It has never been my intention to block the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching bill. In fact, I went to the Senate floor last week to ask for expedited passage.

I continue to work with Democrats and Republicans to make sure the bill does not allow minor altercations, like slapping someone, to be equated with lynching. A 10-year sentence for slapping someone is not just.

I offered an amendment to strengthen the bill because of my long-standing commitment to work in a bipartisan fashion to enact criminal justice reform and ensure that all people, regardless of race or class, are treated equally under the law.

Second, understanding what the anti-lynching bill actually addresses is particularly relevant. To be perfectly clear, lynching and murder are already against the law. Hate crime statutes have been on the federal books for over 50 years and murdering someone because of his or her race has been a federal hate crime for over a decade.

Because I stand so strongly behind the belief that a hateful crime such as lynching deserves a severe sentence, I could not support a bill that places such a low threshold on what could be considered a lynching. My immediate concern was the unintended consequence of making victims out of the very people we seek to protect.

For example, Tiffany Harris is a black woman from New York and was arrested in December 2019 after slapping three Jewish women and making a religious slur. Harris was initially charged with a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail. But, if she were convicted under a federal hate crime statute, she could be sentenced for up to 10 years in prison.

I fear that, with the low threshold provided in this bill, the jury trial will be eroded. Prosecutors will inevitably threaten people guilty of the crimes like those committed by Harris with trumped-up charges in an effort to obtain a plea bargain.

Prosecutors already have enough blank checks. I do not intend on giving them another one.

This is why I have led on criminal justice reform. For too long, Congress ignored the impact of our system’s harsh penalties, turning a blind eye as mandatory minimum sentences led to the problem of over-criminalization and mass incarceration. A 10-year sentence for slapping someone is an abomination and the law has already incarcerated too many people unfairly. I am trying to preclude that kind of unintended consequence.

As the Daily News editorial board did mention, there is no question when it comes to my record on criminal justice reform, and the nearly two dozen justice reform bills I’ve authored and co-sponsored In the Senate support that.

We passed the First Step Act to begin to fix some of the racial disparities in criminal justice. I led that bipartisan effort, first meeting with President Barack Obama and ultimately getting it passed under President Donald Trump. It only happened because partisans put away the slings and arrows of partisanship to address serious inequities in our system.

The terrible act of lynching deserves the most severe penalty we can apply. All I am asking is that we again work together in a bipartisan way to come up with an anti-lynching bill that doesn’t unintentionally mete out 10-year sentences for minor altercations.