Rep. Anna Paulina Luna wants to take a Florida state law national.
On Thursday, the Clearwater Republican is set to file a bill that would make the death penalty or life in prison the federal minimum sentence for sex fiends who abuse children.
“It is absurd that rapists can get off after a few years of ‘good’ behavior after destroying lives,” Luna said on X last week.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed such a bill last year, giving judges the option of imposing either the death penalty or life in prison to criminals who rape children under age 12. The new state law took effect on Oct. 1.
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“One of my big platforms has been: how do you combat child trafficking, just with everything happening in our country?” Luna told Fox News in an interview.
“And it seems like there’s been this obviously massive issue here in the states with consumption of whether it’s child pornography and/or just attacks really on kids. And in honor of sexual assault prevention month, we actually want to introduce legislation.”
Luna’s bill, dubbed the “No Repeat Child Sex Offenders Act,” would change current federal law that now calls for sex traffickers to be fined or get up to 10 years in prison, or both.
“It’s absurd to me, not only as a new mom, but also if you just look at some of the federal statutes, that there’s not more strict punishments for people that are doing this,” Luna told Fox News.
Luna said she believes child predators cannot be rehabilitated and would only commit new crimes against children once released from prison.
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“I have the firm belief, which I think many of my colleagues also hold, that you can’t rehabilitate a predator,” she said.
“And so we have to increase the federal minimums. And as you see, it’s pretty simple text. It’s maybe a page and a half, but it will increase the federal minimums to death penalty or life in prison.”
“Anyone who is even going to consider exploiting someone like this – and you can’t tell me that they don’t know that these people are trafficked or that they don’t know that that’s a young child – but the fact is, is that, if you’re knowingly doing this, you have to be held accountable,” she said.
I think that this does speak to a deeper issue, in that, whether it’s issues of rape or molestation that, you know, it destroys people’s lives, and it’s something that they carry with them for the rest of the time that they’re adults. And so it can impact people, and we should be thinking of this very seriously,” she told Fox News.
“I think that if you’re really about protecting children… you have to have strict laws. And that’s exactly why we’ve introduced it.”
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