An individual convicted of a sexually violent offense or of attempt to commit a sexually violent offense. These are: Rape; Aggravated Indecent Assault; Involuntary Deviate Sexual Intercourse; Sexual Assault; Kidnapping (victim is a minor); Indecent Assault ( victim is less than 13 years); Incest; Promotion of Prostitution (victim is a minor); Obscene and other Sexual Materials; Unlawful Contact or Communication with Minor and sexual exploitation of children. An individual convicted of an equivalent offense where the conviction occurred in another state, territory, federal court, the District of Columbia or where the individual was sentenced by court martial, or where the individual was required to register under a sexual offender statute in the jurisdiction where they were convicted, and the individual: resides in Pennsylvania; or is employed or is a student in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania Definition of S.V.P.
School speed zones benefit child predators
[Ed: Yes, dear reader, you read that correctly. It would seem that TERRY WHEET (gender unspecified) of Elmira Heights, New York, would prefer that children be hit by cars and possibly killed than that they be gazed upon by "child predators fulfilling their perverted needs". Terry has identified this as a real issue worthy of discussion and, the scary thing is, lawmakers seem to be listening to the Terry Wheets of the world. ]
School zone speed limits are everywhere these days. Supporters of this program say it makes the students safer because vehicles are traveling slower in the school zone.
While school districts are spending and taxing us out of existence, they apparently forgot to teach students to stay out of the road.
I believe the lower speed limit is foolish and dangerous. It allows a child predator to cruise the school zone at a speed beneficial to their perverted need to cause harm to a child. Normally, a vehicle traveling at 20 mph would be considered suspicious; now it can blend in with all the other slow-moving vehicles.
It is not the job of the government to have a rule for everything that occurs in daily life. It is time for everyone to take a little responsibility, think for themselves and pass their knowledge and common sense to the younger people in society -- without having a regulation telling them how to do it.
TERRY WHEET
Elmira Heights
In Britain, the Stain of Orange-Some See Offenders' 'Vests of Shame' as Unfair Punishment
Like moths attracted to a bright light, the British are suddenly enthralled by the site of criminals picking up trash along roadsides or scrubbing graffiti off buildings.
The new fluorescent-orange vests help. And so do the purple letters on front and back: "Community Payback."
The British government announced last month that offenders sentenced to community service would have to slip on luminous orange coverups while whittling away their hours. The jackets, Justice Secretary Jack Straw said, will debunk the myth that community service is a soft option and will help "the public to see that justice is being done."
Previously, offenders sentenced to community service wore ordinary clothes on the job. That allowed them to blend in with the crowd -- and most did, with a few exceptions, such as supermodel Naomi Campbell, who worked at a homeless shelter last year to serve part of the 200-hour sentence she received for kicking and spitting at a police officer at Heathrow Airport. [Ed: Do you know how nasty the security people are at Heathrow? You go, girl!]
The new attire -- or "vests of shame," as christened by the tabloids -- has touched off a debate about the rights of criminals and what constitutes fair punishment.
According to a survey published this week by Britain's National Association of Probation Officers, 75 percent of the groups that host placements, including churches and community centers, are refusing to hand out the vests. Some charities called the clothes demeaning; others said that highlighting a cluster of convicts scraping paint off a side wall was a deterrent to business.
Human rights groups argue that the vests are degrading, a throwback to less civilized times. The color orange has invoked comparisons to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Columnist Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian that the uniform has "resonances of the Nazi yellow badge."
Many people writing in letters pages and on message boards have agreed with most of that -- but said criminals should wear them anyway. Writing on the Times of London Web site, Joseph Taylor of London said, "They should feel humiliated, belittled and generally demeaned; they are criminals."
And then there's that phrase: Community Payback. Those in the anti-vest camp suggest that it sounds like the title of a straight-to-DVD action movie. Charlie Brooker, a sardonic columnist in the Guardian, suggested that the label "Scum Slave" on a green leotard might be more effective.
One 25-year-old offender said he felt singled out enough without any leotard. "They might as well put a sign around your neck telling everyone what you've done," he told the Daily Mirror on a recent day, as he snipped hedges as part of his punishment. "I don't want to go through this again."
The probation officers' union said it feared offenders would be subject to intimidation and even vigilante attacks.
