Two bills involving transparency of investigative and pretrial processes for people accused of crimes were introduced Thursday in the Delaware House of Representatives.

House Bill 360 proposes requiring all interrogations of accused and detained juveniles to be recorded, while the passage of House Bill 356 would require risk-assessment evaluations for people accused of crimes to be tested for bias and publicly transparent.

Both bills, if enacted, would add language to Title 11, the section of Delaware law dealing with crimes and criminal procedure.

Primarily sponsored by Rep. Melissa Minor-Brown, D-New Castle, H.B. 360 would add a chapter to Delaware code mandating recording, with some exceptions, of the entire time a detained child believed to have been involved in illegal activity is being questioned, including the time in which that child is being informed of their rights and in which they might waive those rights.

Law enforcement officers would not be required, based on the language in the bill, to tell a child they're being recorded or to get their permission to do so. However, the interrogation would not have to be recorded if the child indicates they wouldn't participate on electronic record or if there are safety or identification concerns associated with recording.

The bill lays out several specific circumstances that would exempt an interrogation from the proposed law, such as malfunctioning equipment or officers not having probable cause to suspect the person being questioned has committed a crime or delinquent act, but interrogating officers would generally be required to submit a report detailing why they didn't record the interaction and what exempted it from recording.

If H.B. 360 were to become law, Delaware's attorney general would have to implement regulations on how state law enforcement agencies would be required to make, store and review recorded interrogations, as well as the chain of custody for those recordings and administrative sanctions for unjustified noncompliance.

With the proposal of adding several new paragraphs into an existing section of Delaware law, H.B. 356 would regulate which evaluation methods could be used to determine an accused's person's risk of committing a separate offense, failing to appear in court or otherwise not being successful pretrial.

Sponsored by Rep. Stephen Smyk, R-Milton, the bill would define a "risk-assessment instrument" as being a pretrial process that weighs factors to determine the likelihood of that risk, which can then be used to make recommendations on bail or conditions of release.

While the bill doesn't list specific assessments that could be used, it would add a section to the existing law requiring any assessment tools used to have been tested for bias, with no tools being used "until testing for bias has been shown not to increase or magnify bias against a person in a protected class or classes as defined by an empirically recognized standard for testing for such bias, including but not limited to the error rate balance test."

The bill would also add language requiring transparency in those risk-assessment tools, with information on the tools' structures and usage policies open for public inspection, which would prevent builders from using intellectual property protections as protection from being subject to discovery.

If passed into law, H.B. 356 would go into effect immediately, while H.B. 360 would become effective six months after its passage.