California Senate Panel Rejects Sex Offender Candidate Ban After Divisive Hearing

A California Senate committee voted Tuesday to kill a bill that would have barred registered sex offenders from running for or holding elected office, while advancing a narrower measure that excludes certain offenses involving minors—including some convictions for sexual penetration—from disqualifying a candidate.

The background of the bill is a local issue for Soria. Rene Campos, a Fresno man who pleaded no contest in 2018 to possessing child sexual abuse material, twice tried to run for Fresno City Council this year, and is classified as a tier one registered sex offender. During his campaign, he held a news conference across the street from Big Picture Elementary School, prompting the school to file a police report against him, according to the Fresno Bee. He failed both times to collect enough signatures to appear on the ballot, but his candidacy drew condemnation from Fresno city leaders and became the reason Soria wrote the bill.

The bill had bipartisan support through the Assembly, passing the Assembly Elections Committee 7-0 in April and clearing the full Assembly 60-0 on May 7. A Senate analysis raised concerns that its disqualification was permanent even for people later removed from the registry, and suggested narrowing it to cover only tier three, or lifetime, registrants. The cities of Fresno and Calimesa supported the bill as written. The League of Women Voters of California and Smart Justice California opposed it.

Soria refused to accept amendments she said would gut the bill. “I was not willing to make additional amendments to this bill,” she said in a statement. “I made a promise to my community that I would do everything in my power to ensure they would never have to go through something like this again.” She told reporters after the vote she plans to reintroduce the measure next year. Fresno City Council President Nelson Esparza called the committee’s rejection “a gut punch” for the city.

Wiener has said his objection is to the scope of the sex offender registry itself, which he has called overly broad, and that he favors restricting candidacy bans to tier three registrants rather than everyone on the list. He is the author of a 2020 law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, that gave judges discretion to exempt certain people convicted of sex offenses against minors from mandatory registration, a law he said was necessary because the prior statute discriminated against gay men.

In the same hearing, the committee advanced a separate bill, Assembly Bill 2691 by Assemblywoman Dawn Addis, D-San Luis Obispo, that bars people convicted of specific sexual assault and human trafficking felonies from holding office. Before the vote, the committee adopted amendments requested by Wiener that narrowed the bill’s definition of disqualifying “sexual assault” to exclude sodomy, oral copulation and sexual penetration committed against minors under certain conditions, meaning people convicted of those specific offenses against children would remain eligible to run for office under Addis’s bill even though Soria’s broader ban had just failed. Addis characterized the change as necessary to avoid what she called “Romeo and Juliet kinds of situations,” though the exemption as written applies to convictions for those acts against minors, not merely age-gap relationships between minors themselves.

The amendment drew immediate pushback at the hearing. Greg Burt, vice president of the California Family Council, told the committee he initially assumed he had misread the bill. “We sat in our office and tried to imagine how anyone could stand up and defend it,” he said.

Soria represents California’s 27th Assembly District, covering parts of Fresno, Madera and Merced counties.