The Labor government has for years wrestled with the idea of the vests, which cost about $3 each. At the launch event, Straw explained to reporters that the jackets were not, in fact, "medieval," nor were they akin to "the stocks" -- a popular form of punishment here in the 18th century. (In the stocks, petty criminals were clamped between wooden boards and placed in a common area where the public would jeer, throw rotten fruit at them and tickle their feet.)
The government says most of the 70,000 offenders currently sentenced to unpaid community work are sartorially within the law. Those who flout the vest requirement receive a warning. If they do so twice, they are sent back to court, where they can face harsher sentences. Only one person has been recalled to court.
Some of the most gleeful supporters of the uniform have wondered aloud whether it might be extended to other members of society. Writing on the Times of London Web site, Peter James of Nottingham said: "Oooo. Goody. Can we have orange jackets for merchant bankers?"
Threatens To Expose Man As Paedophile, Then Kills Man's Children
[Ed: Who does he think he is? Janet Reno? ]
Queensland, Australia
A JUDGE will listen to a secret recording of Max Sica allegedly being told by his father to flee Queensland, before he decides whether to let the accused triple-murderer out on bail.
The prosecution told the Supreme Court in Brisbane yesterday that police had taped a conversation between Mr Sica and his father, Carlos, in September, 2006.
Mr Sica's father allegedly tells his son: "You go get yourself a ticket and get yourself out of here before it happens ... we can't do airport."
The tape allegedly contains evidence that Mr Sica was planning to go to Western Australia.
Mr Sica, 38, of Toorbul, north of Brisbane, was charged with three counts of murder four days ago, almost six years after allegedly killing his former girlfriend and two of her siblings.
The bodies of Neelma, 24, Kunal, 18, and Sidhi Singh, 12, were found at their family home in Bridgeman Downs, Brisbane on April 22, 2003.
Mr Sica is a former neighbour.
He applied for bail yesterday, represented by Michael Byrne, QC. He was not in court.
Mr Byrne argued that the conversation was more than two years ago and his client had not fled.
Justice James Douglas said now Mr Sica had been charged and faced a potentially heavy sentence if found guilty, there was a greater risk.
"I regard it (the tape) as significant," he said.
Mr Byrne said there was 'no logical or lawful basis' for bail to be refused, referring to the prosecution case as 'somewhat tenuous'.
During the bail application, Mr Byrne referred to an argument between Mr Sica and the father of the Singh children which took place weeks before the children were killed.
Mr Sica allegedly accused Vijay Singh of being a pedophile and of mistreating his children.
Mr Sica allegedly said: "I can cave your head in right now, you are a (expletive) pedophile ... I'll come here myself with the (expletive) cops and send you to jail."
Mr Byrne asked for an adjournment and that the tapes relating to Mr Sica being a flight risk be provided to the court so they could be put in proper context before bail was determined.
Director of Public Prosecutions Tony Moynihan, SC, said Mr Sica's defence team had wanted the matter brought on early and for them to seek an adjournment was 'absurd'.
Justice Douglas adjourned the hearing until January 27.
A committal mention date has been set for the Supreme Court in Brisbane on March 16.
Before closing the court yesterday, Justice Douglas warned Mr Sica's lawyer, Kerry Smith Douglas, of contempt of court if she continued making comments to the media which might be prejudicial after Ms Smith Douglas said the charges had been 'trumped up'.
"These are very serious charges, they must be tried fairly in the courts, not in the media," said Justice Douglas.
Outside the court, Carlos Sica wanted to say his son was innocent.
"If I knew my son did that, I'd kill him myself," he said.
Mr Sica said his son had been persecuted by the police and media.
"God witnessed who killed those kids," he said.
My New Year's Resolution: Talk To Strangers!
Editor: When the message of "don't talk to strangers" was taken to an obsessive and paranoid level during the child abduction hysteria some twenty-five years ago (abductions which were as vanishingly rare then as they are now [no pun intended]) few considered at least one likely outcome of obsessively drumming that message into children's heads: that they would grow up to become adults who DON'T TALK TO STRANGERS. Having now acquired considerable years over which to observe human behavior, it is quite apparent that young adults today are far less friendly and engaging with people they don't know, especially those not in their own age 'demographic', than were young adults when I was one. I also strongly sense a certain self-involvement approaching narcissism amongst today's young adults beyond that of my own generation, itself often (rightly) accused of excessive self indulgence.
