The judge had only one option when he sentenced Cedric Bradshaw: life in prison.
Bradshaw had not committed murder, rape or armed robbery. His offense was failing to properly register as a convicted sex offender for a second time —- even though he had repeatedly tried to follow the law.
"Mr. Bradshaw, the court could say a lot of things about the law, the wisdom or not of it," Bulloch County Superior Court Judge F. Gates Peed said as he sentenced the 25-year-old Statesboro man on Dec. 20, 2007. But the law calls for a mandatory life sentence, and that's what Bradshaw got.
On Monday, the state's highest court will consider whether the law is unconstitutional on grounds it is cruel and unusual punishment.
No other state calls for a life sentence for failing to register as a sex offender the second time, and even rape and armed robbery convictions in Georgia do not carry mandatory life terms, said Bradshaw's lawyer, Robert L. Persse, the circuit public defender in Statesboro.
"The punishment for a second violation is grossly disproportionate to the offense," Persse said. "That is particularly true when this is essentially a paperwork offense not accompanied by aggravating circumstances like violence, sexual deviance or being out in a schoolyard hunting for children."
The Bulloch DA's office is urging the state Supreme Court to uphold the life term.
"The courts look at the Legislature's intent in determining the best evidence for the appropriateness of the sentence," Assistant District Attorney W. Scott Brannen said. "When they increase it [to a life term], that too is evidence of the intent and the will of the people."
Sen. President pro tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) said the law is clear.
"I wish it hadn't happened, but there are consequences for people's actions," said Johnson, a chief sponsor of the offender law. "What would have happened if he had given the wrong address and had lived in a place and was harming a child next door? The law is trying to protect children. Justice has to be blind to motive."
He said Bradshaw had committed "serial stupidity."
There is no question Bradshaw committed a colossal blunder. The law, one of the toughest in the nation, makes it clear that failure to properly register as a sex offender the second time brings a mandatory life sentence.
Bradshaw's legal problems started when, shortly after turning 19, he pleaded guilty to enticing a child for indecent purposes. In November 2001, he was sentenced to serve six to eight months in a detention center and five years probation.
But before reporting to the center, Bradshaw was charged with statutory rape for having sex with a 15-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty to that and was sentenced to five years in prison.
After being granted parole in December 2006, Bradshaw gave an invalid address when registering as a sex offender, the first strike against him. In June 2007, he pleaded guilty to the offense and was sentenced to time served —- little more than six months in jail.
After his release, Bradshaw moved in with his sister and registered as a sex offender, listing her address. But deputies soon made him leave because the home was too close to a recreation center.
Bradshaw then moved in with his aunt and correctly put her address on the registry. This time he was told to leave because the home was within 1,000 feet of the First Baptist Church.
Bradshaw began to wonder if he could find a place to live and not be in violation of Georgia's sex-offender registry law, according to court records. But a relative hooked him up with Edgar Moore, a family friend, who said Bradshaw could have the spare bedroom in his single-wide trailer.
Bradshaw registered once more at the Sheriff's Office, but provided the wrong address, inadvertently transposing two of the street numbers.
A sheriff's captain, checking to verify Bradshaw's address, eventually found Moore at his trailer. Moore confirmed that he had invited Bradshaw to live in the spare bedroom. But he said Bradshaw had yet to move in.
Authorities obtained a warrant for Bradshaw's arrest because he had failed to move into the address within the 72 hours required by law.
Bradshaw turned himself in at the Bulloch County jail, where he made another mistake: he lied, saying he had been living in Moore's trailer.
A grand jury indicted Bradshaw for failure to register the second time. Bradshaw waived his right to a jury and, during a one-day trial last December, let Judge Peed decide his fate.
At trial, Bradshaw testified that he had tried to get in touch with Moore. He said he left him messages on his cellphone and dropped by, but Moore was not home. In the meantime, Bradshaw said, he was staying with his girlfriend.
Persse, the public defender, argued that Bradshaw had tried to comply with the law. "If anything, the man tried to do what he was supposed to do, and the statute and its rigid requirements got in his way," he told the judge.
But Brannen, the prosecutor, said the law is on the books and "it's not my place or the court's place to decide what we like and don't like and what we want to enforce or not enforce."
Bradshaw, Brannen said, broke the law by failing to give a valid address within the 72-hour reporting deadline. "There are no exceptions in the law," he said.
Even though he called into question the wisdom of the law, Peed agreed and sentenced Bradshaw to life in prison.
"I'll leave it to the super Legislature, the Supreme Court, to decide the issues of constitutionality," he said.
CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS
Among the crimes in Georgia where a life sentence may be imposed:
>Aggravated child molestation
>Aggravated sexual battery
>Aggravated sodomy
>Armed robbery
>Child molestation (second offense)
>Rape
>Sale of controlled substance (second offense)
>Treason
Among the crimes in Georgia where a life sentence must be imposed:
>Failure to register as a sex offender (second offense)
>Feticide
>Hijacking motor vehicle (second offense)
>Hijacking aircraft
>Kidnapping with bodily injury
>Kidnapping for ransom
>Murder
Source: Georgia criminal code
The week before a state appeals court condemned the wholesale removal of children from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, a spokesman for Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) insisted the case "is not about religion." If you believe that, you may also believe that a community of hundreds is a single household, or that a 27-year-old is younger than 18, to cite just a couple of the whoppers CPS has told in the last two months.
To justify seizing more than 450 children from the ranch, which is owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), CPS argued that the church's teachings are inherently abusive. CPS did not bother to present evidence that particular children were in immediate physical danger, as required by state law, because it thought membership in the polygamous sect was enough to make parents unfit.
CPS asserted that a "pervasive belief system" at the ranch, which it raided on April 3 in response to what seems to have been a fictitious abuse report, encouraged underage marriage. "They're living under an umbrella of belief that having children at a young age is a blessing," the lead investigator testified. "Therefore any child in that environment would not be safe."
But as the appeals court noted, "The existence of the FLDS belief system as described by the [state's] witnesses, by itself, does not put children of FLDS parents in physical danger. It is the imposition of certain alleged tenets of that system on specific individuals that may put them in physical danger."
CPS claimed 31 underage girls at the ranch were pregnant or mothers. It recently conceded that at least 15 of them are in fact adults, ranging in age from 18 to 27, while a 14-year-old on the list is not pregnant and has no children. A.P. reports "more mothers listed as underage are likely to be reclassified as adults."
In any case, as the appeals court noted, "teenage pregnancy, by itself, is not a reason to remove children from their home and parents." In Texas the minimum age for marriage with parental consent is 16 (raised from 14 in 2005 with the FLDS in mind), and "there was no evidence regarding the marital status of these girls when they became pregnant or the circumstances under which they became pregnant."
By the state's current count, underage mothers represent no more than 3 percent of the children it seized. Even if the other girls who had reached puberty were likely to be married off soon (a matter of dispute), there was no evidence that the boys or the prepubescent girls were in danger of abuse.
CPS glossed over the lack of evidence by treating the entire 1,700-acre ranch as a single household. If there had been even one instance of abuse in the community, it argued, no child should be left there. This assumption of collective guilt was not only contrary to law; it was contradicted by the state's own witnesses, who conceded that FLDS members, only some of whom practice polygamy, disagree about the appropriate age for marriage.
The first parents to be reunited with their children after the appeals court's ruling, which CPS has asked the Texas Supreme Court to reverse, were Joseph and Lori Jessop, both EMTs in their 20s. The monogamous couple's children—two boys and a girl, ages 1, 2, and 4—became ill during their state-imposed separation and had to be hospitalized.
When they were released, CPS caseworkers forcibly pulled the two older children from their mother. Until a judge intervened, CPS threatened to take the youngest child as well, saying nursing babies older than 12 months were not allowed to remain with their mothers.
Not surprisingly, the Jessops' older children are anxious these days, waking up repeatedly during the night and displaying regressive behavior. There was never any evidence that their parents abused them, but there's plenty that the state did.
© Copyright 2008 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
Sumnang Chea, 21, David Inthirath, 27, and Sarim Kheleung, 25, were among those believed to have killed inmate Donald Jones, 30, of Los Angeles, said Lt. Eric Moore of the prison in Monterey County. Jones was sentenced to spend 20 years in prison for sodomy on a child younger than 14 years old.
Jones was attacked at 10:53 a.m. on a general population yard for maximum-security inmates. He was taken by ambulance to an outside medical center and was pronounced dead at 12:17 p.m., Moore said.
Another three inmates from Sacramento, Orange and Los Angeles counties also are suspected in the death. All the attackers are in their 20s, Moore said.
Of those from San Joaquin County, Chea was serving a sentence for second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter, Inthirath had been sentenced for voluntary manslaughter, and Kheleung was sentenced to prison for second-degree murder, Moore said.
Los Angeles Times
Photographers whose high school water polo pictures wound up on gay Web sites won't be prosecuted.The Orange County district attorney's office says a four-month investigation determined Scott Cornelius and Allen Rockwell didn't commit any crimes. Cornelius, a UC Irvine police employee currently on paid leave, is still being investigated by the university to determine if he violated college policies.Photographs of youths as young as 14 taken by Cornelius and Rockwell appeared on homosexual pornographic Web sites. But district attorney's office spokeswoman Farrah Emami says "legally there were no criminal charges we could file."An Assembly bill currently in the Legislature would make preparing, posting or publishing a photograph or image of a minor on adult Web sites a crime.
