UNDATED (WSAU) — Governor Scott Walker announced a partial veto of a sexually violent persons or SVP bill that was authored by Senator Patrick Testin and Representative Scott Krug. State Representative Katrina Shankland has also been working closing with SVP legislation after many SVPs have been placed in her district in Portage County.
Rep. Shankland says ideally she would like to see SVPs placed near the jail in whatever county they commit their crime in.
“The response time would be very low,” said Shankland. “The additional enforcement and monitoring would be very low.”
State Representative Scott Krug of Nekoosa says he’s disappointed that the governor vetoed a portion Assembly Bill 539, but some of the principles were left in place.
“The main reason we did the bill was to make sure that individual counties dealt with their own offenders upon release. That stays in the bill. That became law (Wednesday) morning,” he said.
Krug also disagrees with the Governor about what was vetoed, saying local authorities would not be apt to place offenders near churches or nursing homes.
“I don’t think that anybody in those county’s committees would’ve done anything like that,” Krug said. “It’s his decision to make sure it’s plain and black and white, but I don’t think it would’ve happened either way.”
Rep. Shankland went on to say she’s concerned that a court could find the whole SVP program unconstitutional following the governor’s partial veto.
She said, “Because it would be so hard to meet these conditions since the governor didn’t sign the full bill into law. If a court ever ruled this billed unconstitutional, SVPs would be released without any state supervision, which includes GPS monitoring.”
