The bill, designated as Substitute House Bill No. 5298 with File No. 479, aims to clarify the legal prosecution of sexual assault crimes. It specifies that any prosecution for violations of sections 53a-70 to 53a-73a of the general statutes may be based on a single act or multiple acts committed over a period of time as a continuous course of conduct. This clarification is in response to a 2022 state Supreme Court case, State v. Joseph V., which ruled that existing sexual assault laws only criminalized individual acts and not a continuous course of conduct. The bill is effective upon passage and is applicable to acts occurring before, on, or after the date of passage.

The bill's fiscal impact statement indicates that there is no anticipated fiscal impact to the state or municipalities. The bill analysis references the Supreme Court case State v. Douglas C., which established that a defendant's constitutional right to jury unanimity is violated under certain conditions, such as when the evidence supports separate incidents that could independently establish a violation, but there is no specific unanimity instruction to the jury or a bill of particulars. The bill seeks to address this issue by allowing for prosecution based on a continuous course of conduct, thereby potentially avoiding the risk of non-unanimous jury convictions based on different acts. The Judiciary Committee reported favorably on the bill with a vote of 35 to 1.