BILLY'S LAW

February 23, 2010

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia:  Madam Speaker, the Help Find the Missing Act, or Billy's Law, will help families of missing persons find their loved ones by strengthening Federal databases about missing persons and unidentified remains.

Every year, tens of thousands of Americans go missing and are never found. In the subcommittee we heard moving testimony from Ms. Janice Smolinski, whose son, Billy, went missing in 2004. While she has not found her son, she has dedicated her life to improving the system for others, including highlighting the need to strengthen and expand access to our missing persons databases. I thank her for her dedication to this worthy cause.

Billy's Law will facilitate the sharing of information between the FBI's NCIC databases and the NamUs databases recently established by the National Institute of Justice. Facilitating information-sharing between those two databases will assist the public, medical examiners, and coroners in looking for missing persons and identifying remains.

Billy's Law also authorizes grants for personnel, technology, and training to help States submit data to NCIC and NamUs. These grants will strengthen the system by providing an incentive for States to provide critical information to the databases shortly after missing person cases are reported.

This bill is strongly supported by the Department of Justice. And I would like to commend our colleagues, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Murphy) and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe), for their hard work on this piece of legislation.

I strongly urge my colleagues to support H.R. 3695.