NEW LAW WOULD BE TRIBUTE TO SLAIN CHILD.

Byline: EARL O. HUTCHINSON Local View

CALIFORNIA Gov. Gray Davis has a chance to bring closure to one of the most tragic and sordid cases in recent years.

On May 25, 1997, Sherrice Iverson, a 7-year-old African-American girl, was kidnapped, raped and strangled in a bathroom stall at the Primadonna Casino 45 miles south of Las Vegas by Jeremy Strohmeyer, 18, a white high school student from Long Beach.

In August, the California state Legislature passed the Sherrice Iverson bill. The bill would make it a misdemeanor punishable by six months in county jail and/or a $1,500 fine to witness a sexual or violent act against a child and fail to report it to authorities. Davis has until Sept. 30 to sign the bill.

The Sherrice Iverson slaying was a brutally compelling story that tossed public glare on such hot-button issues as child molestation, teen violence, parental neglect and national media insensitivity to the plight of poor victims. It was a story that also had many bizarre twists.

After an initial burst of public rage at the idiocy of Leroy Iverson, the girl's father, for leaving her unattended at a gambling casino in the early morning hours, the case dropped quickly from the radar scope.

This changed in July 1998 with the public disclosure that Strohmeyer's friend David Cash witnessed at least part of the attack on the child and did nothing. He made things worse when he was quoted in a newspaper as saying that he wasn't troubled by her death.

This touched off a furor of protest that included marches, demonstrations and rallies demanding that Cash be prosecuted as an accessory to the murder. The national media finally did begin to pay some attention to the Iverson case only after Iverson's mother publicly demanded that Cash be prosecuted by Nevada authorities.

The killing of Sherrice, though heinous and shocking, did not ignite the hypercharged media frenzy of the cases of Louise Woodward, the British au pair convicted of manslaughter in a baby's death in Massachusetts; Melissa Drexler, an 18 year-old high school student in New Jersey who abandoned her baby at the prom; Megan Kagan, a 7-year-old raped and strangled in New Jersey; and Polly Klass, an 11 year-old who was murdered in California. Those victims were all young nonblacks.

When the public rage died down over Cash, the Iverson tragedy seemed well on its way to receding into public oblivion. But a tragedy of this magnitude could not be easily forgotten.

In the wake of the Sherrice Iverson killing, Nevada and a handful of other states toughened their laws against criminal acts against children. U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., sponsored a congressional bill that would make it a crime to witness a violent act against a child and not report it to authorities.

The bill is stalled. Civil libertarians oppose it. They say that it looks too much like a good Samaritan law. They insist that these kinds of laws are dangerous and intrusive and would virtually criminalize any and everyone who fails to report a crime. They are right. A broad catch-all law that makes it a crime not to report a crime, any crime, bumps up hard against the Constitutional prohibition against selncrimination.

Assemblyman Tom Torlakson, D-Martinez, wisely avoided this thorny problem by crafting the California bill as a child protective law. The appeal of such a law is that it provides another safeguard for children at grave risk from sexual predators and abusive adults.

Now all it takes is a signature from Davis to become law. If he signs it, and he should, it would give Sherrice Iverson the fitting tribute that she and children everywhere deserve.