By Kelly Davis, City Beat San Diego
Most people reading this will remember when there were no public sex-offender registries—no online portals where you can type in your address and find out if a sex offender is living nearby or sign up to receive an e-mail alert when one moves into your neighborhood. A decade ago, there weren’t folks who memorized names and faces and went door-to-door to let their neighbors know that a sex offender moved in down the street—no one putting up fliers in apartment-building lobbies and laundry rooms.
No sex-offender registry or neighborhood watch would have kept a babysitter from molesting me when I was 6. He was around 16 or 17, the brother of our regular babysitter who filled in whenever his sister was busy. I don’t remember how many times it happened, but I know it was more than once. Years later, I found out that he molested my sister, who was 4, and my best friend, who lived across the street.
At some point I told my mom what happened, but I don’t know what words I used. At 6, “penis,” “vagina” and “sex” weren’t part of my vocabulary. Whatever I said, my mom didn’t believe me—at least that’s what she told me.
Looking back, I think she knew I was telling the truth, but she just didn’t know how to respond.
And then I simply forgot that it ever happened—until my first serious relationship in high school, when I had to admit to the guy that, in my mind, the male penis was a diseased, disgusting thing. A year later I ended up in counseling for severe anxiety and depression. There was a box on a questionnaire asking if I’d ever been the victim of sexual abuse, and that opened the door.
A couple of weeks ago, I threw the babysitter’s name into a national sexual-offender registry. A match came up, but the photo was a guy from Texas who happened to have the same name. I doubt the babysitter went on to become a habitual child molester—statistics suggest that he didn’t. I think it was a case of a sexually confused teen who made a bad decision.
In nine out of 10 sexual assaults, the victim knows the perpetrator. In roughly 35 to 40 percent of those cases, it’s a relative. And if it’s not a relative, it’s mom’s new boyfriend (one of the more common victim-offender relationships) or, as in my case, a babysitter.
“The mythology of the dirty old man in the trench coat with the candy lurking around kids at a school yard is misplaced,” says San Diego County Public Defender Marian Gaston. “The vast majority of sex offenders, they don’t look like that…. It’s not this easily identifiable group of outsiders who can then be cast away. It’s your sister’s new boyfriend; it’s your stepdad.”
The term “sex offender” conjures the kind of monolithic image Gaston refers to—one that’s reinforced by the news media and tough-on-crime politicians, despite evidence to the contrary. Misperception and fear, rather than good empirical research, seem to be what drives sex-offender laws.
A case in point is a new law that takes effect this week in San Diego.
The “Child Protection” ordinance, passed unanimously by the City Council in March, is a spin-off of California’s Jessica’s Law, approved by voters in 2006. Among other things, Jessica’s Law created mandatory sentences for sex offenders, requires that certain sex offenders be outfitted with Global Positioning System (GPS) devices for life and expanded the list of what constitutes a sexual offense. Most controversial are the 2,000-foot-radius “predator-free zones” the law established around schools and parks in which sex offenders who are paroled after Nov. 7, 2006, are forbidden to live (for a look at how this maps out in San Diego County, click here).
The law was named after Jessica Lunsford, a 9-year-old Florida girl who was abducted from her home, raped and killed in 2005 by John Couey, a registered sex offender who lived about 100 yards from the Lunsfords. Couey abducted Jessica by entering the home at night through an unlocked door.
Four unnamed plaintiffs—two from San Diego County—are challenging Jessica’s Law before the state Supreme Court, arguing that the law’s residency restrictions are too broad. None of the four’s crimes involved children.
Despite the court challenge, San Diego went ahead and added more locations to the list of safe zones: city libraries, city parks, amusement parks (SeaWorld, the zoo), video arcades, licensed daycare facilities and businesses that cater to children, like Chuck E. Cheese. (The map factors in only schools and parks.)
Additionally, the San Diego law creates “presence” restrictions that forbid registered sex offenders from being within 300 feet of any of the above locations. While the city’s enhanced residence restrictions apply only to people who commit a sexual offense after the law takes effect, the 300-foot restriction applies to all registered sex offenders.
Sgt. Mark Sullivan, who supervises the San Diego Police Department’s Sex Offender Registration Unit, said enforcement of the presence restriction would likely be complaint-driven.