We need to recognize that deliberate and fundamental changes in personal behavior and governmental policies necessarily bring with them the certainty of unforeseen consequences. "Not talking to strangers" has had, as was inevitable, a corrosive effect upon society and upon trust which cannot be a good thing.
Bruce Schneier, perhaps the world's foremost computer (and societal) security "guru", wrote a piece for his own website a few years ago which is as true today as it is now. Please read it, below. Thank you, Bruce!
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Talking to Strangers
In Beyond Fear I wrote: "Many children are taught never to talk to strangers, an extreme precaution with minimal security benefit."
In talks, I'm even more direct. I think "don't talk to strangers" is just about the worst possible advice you can give a child. Most people are friendly and helpful, and if a child is in distress, asking the help of a stranger is probably the best possible thing he can do.
This advice would have helped Brennan Hawkins, the 11-year-old boy who was lost in the Utah wilderness for four days.
The parents said Brennan had seen people searching for him on horse and ATV, but avoided them because of what he had been taught.
"He stayed on the trail, he avoided strangers," Jody Hawkins said. "His biggest fear, he told me, was that someone would steal him."
They said they hadn't talked to Brennan and his four siblings about what they should do about strangers if they were lost. "This may have come to a faster conclusion had we discussed that," Toby Hawkins said.
In a world where good guys are common and bad guys are rare, assuming a random person is a good guy is a smart security strategy. We need to help children develop their natural intuition about risk, and not give them overbroad rules.
Also in Beyond Fear, I wrote:
As both individuals and a society, we can make choices about our security. We can choose more security or less security. We can choose greater impositions on our lives and freedoms, or fewer impositions. We can choose the types of risks and security solutions we're willing to tolerate and decide that others are unacceptable.
As individuals, we can decide to buy a home alarm system to make ourselves more secure, or we can save the money because we don't consider the added security to be worth it. We can decide not to travel because we fear terrorism, or we can decide to see the world because the world is wonderful. We can fear strangers because they might be attackers, or we can talk to strangers because they might become friends.
Ga. sex offenders must hand over online passwords
[Ed: Another "crime" which makes convenient the Constitutional rear-guard action to imprison for a lifetime those which they were unable to do so to the first go-around. Another obstacle in a hellish obstacle course to make life quite impossible to live. And it is all being perpetrated by those who insist that it is being done in the service of "public safety", not punishment because punishment would be ex post facto and that would be illegal. They're so terribly clever, aren't they?]
ATLANTA (AP) — Privacy advocates are questioning an aggressive Georgia law set to take effect Thursday that would require sex offenders to hand over Internet passwords, screen names and e-mail addresses.
Georgia joins a small band of states complying with guidelines in a 2006 federal law requiring authorities to track Internet addresses of sex offenders, but it is among the first to take the extra step of forcing its 16,000 offenders to turn in their passwords as well.
A federal judge ruled in September that a similar law in Utah violated the privacy rights of an offender who challenged it, though the narrow ruling only applied to one offender who had a military conviction on sex offenses but was never in Utah's court or prison system.
No one in Georgia has challenged the law yet, but critics say it threatens the privacy of sex offenders and burdens cash-strapped law enforcement officials.
"There's certainly a privacy concern," said Sara Totonchi of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights. "This essentially will give law enforcement the ability to read e-mails between family members, between employers."
State Sen. Cecil Staton, who wrote the bill, said the measure is designed to keep the Internet safe for children. Authorities could use the passwords and other information to make sure offenders aren't stalking children online or chatting with them about off-limits topics.
Staton said although the measure may violate the privacy of sex offenders, the need to protect children "outweighs a lot of the rights of these individuals."
"We limit where they can live, we make their information available on the Internet. To some degree, we do invade their privacy," said Staton, a Republican from Macon. "But the feeling is, they have forfeited, to some degree, some privacy rights."
Most states already make the addresses of sex offenders available online. Georgia is one of at least 15 states that have adopted laws requiring sex offenders to detail their e-mail addresses, user names and other Internet handles, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
But researcher Sarah Hammond said Georgia and Utah appear to be the only states that require sex offenders to also hand over their passwords.
The new requirements are far from watertight. While offenders who don't report their user names and passwords could face probation violations — and possibly a return to prison — supporters admit it isn't hard to skirt the law's requirements.
