Opinion ID: 1110277
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Kansas Act

Text: We begin our analysis with a brief discussion of the legislative history of the Ryce Act, which appears to have been largely based on Kansas's similar statutory scheme allowing for the continued civil commitment of certain sexual offenders even after they have served criminal sentences for their crimes. [2] The Florida Legislature first passed the Ryce Act in 1998. [3] The final staff analysis on the house version of the Jimmy Ryce bill referred to the strict procedural safeguards provided in the Kansas act and made numerous comparisons to provisions in the Kansas act. See Fla. H.R. Comm. on Fam. Law & Child., CS for HB 3327 (1998) Staff Analysis 9 (final May 26, 1998). Kansas's act was used as a model in part because the United States Supreme Court had upheld Kansas's act in Kansas v. Hendricks, 521 U.S. 346, 117 S.Ct. 2072, 138 L.Ed.2d 501 (1997). [4] In Westerheide v. State, 767 So.2d 637, 645 (Fla. 5th DCA 2000), approved, 831 So.2d 93 (Fla.2002), for example, the Fifth District concluded that the Florida Legislature intended to establish a civil proceeding substantially similar to the Kansas Act scrutinized by the court in Hendricks. The State contends that the Ryce Act was based on statutes from a number of different states and not just Kansas. However, our review of the available legislative history confirms that the Florida Legislature was intending to substantially pattern the Ryce Act after the Kansas act. [5] Both the Florida House of Representatives and the Senate developed several versions of bills that influenced the final version of the Ryce Act. Initially, the trial time-limit provision in the Florida House's version of the bill was similar to the Kansas act, except for the actual time period for trial, which was forty-five days. See Fla. HB 3327 § 7 (1997) (first engrossed version of bill). The Senate's initial version of the bill was also similar, but it used the Kansas act's sixty-day time limit. See Fla. SB 646 (1997) (initial bill introduced to committees). Although there is nothing in the legislative history indicating that the precise number of days allowed for trial was based on Kansas's act, it is clear that the Kansas act was the model for the language of the provision where the time limit for trial appears. For example, the Bill Research and Economic Impact Statement for House Bill 3327 dated February 27, 1998, states that section 916.35 would require the court to conduct a trial within forty-five days after filing the petition and notes that the provision for trial is [i]dentical to Kansas, except for the timeframe. On April 23, 1998, on the Senate floor Senators Klein and Gutman offered a number of amendments to the Senate bill, one of which changed the time limit for trial to thirty days. See Fla. S. Jour. 841 (Reg.Sess. 1998). In explaining the amendment, Senator Klein stated: This amendment provides that the trial shall be shortly after the adversarial or non-adversarial probable cause hearing. Again our goal here is to make sure we compress the time and make sure that the court responds promptly so that all this can take place within six months prior to the point in time in which the person is scheduled to be released from the Department of Corrections. Fla. S. tape recording of proceedings (April 23, 1998) (floor debate) (emphasis supplied). From Senator Klein's explanation, it appears that the thirty-day time limit was adopted in order to promptly resolve the detention issue and so that the entire commitment proceeding would be concluded before the alleged predator was scheduled to be released. This was no doubt influenced by the desire to avoid situations like the instant case where a defendant's incarcerative sentence has expired and he would ordinarily be entitled to immediate release. We conclude that because both the Kansas and Florida Legislatures were concerned about the patent constitutional issues implicit in any scheme of involuntary and indefinite detention to be imposed in addition to specific criminal penalties imposed for the same underlying conduct, it is apparent that they sought to counter those concerns and temper the drastic effects of the indefinite detention scheme by the imposition of rigid time constraints set out in explicit language in the acts. Importantly, the Kansas courts have found the sixty-day time provision of the Kansas act to be both mandatory and jurisdictional. See In re Brown, 26 Kan.App.2d 117, 978 P.2d 300, 303 (1999).