“We used to get complaints from mothers that would take their kids to the park and say, ‘There’s a weird guy staring at my kids,’ and they’d call the police, the police would show up [and] realize they’re talking to a sex offender,” Sullivan said, “but there was no law that would allow an officer to tell him to leave.”
Now, under the new city law, the individual could be arrested, he said.
Unlike Jessica’s Law, which has no defined punishment for anyone who violates the residence restriction (unless the person’s on parole and, in that case, it’s a parole violation), San Diego’s ordinance makes it a misdemeanor criminal offense, punishable by up to six months in jail.
At the meeting where the City Council voted to implement the law, only one person spoke in opposition. Laura Arnold, a public defender, presented each council member with a 10-page memo that summarized what a number of studies have found: Restricting where a sex offender lives has no influence on whether or not he’ll commit another crime. In fact, Arnold told the City Council, research has found that such restrictions can be counterproductive, pushing sex offenders into low-income communities and rural areas or, worse, onto the street.
In 2006, the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault, an umbrella group for 84 rape crisis centers and sexual-assault prevention programs, issued a strongly worded position statement opposing Jessica’s Law: “Residency restrictions… don’t make communities safer. Residency restrictions don’t reduce recidivism, don’t improve supervision of offenders and ultimately do not protect children from sex offenders.”
And, according to a study by the Minnesota Department of Corrections that looked specifically at repeat offenders, it really does come down to relationships and not geography: “What matters with respect to sexual recidivism is not residential proximity, but rather social or relationship proximity.”
In 2006, the year before Jessica’s Law went into effect, 2,000 sex offenders registered as transient with their local police agencies. According to recent numbers from the state, 3,140 sex offenders have registered as transient—a 63-percent increase in less than two years. In San Diego, roughly 200 of approximately 1,880 registerd sex offenders have declared themselves homeless.
Sex offenders with permanent addresses are required to register annually or when they move, but transient registrants must check in with the police department every 30 days and provide officers with a general idea of where to find them, Sullivan said.
“They’ve made it very difficult for this population to find housing,” said Steve Kubicek, supervisor of adult parole operations for San Diego County. “With the city, now you’re adding [more locations]. It’s almost as if they’re purging the city of all registrants.”
Transient registrants, Kubicek pointed out, are more likely to commit other crimes. “We may see an increase in drug use when they go on the streets,” he said.
“Jessica’s Law was passed hurriedly in an election year,” he added. “And here we are in an election year.... I think [lawmakers’] intent was absolutely valid, but I think [the city law] was passed prior to evaluating the impact of the residency restriction.”
In Iowa, where a similar 2,000-foot rule has been in place since 2002, the Iowa County Prosecutors Association and more than three-dozen local governments have demanded that the state’s legislature repeal the residence restriction because of the number of offenders who’ve gone underground. And in Miami-Dade County, a reporter for the weekly Miami New Times discovered roughly 30 men living under a freeway overpass, the only place they could legally reside from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. or risk violating probation or parole.
There are other consequences of residency restrictions. Laura Arnold recently had to find a way around the law to get a client into a drug treatment facility that was too close to a school. The client, a former prostitute, is a registered sex offender because she once said “Show me your dick” to a vice cop. “Counseling” a person to expose himself is a sex crime.
Unlike most new laws the City Council enacts, this one got very little discussion; council members talked in general terms about needing to protect children, and Councilmember Ben Hueso talked about how a similar National City ordinance was pushing sex offenders into his district and so the city needed to push back. There was no factual evidence presented to the public as to why the ordinance was needed.
Not only does the ordinance lack any clear reason for being, but also, as written, it contains wrong information, specifically a portion included in the “whereas” statements that lead off the document:
“According to a 1998 report by the U.S. Department of Justice, sex offenders are the least likely to be cured and the most likely to re-offend and prey on the most innocent members of our society, and more than two-thirds of victims of rape and sexual assault are under the age of 18 and sex offenders have a higher recidivism rate for their crimes than any other type of violent felon.”
No such study exists. The information, rather, comes from a talk given by Florence Shapiro, a senator from Texas, at a 1998 conference organized by the Department of Justice. Shapiro was there to discuss “Ashley’s Law,” her overhaul of Texas’ sex-offender rules, prompted by the highly publicized death of Ashley Estell, a 7-year-old who, in 1993, was abducted from a playground and later found strangled. A man named Michael Blair, who’d helped search for the girl, was convicted and sentenced to death for her murder. Though an autopsy found no indication that Ashley had been sexually abused, Shapiro stuck with the story that the girl had been raped, and that’s what she told the audience who gathered for the conference. Blair, 23 years old at the time of the trial and already a convicted child molester, damned himself by telling the jury that he saw nothing wrong with consensual sex with underage girls. (Blair’s conviction is currently on appeal since repeated DNA tests of physical evidence suggest there were two men involved, neither of them Blair.)
