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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Utah moved a step closer to raising sentencing minimums for first-degree felony murder Thursday as the House gave the proposal overwhelming support.
"Lori's Law" would raise the sentencing range for murder from five-to-life to 15 years-to-life. The bill is named for Lori Hacking, a Salt Lake City woman shot and killed by her husband in 2004. Mark Hacking is now serving a five-to-life sentence in the Utah State Prison.
House Bill 102 passed 67-0, and now moves to the Senate.
The bill's sponsor, Rep. Lorie Fowlke, R-Orem, said Utah's system of indeterminate sentencing has served the state well. "Very few of these are ever released in less than 20 years," she said.
But she added that's not what a victim's family thinks when they hear judges mete out the five-to-life term under current law.
"(They) believe at the time that there's a chance these people will be out in five years," she said.
Hacking's father, Eraldo Soares, spent much of 2005 urging state prosecutors to change the law.
"I have tried to think of another murder in which circumstances a sentence of five years in prison is enough," Soares told a House committee hearing two weeks ago. "And the answer is none."
Fowlke said changing the law is important because "it helps avoid undermining public confidence in our system."
It also means Utah's Board of Pardons and Parole, which decides how long an offender spends in prison, won't grant parole hearings to convicted murderers for at least 15 years. Last year, the parole board said Mark Hacking, whose crime made national news, won't get a hearing until 2034.
Hacking initially told police his wife of five years had gone jogging in a city park and never returned. His televised pleas for her return launched a massive search of the park and surrounding areas by 4,000 volunteers.
Nine months later, Mark Hacking pleaded guilty to murder, admitting that he shot Lori in the head as she slept after they argued because she had discovered he had lied about his acceptance to medical school. Mark Hacking left her body in a University of Utah trash bin. Her remains were recovered three months later in a Salt Lake County landfill.
HB 102 also allows state judges and the parole board to consider a trust relationship between a victim and an offender, such as a marriage, as an aggravating factor in sentencing or when considering parole.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
