Police will no longer be able to wear masks, hospitals will not be able to deny emergency abortions in life-threatening situations and retailers will prohibited from setting different prices for the same item based on shoppers’ personal data, under new laws that took effect Thursday.
Motorists, meanwhile, will be required to clear snow and ice off their cars before driving, businesses will be required to accept cash for essential goods like food and medicine at certain times — and the state is getting another official symbol, this time a prehistoric shark that has not swum in state waters for 3.6 million years.
The more than 370 bills that became law Thursday are the usual grab bag of serious and silly, of technical tweaks, of proposed answers to sweeping national issues and personal responses to situations that took young lives in Maryland. Some passed on their first try, but many were years in the making.
Youth auto charging
One of those was the youth auto charging bill by Sen. William C. Smith Jr. (D-Montgomery), which took more than a decade to get approved. Maryland’s system of automatically charging youth as adults in some cases was an outlier among states, with only Alabama sending more 14- to 17-year-olds to adult court…