An at-large member of the Nashville, Tennessee, Metro Council had a rather draconian suggestion last week for what punishment should be meted out to someone who eschews wearing a mask and transmits the coronavirus to someone else: try them for murder.
At a Metro Council committee meeting on Aug. 5, Sharon Hurt, an at-large member of the Nashville Metro Council, asked Mike Jameson, Nashville Mayor John Cooper’s director of legislative affairs and a senior adviser, “My question goes back to legislation. I don’t know if Mike Jameson could be the one to answer the question, but my concern is – you know I work for an organization, that if they pass a virus, then they are tried for murder, or attempted murder, if they are not told, and this person who may very well pass this virus that’s out in the air because they’re not wearing a mask is basically doing the same thing to someone who contracts it and dies from it.”
“It seems to me that we have been more reactive, as opposed to proactive, and a little too late, too little,” she continued. “So, my thing is, maybe there should be legislation, stronger legislation. I don’t know if Mike Jameson is, is, can speak to it, but maybe there needs to be stronger legislation to say that if you do not wear a mask and you subject exposure of this virus to someone else then there will be some stronger penalty as it is in other viruses that are exposed.”
“The officers do have the discretion if they encounter someone who is flagrantly violating the mask ordinance to take the conduct of that individual at hand and issue other citations or other criminal violations, including, for example, disorderly conduct or even potentially assault,” Jameson replied. “You may have read the efforts where there was allegedly unintentional coughings of someone into the face of another. The restraint we have, the council does not have the opportunity on its own to create criminal legislation, that is a state creature. We’re warranted by state law, to apply criminal application to violations, just for example, as the state law allows us to apply a Class E misdemeanor to violate a health director violation. But, in terms of creating a new code, or class of criminal offenses, that is a creature of state law.”
“No, I was afraid that was going to be the answer,” Hurt said, “but I guess that’s the whole point of asking for something to be done as early as the council was pushing you know, it was not – it seems – that it wasn’t taken as seriously as it should have been, and thus we are in the situation that we’re in right now.”
The Nashville Voice reported in October 2019, “Hurt is also executive director of Street Works, an organization that was the first in Tennessee to be approved to lead a needle exchange program and has been a leader in the Nashville community on ending the epidemic of AIDS/HIV.”
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