift in the mentality of the people [who] will be serving as the jurors. But what I think you need to understand is what we do as prosecutors. Every day you walk into a courtroom and you explain to a jury, the facts of the case, as well as the law,” Stone says.

Stone says updating the law would allow future cases to explain the facts and charge the perpetrators more accurately more clearly.

“I brought it up thinking that I was the only one who had a case that applied to this, and I found two other solicitors in the room with the 16 that had cases pending similarly,” Stone says.

He hopes to see changes to the law so those cases in the 16th circuit can be tried using the homicide by child abuse facts, as opposed to murder facts, since the first is more accurate for the cases. He recalls his work to get justice for Cristina Pangalangan. Stone spent a lot of time explaining to the jury how egregious neglect meets the standard for malice in a murder. He says, if he had to explain and meet the requirements for homicide by child abuse, the case would have likely taken less time, and been less convoluted.

“And so in that case, we had to try the case as a murder case. And that was particularly complicated because we had to use law from 1957 that would even allow us to do that. That complicated, a relatively simple fact pattern. This was to me a textbook example of homicide by child abuse but in South Carolina, the homicide by child abuse statute is limited to children under the age of eleven. And that’s something that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” Stone says.

Stone says, basically, right now, the law is inaccurately low on the age requirement for victims, and creating unnecessarily complicated charges when a child dies from abuse in the eleven to 18 gap.

Alexander pre-filed the senate bill after a meeting with those solicitors who expressed that they would the bill.

“We want to make sure that law enforcement and solicitors have the appropriate tools in place to address that and hold those able for their actions that are doing harm and unfortunately, death to the children in the state of South Carolina,” Alexander says.

Alexander and Stone agree that this is a crucial law update that makes sense.

“We do have, I think, a responsibility not only [as] legislators but as a society to protect the most vulnerable citizens, our youth. And this is an opportunity for us to make sure that it demonstrates that we’re serious about this. We just need to make sure that our young, most vulnerable population is protected,” Alexander says.

Tommy Pope, Speaker Pro Tem in the state House of Representatives, also prefilled a nearly identical bill in the house. Both bills will be looked at by a judiciary committee in the session.

Copyright 2024 WRDW/WAGT. All rights reserved.