Red flag bill splits Maine Democrats, gets narrow approval to move forward to full Legislature

Before she voted in favor of the red flag proposal, Sen. Anne Carney (D-Cumberland) said she thinks the bill would allow family members who are dealing with a crisis to “take the basic step of protecting their loved one.” She also saw the legislation as a potential means for avoiding crisis situations that often end in law enforcement having to use deadly force, drawing on her experience reading multiple reports of such situations.

“I hope that if I ever have a family member or loved one in crisis that I have a mechanism that I can reach out and try to help them without being the inadvertent instigator of an armed conflict that results in my loved one dying,” she said.

While most Democrats on the committee voted in favor, two did not join the rest of their party members on the report. Sen. Donna Bailey (D-York) backed a separate version that stipulated the measure could only be invoked in cases where existing laws did not apply. Rep. Adam Lee (D-Auburn) joined Republicans in opposing the bill.

Before the vote, Lee said that while he isn’t opposed to an extreme risk protection order law that doesn’t tie directly to a person’s mental health status, he didn’t feel like he had enough time to work through how to do it effectively given the timing so close to the end of the session.

While Lee said he thinks connecting the order to mental illness under the yellow flag law is an “imperfect proxy” for dangerousness and praised many of the committee’s amendments, he said it still felt short of what he wanted to see for due process.

“There’s a good amount of daylight between the constitutional minimum for due process and what I think good policy is,” he said.

Rep. Jennifer Poirier (R-Skowhegan) voted to advance another amended version of the bill that struck most of the language and instead turned it into a ban on red flag laws. No other Republicans on the committee who were present for Tuesday’s vote joined her and instead voted to oppose the initial bill.

Poirier said multiple times that she believes the state’s yellow flag law works, making the reform unnecessary. Bailey said she agrees the yellow flag works when law enforcement invokes it, but she is concerned about those situations where the criteria is met but law enforcement are unwilling or unable to invoke it and family members are left with no recourse— which appears to be the case with Robert Card, the Lewiston mass shooter.

Although some members of the public and even select committee members said they believe the red flag bill and other reforms brought forward this session have used the Oct. 25 shooting to advance a political agenda, Rep. Matthew Beck (D-South Portland) said gun safety effort began long before that dark day.

Voting in support of the bill, Beck said people in his district have been asking lawmakers to do more to make them feel safe well before the Lewiston shooting.

“That drum beat has only increased,” he said.