A 2025 Utah Senate bill seeks to introduce minimum punishments for those found guilty of child torture and expand the legal definition of child abuse to include psychological abuse.
The Child Abuse and Torture Amendments bill seeks to create a new criminal offense for child torture, classifying child torture as a first-degree felony that can be punished with mandatory imprisonment of at least ten years to life.
Child torture is defined as when someone intentionally inflicts, or allows another to inflict, a serious injury in an “exceptionally cruel or exceptionally depraved manner that causes the child to experience extreme physical or psychological pain or anguish,” according to the bill.
Utah Senator Don Ipson is set to introduce the bill to the Utah Senate during the 2025 legislative session.
“This bill will make child torture a standalone crime,” Ipson said, "escalating it from a second-degree felony to a first-degree felony and imposing a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years.”
Ipson said court cases like that of Ruby Franke in December of 2023 are what inspired him to sponsor the bill.
“It's appalling the things that have happened statewide and nationally,” Ipson said. “It's just appalling to me that a parent would do that to a child. I just, I can't comprehend that.”
Ipson worked on the bill with an interim committee that included Dr. Antionette Laskey and other attorneys.
Laskey is the medical director of the Utah Children’s Justice Center, which evaluates and provides care for maltreated children.
“One of the problems that my colleagues and I have been seeing in Utah and also around the country,” Laskey said, “is an increase in this type of child maltreatment that is far in excess of anything that we used to consider 'normal.'”
The child torture cases that Laskey said she and her colleagues have seen are not isolated events or one-off offenses but are instead systematic and planned-out patterns of abuse.
“Something is happening that we don't understand,” Laskey said. “This is happening at such a frequency that we need to deal with it.”
The Child Abuse and Torture Amendments will help provide adequate tools for prosecutors to deal with child torture cases, Laskey said.
Washington County Attorney Eric Clarke prosecuted the Ruby Franke case and helped draft the bill as part of the interim committee with Ipson.
Clarke said that one of the most beneficial aspects of the bill is its recommended 10-year minimum for offenders, providing punishment he saw as lacking for cases concerning child torture.
“This law could impact Ruby Franke and Jody Hillebrand,” Clarke said. “Without this lobbying getting passed, I would be surprised if either of them did 10 years in jail or prison, and so we're asking for a minimum mandatory because we think that that should be the starting point of when someone can be considered getting out in 10 years.”
Another beneficial aspect of the bill is its ability to prompt conversation regarding the increased numbers of child torture cases, Clarke said.
“I also think it's important that we have a dialogue,” Clarke said. “We're seeing an increase in this kind of isolating, denying basic things, emotionally, psychologically, beating these kids down. We're seeing an increase of that kind of torture, and we need to be having public conversations to stop it.”
Clarke said he hopes this bill will promote conversations as well as send a message concerning child torture in Utah.
“The reason that we pass laws is to say, 'Here are societal norms,' right?” Clarke said. “Specifically calling something out in law and saying, 'This is not allowed.' That helps send a message.”
Some groups have already provided pushback against the bill and may continue to do so, Clarke said.
“The parental rights advocates want to make sure that we're not writing a law that could be interpreted to catch the normal parenting disciplinary actions of a reasonable parent,” Clarke said. “We're talking to people and working to try to address that, to make sure that we only want to catch torture. We don't want to catch parenting.”
The mandatory 10-year sentence may prompt some pushback as laws with a mandatory sentence take some discretion away from the Board of Pardons regarding when certain prisoners can be released, Clarke added.
“People who otherwise would be staying in for longer periods of time are having to get out," Clarke said. "A minimum-mandatory restricts their ability to do that on a case that they might not feel like is as extreme as other things that have people in prison.”