Senior Citizens' Poker Game Broken UpIdaho Passes New Law After Public Reaction |
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It seemed too absurd to be true. And after the public ridicule and outcry that followed, Idaho legislators decided it was too absurd to continue.
Approximately 20 elderly residents of the Twin Falls Senior Center in Idaho were told by local police last month that they were breaking the law by playing in their regular $20 poker game and that they had to stop or else they would face prosecution.
The competitors, in their 70s and 80s, didn’t realize that playing poker for money in Idaho was illegal, but they begrudgingly agreed to stop playing for money. They weren’t happy about it.
“I don’t have many things that I can do,” Norman Pohl, a resident who uses a wheelchair, told the Times-News newspaper. “I met so many people…I would look for it every week.”
Residents of the senior center, including 80-year-old Doris Williams, said they have played poker without money since the police came in, but complained that it wasn’t as much fun without anything of value at stake.
In Idaho, illegal gambling is identified as “risking any money, credit, deposit or other thing of value for gain contingent in whole or in part upon lot, chance, the operation of a gambling device or the happening or outcome of an event, including a sporting event, the operation of casino gambling including, but not limited to, blackjack, craps, roulette, poker, bacarrat [baccarat] or keno.”
But even more stringent is that under Idaho law, it was a misdemeanor for a prosecutor if he or she failed to investigate or prosecute a gambling report.
So when authorities in Twin Falls received an anonymous tip that the senior center had been hosting a poker game for the past five years, they were legally obligated to break it up.
Twin Falls County Prosecutor Grant Loebs, perhaps realizing the absurdity of having to investigate and prosecute senior citizens for an innocent poker game, criticized the law on the books.
“It is a misdemeanor crime for a prosecutor to fail to prosecute someone who fills out an NCAA tournament bracket,” said Loebs. “That seems, at best, to be a waste of law enforcement resources.”
The Idaho legislature quickly went to work to amend the archaic law, which dates all the way back to when Idaho was a territory.
State Senator Kate Kelly (D-Boise) sponsored a new measure that while it would not legalize any form of gambling in the state, it would give prosecutors discretion in if and how they investigated and pursued such violations.
Kelly spoke on behalf of the measure to the legislature: “We have elected prosecutors in Idaho, and they make decisions every day about whether or not to pursue a particular defendant or whether or not to pursue a particular act. And I think we can support that rather than exposing them to be subject to a crime for failing to prosecute.”
She said she wasn’t sure why exactly prosecutors weren’t given discretion to determine how to pursue possible gambling violations as they are given discretion for a host of other things, but said that it was “a good idea to remove it from the code, and I hope you agree with me.”
Nearly everyone did, as the measure passed the Idaho Senate 34-1. It had passed through the Idaho House with similar support, by a vote of 69-1.
On March 9, the Spokesman-Review reported that Republican Governor Butch Otter had signed the legislation into law without comment. The legislation will go into effect July 1.
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