"My hunch is, where there's a will, there's a way," Staton said. "If people are intent on violating this law, there are many different ways. What's important is we have given law enforcement a tool."
For offenders like Kelly Piercy, convicted of child pornography charges in 1999, the password requirement is the latest example of "pre-emptive justice."
Piercy, who suffers from a degenerative disease that has left him blind, said he already struggles to keep track of the roughly dozen screen names he has created, and he doubts deputies would have much sympathy for him if he forgets to report one.
"I made a mistake and I need to pay for it. And I did. But now we're the target of pre-emptive justice — and that concerns me," he said. "How much further down the road can sex offenders be chased?"
Senate Bill 474: http://www.legis.ga.gov/
Judge: sex offender's no-contact order goes too far
[Ed: Today is an unusually good day with two judicial "wins". Let us hope for more. ] The appellate court ruled last week the no-contact order imposed on Brian C. Cobler went too far, violating his parental rights. The no-contact order included letters, phones and e-mails. Cobler was arrested in 2006 and convicted of having a three-month sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl. He was sentenced to serve a minimum of 2 years in prison. In his decision earlier this month, Idaho Court of Appeals Chief Judge Sergio Gutierrez says denying Cobler his rights as a parent "oversteps the authority of the state." Cobler and his wife have two children, a boy and girl, who were both under the age of 6 at the time of his arrest. Information from: The Spokesman-Review, http://www.spokesmanreview.com Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
BOISE, Idaho (AP) - The Idaho Court of Appeals has overturned a state court order banning a convicted sex offender from being within 100 feet of any minor, including his two young children.
Court tosses sex offender's 28-year prison term
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered a lower court to reconsider the punishment of Cecilio Gonzalez. He was handed the lengthy term under California's three-strikes law, which requires a minimum prison sentence of 25 years after a third violent or serious felony conviction. Gonzalez had failed to check in with authorities five days after his birthday. Sex offenders are required to update authorities annually of their home addresses. The appeals court said that failure to update his Burbank address was a technical violation and didn't count as a third strike.
SAN FRANCISCO—A federal appeals court has ruled that a convicted sex offender's 28-year prison sentence for failing to properly update his home address with authorities was too harsh.
Sex offender 'loophole to close'
A loophole which allows sex offenders to slip off the police radar by declaring themselves homeless is to be closed, the justice secretary announced.
Kenny MacAskill said new laws will make sure registered offenders have to report to authorities weekly, daily, or even hourly, if supported by the Scottish Parliament.
"We'll be using the first available opportunity in the Criminal Justice and Licensing Bill to close it," he said.
Virginity Pledge Doesn’t Stop Teen Sex
Dec. 29, 2008 -- Teenagers who take virginity pledges are no less sexually active than other teens, according to a new study.
But the results, published in the journal Pediatrics, suggest that virginity pledgers are less likely to protect themselves against pregnancy or disease when they do have sex.
Researchers say the findings suggest that virginity pledges may not significantly affect teenagers' sexual behavior. Instead, they may decrease the likelihood of teenagers taking precautions, such as using a condom or using birth control, when they do have sex.
Virginity Pledge May Lead to Risky Sex
Researchers say the federal government spends about $200 million annually on abstinence promotion programs, which include virginity pledges. Two previous studies have suggested that virginity pledges can delay sex, but researchers say those studies did not account for pre-existing differences between pledgers and non-pledgers.
In this study, researchers compared the sexual behavior of 289 teenagers who reported taking a virginity pledge in a 1996 national survey to 645 non-pledgers who were matched on more than 100 factors, such as religious beliefs and attitudes toward sex and birth control.
The results showed that five years after taking the virginity pledge:
- 82% of pledgers denied ever having taken the pledge.
- Pledgers and matched non-pledgers did not differ in rates of premarital sex, sexually transmitted disease, and oral and anal sex behaviors.
- Pledgers had 0.1 fewer sexual partners in the past year but did not differ from non-pledgers in the number of lifetime sexual partners and the age of first sex.
The biggest difference between the two groups came in the area of condom and birth control use. The study showed that fewer pledgers used birth control or condoms in the past year or any form of birth control the last time they had sex.
Researcher Janet Elise Rosenbaum, PHD, of Harvard University, says the findings suggest that health care providers should provide birth control information to all teenagers, especially virginity pledgers.
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