BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Trying to intimidate someone with a hangman’s noose should be a crime punishable by up to a year in prison, a state House panel decided Wednesday.

A bill by Rep. Rickey Hardy, D-Lafayette, would make it a crime to place a hangman’s noose on another person’s property or on public property with “the intent to intimidate.”

Hardy, in arguing for the bill, brandished a small hangman’s noose and noted its history as a symbol of racial lynchings. He also touched on a 2006 incident at Jena High School in central Louisiana, where three students were suspended after nooses were found hanging from a tree on campus. That incident became one of the focal points of a large civil rights march in Jena last September.

The district attorney said there was no state law under which the three could be prosecuted. A U.S. attorney later told members of Congress that the Justice Department decided not to prosecute because the federal government typically does not bring hate crimes charges against juveniles.

Some members of the House Criminal Justice Committee raised questions about the difficulty of proving intent under Hardy’s bill, and some worried aloud that the display of a noose in nonracial contexts, such as Halloween displays, might put someone in legal jeopardy.

“Halloween would be symbolic,” Hardy said. “The intent would be, for example, if I would take this noose right here, take this noose, go to your house and hang it in a tree.”

Nobody voted against the bill, which goes next to the House floor.

A committee attorney said the bill is modeled after an existing bill outlawing cross burning.

The Jena case gained national attention when, a few months after the nooses were placed in the tree, six black students were arrested in the beating of a white student at Jena High School.

Five of the six were originally charged with attempted murder, causing an uproar among civil rights leaders who said that the charges, which eventually were reduced, were out of proportion to the crime.

Although the district attorney and a federal prosecutor have said there was no link between the noose hangings and the attack on the white student, the noose issue was cited by many when an estimated 20,000 demonstrators who converged on the town last September to protest the treatment of the “Jena Six.”

Nooses became a focal point again when an 18-year-old man from nearby Colfax was arrested after driving past some of the marchers with a noose tied to the back of the truck. He eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor federal hate crime, carrying a possible penalty of up to a year in prison. He will be sentenced in August.