Gov. Matt Meyer continues his marathon of summer bill signings with six pieces of legislation from the House and four from the Senate, all of which make various changes to Delaware’s criminal justice and public safety system.
“Each of these laws remind us that public safety is not just about punishment, it's about protecting rights, it's about saving lives, it's about strengthening trust between people and their government and protecting those who have been victims and families of victims of violent crime," Gov. Meyer said in his opening remarks Wednesday.
House Bill 36 and House Bill 37 updates Delaware Code to make sure all protected classes, like race, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity, are included in non-discrimination provisions.
"We wanted to make it clear that all [classes] are protected. And we also wanted to prevent any lawsuits that could come against the state of Delaware because the law wasn't especially clear. For HB 37, what that does is it says that any programs or entities that receive state funding or are supervised by the state that they have to abide by the same non-discrimination rules as do private businesses," State Rep. Eric Morrison (D-Glasgow) explained.
House Bill 54, also sponsored by Rep. Morrison, establishes an Office of Suicide Prevention in Delaware, making it the last state to have a state-level resource regarding suicide awareness and prevention.
"We're going to centralize all the different resources we have in this state because when you are suicidal, or when a loved one you know is suicidal, the last thing you want to be doing, or have the capacity to do, is to make a million phone calls or jog through a lot of red tape," Rep. Morrison explains.
He says the next step is hiring a director of the office who will spearhead coordination efforts and secure additional funding so the office can expand and hire more staff in the future.
"We are going to quickly identify someone to run this Office of Suicide Prevention. We're going to move forward with intentionality to make sure that we're doing everything we can to save lives," Gov. Meyer said.
The bill does not directly outline a timeline for a director to be hired, but it does require the office to deliver a State Suicide Prevention Plan on or before Jan. 1, 2026.
Gov. Matt Meyer says he expects the newly established Office of Gun Violence and Community Safety to work in close collaboration with the new Office of Suicide Prevention.
House Bill 129 now guarantees that a child has a right to appeal a case transfer decision to the Delaware Supreme Court within 30 days of sentencing.
"For too long, if a child's case was transferred out of Family Court and into Superior Court, there was really no meaningful opportunity to appeal the decision until the case was fully adjudicated. That meant young people could face adult penalties without ever having their right to appeal recognized, and with Delaware's minimum mandatories, this is often very problematic," State Rep. Cyndi Romer (D-Newark) explained.
House Bill 154 provides immunity to nonprofit organizations who distribute new secure gun storage and safety devices to individuals, so long as the devices are distributed in their original packaging and are unopened.
"The reason this bill is important is because we know that one of the ways to make sure that guns are only in the hands of the people who should have them, which is to say, not children, not people with suicidal ideation, is to store them responsibly, and this gives us one more tool in the toolbox of making sure that that happens," State Rep. Mara Gorman (D-Newark) said. "It encourages nonprofit organizations, it encourages physicians offices to make sure that homes where we know there are guns in the home also have secure storage devices."
House Bill 220 requires a peace officer to consider issuing a juvenile civil citation to a qualified juvenile offender who would otherwise be charged only with specified criminal offenses.
A qualified juvenile must have no prior adjudication of delinquency and must not have received a prior referral to the Juvenile Offender Civil Citation or any other diversion program unless more than one year has elapsed since the prior referral.
A juvenile civil citation could be issued in lieu of a criminal charge for offenses like graffiti, trespassing, shoplifting or disorderly conduct.
State Rep. Deb Heffernan (D-Bellefonte) sponsored the legislation and codified the Juvenile Offender Civil Citation program nine years ago.
"What civil citation does is that for kids or youth under 18, for many misdemeanors that are not violent, they can do this other program which keeps them out of the system. So kids are held accountable, and they do their their work to be held accountable, but they do not get in the system, and this civil citation program has over a 90% success rate with very low recidivism," Rep. Heffernan explained.
She says that this new law ensures that for these certain misdemeanors, civil citations will be considered first.
Senate Bill 17 updates Delaware's Victims' Bill of Rights, which had not been comprehensively reviewed since its inception in 1992.
The legislation makes various changes based off of the recommendations from the Victims’ Bill of Rights Committee, but in summary, the updates expand access to support services, improve how victims more easily receive information and create and strengthen processes and protections throughout the state's justice system.
Senate Bill 73 updates language around lethal violence protection orders, while Senate Bill 82 extends the ability for lethal violence protection orders to be in place for up to five years instead of one.
These orders are issued by the Justice of the Peace or Superior Court and prohibit a person from possessing a firearm.
SB 82 is championed by State Sen. Minority Whip Tizzy Lockman (D-Wilmington), who also spearheaded Delaware’s Permit-to-Purchase bill, which passed in 2024 and requires an eligible gun owner to first complete an approved firearm training course.
“Because of this work that we've been doing, we are seeing great progress here in our state. I represent the city of Wilmington. Shootings are at a six-year low. Violent crime is down. Delaware is currently among states with lower gun death rates in the country right now. We're becoming a true leader thanks to the investment of years of legislative work that's been done," she said.
Finally, Senate Bill 139 codifies and changes how Delaware preserves DNA evidence, particularly the core sections of Delaware's Sexual Assault Kit (SAK) testing policy, which Rep. Romer says has cleared backlogs of rape cases in the First State since it was adopted in May 2022
The bill requires that for victims under the age of 18 at the time of the alleged offense, biological samples from an unsolved sexual assault case may not be destroyed or disposed before the victim is 40 years of age.
"I think we all know that it can take decades and decades for children to come to terms with what has happened to them, to reconcile what has happened to them, and to potentially face their accuser. And what this bill does is it allows that evidence to be preserved, so that if they do decide to take their perpetrator to court, that that evidence has been preserved," Rep. Romer said.
All of the legislation signed had some level, if not unanimous bipartisan support in the Delaware General Assembly.
