A legal loophole that Kansas legislators and Attorney General Paul Morrison feared could let some repeat sex offenders off the hook with weaker sentences was closed this week.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius signed into law Monday a bill that would qualify second-time sex offenders for a mandatory 40-year prison sentence with no opportunity to get out early.

The bill changes an oversight in Jessica’s Law, which the Kansas Legislature passed last year. That oversight gave certain second-time sex offenders the same punishment that a first-time sex offender would receive.

Jessica’s Law originally was designed to give 25-year sentences to first-time sex offenders whose victims are younger than 14 and 40-year sentences to second-time offenders.

But a mistake in the bill held repeat offenders whose first conviction was before 1994 to the 25-year sentence.

Morrison lauded the bill’s passage, but said he didn’t know whether any offenders had been given a shorter sentence because of the loophole.

“I suspect that there were,” he said. “That was a pretty big group that was affected by that loophole.”

Rep. Lance Kinzer, R-Olathe, vice chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said Thursday that no reports of lesser sentences came up when hashing out the bill.

“I don’t recall anyone from law enforcement presenting us with a specific case where this caused a problem,” he said.

A memo from the state’s budget office indicated that the change to the law would require more prison beds, but not before 2032.