We’re going to head to the State House to update progress on a couple more pieces of legislation — including one that could expand capital punishment.

Thanks for reading,

Ike

State House I

We’ll mention two bills that passed the Alabama House of Representatives on Tuesday, both reported by AL.com’s Patrick Darrington.

First, the House passed a bill that would put the death penalty in play for some child-sex crimes.

State Rep. Matt Simpson, a Daphne Republican, is sponsoring the bill, which lets the state opt for death or life in prison for someone 18 or older who is convicted of first-degree rape or sodomy of a victim 12 years old or younger.

The bill passed easily: 86 in favor, 5 opposed and 9 absent.

State House II

The House also passed a bill — this one by a unanimous 100-0 vote — that would require parental consent for a minor to receive a vaccine. It’s sponsored by state Rep. Chip Brown, a Mobile Republican.

Currently, 14 is the age of medical consent.

Both of those bills are headed to the Senate.

Disc golf championships

You have to love the scaled-down alternatives to big-time American sports.

Baseball has wiffle ball, football has flag football, bowling has Skee-Ball, surfing has skimboarding, hockey has foosball (I suppose) and tennis has pickleball.

They are often more accessible to more people and require less space or less equipment for organized or person recreational enjoyment. And in the case of pickleball, it likely can front a covert attempt to take over America beginning with municipal parks.

Disc golf is quite a different game from golf golf, but I feel like it still kind of belongs in this category of sports. While it hasn’t taken over an entire wall inside your sporting goods store like pickleball has, it’s a worldwide sport that’s now been around for decades and now has its chain-and-basket targets dotting many local parks.

The Professional Disc Golf Association boasts thousands of sanctioned events a year and tens of thousands of active members.

And the PDGA’s 2027 amateur world championship will be at courses in the Huntsville/Madison area, reports AL.com’s John R. Roby.

It’s not a new phenomenon for North Alabama. PDGA World Championships were held in the area in 1983 and 1993.

The amateurs will be played at John Hunt Park and Mastin Lake Park in Huntsville, Sunshine Oaks in Madison and Sharon Johnston Park in New Market.

Local authorities expect the event to bring in 450 competitors for a week.

Identity discovered

Here’s a cold-case story reported by AL.com’s Carol Robinson.

In 1995, a man named Chad Singleton died. We don’t have any details on that, and it probably doesn’t matter to this story.

Sometime after that, an inmate serving time for cocaine possession in Raymond, Mississippi, escaped during a work assignment. That man’s name was Patrick Grayson Spann, but we now know that he assumed the name of Chad Singleton.

Spann, as Singleton, then lived on Overlook Road in Blountsville, Alabama, where he fathered two daughters. Witnesses say that in October 2004 he drove away from Overlook Road and didn’t come back.

In 2005 hunters found human remains along some railroad tracks off Highway 31 in Blount County. An ID on the body led authorities to a woman who said Singleton had disappeared the year before, but they weren’t able to make a positive identification at the time. The case went cold.

Blount County District Attorney Pamela Casey reopened the case last year and hired Moxxy Forensic Investigations to help with genetic genealogical research.

They matched the daughters of so-called Chad Singleton with a possible brother. And once that brother’s DNA was matched up with a tooth from Singleton’s remains, they knew Singleton was actually Spann.

So the identification part is solved, but the death isn’t.

Authorities do not believe the death was of natural causes. Spann was 32 when he died, and he was found with a .22 revolver with five of the six loaded rounds spent.

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