Because Blair had served a shortened sentence for a child-molestation case, he became Shapiro’s poster sex offender—if he’d remained in prison, she argued, Ashley would still be alive.
“Sex offenders are a very unique type of criminal,” Shapiro told conference attendees. “I like to say they have three very unique characteristics: They are the least likely to be cured; they are the most likely to re-offend; and they prey on the most innocent members of our society.”
Those words—attributed to a “U.S. Department of Justice study”—have made their way into various pieces of sex-offender legislation, like Jessica’s Law and San Diego’s new ordinance, even though the DOJ included a disclaimer along with the transcript of the conference, saying the contents “do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.”
One part of the statement is true—more than two-thirds of victims of rape and sexual assault are under 18. But the rest of the information isn’t accurate. A number of studies, including two by the Department of Justice (one released in 1997, another in 2003), have found that sex offenders have a much lower recidivism rate than any other type of criminal. According to the 1997 DOJ report, for which researchers tracked 272,111 parolees for three years, only 5.3 percent of the 9,691 sex offenders in the group were rearrested for another sex crime. As for the non-sex-offender cohort, 68 percent were rearrested. Other studies have found higher rates of recidivism among sex offenders—14 percent, on average, and as high as 26 percent—but still lower than for other criminals.
Parole’s Kubicek said his own experience confirms what the studies have found. “It’s very low for us for a new sex offense,” he said.
As the state’s Sex Offender Management Board put it, in its 219-page analysis of California’s sex-offender laws, released in January, “Statements that sex offenders cannot be ‘cured’—a concept generally accepted by experts in this field—have often been misinterpreted to mean that they will inevitably re-offend. In fact, the majority of sex offenders do not re-offend sexually over time.”
Ultimately, though, debates about recidivism mean little when it comes to the population most affected by sexual assault. As Phyllis Shess, the deputy district attorney who heads the DA’s sex offender unit, pointed out, “You have to ask, is 1 percent [recidivism] acceptable? Is 10 percent acceptable? When you’re talking about these kinds of issues, no it isn’t.”
So what’s the answer? Jessica’s Law mandated that all “high-risk” felony sex offenders must wear a GPS device for life, so that their movement can be monitored by law enforcement. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation began outfitting all newly paroled sex offenders—regardless of risk level— with some form of GPS device beginning last July.
In December, California was spending $21,000 a day on GPS monitoring, which comes out to $20 million a year. The state’s Legislative Analyst’s office estimated that within 10 years, the cost for GPS monitoring could grow to $100 million annually and continue to increase. Right now local governments are expected to pick up the cost after a person completes parole, an idea that no municipality has yet embraced.
While some studies have found that GPS-monitored offenders have lower recidivism rates, pilot-programs in San Diego and Tennessee found no significant difference between GPS-monitored sex offenders and those not on GPS. It’s not necessarily going to stop someone who’s dead-set on reoffending “It’s GPS, it’s not real-time; you’re not going to get the information until the following day.”
If anything, it stops an offender from absconding, though the device can just as easily be cut off. The Tennessee Department of Corrections warned that GPS devices are a resource drain when used too broadly and shouldn’t be used for life-long monitoring. Successful rehabilitation requires that an offender be given a goal to work toward, the study found.
At a community forum on San Diego’s Child Protection ordinance, Al Killen-Harvey, supervisor in the trauma counseling program at Rady Children’s Hospital, questioned whether GPS devices were the best use of limited resources:
“We only have so much money, and that money’s now gone to looking at these kinds of tracking devices. We’ve wiped out early prevention and education programs that we used to have 15 and 20 years ago where we taught kids about healthy touch and bad touch and how to report it. We’ve wiped out funding for mental-health services for families that are economically distressed, which is a factor that may lead someone to cross a boundary that they wouldn’t have crossed before.
“In the macro sense, yeah, we’ve missed the mark here and we’re allocating way too much money in an area where the bang for the buck is minimal compared to where the real risk level is,” Killen-Harvey said.
His point on prevention is an important one. Eighty-seven percent of sex crimes committed each year are first-time offenses by people who aren’t already known to the police. It’s a statistic that turns public policy on its head—why put all the attention on the guys we already know about?
“There are agencies out there that have demonstrated that if you do a good public health, public awareness campaign, including a [hotline for] people who are afraid they might hurt a child… you can actually reduce the incidence of sexual assault in your community,” said Marian Gaston, the public defender. “Why wouldn’t we spend money on that? And instead, we’re busy spending how many millions of dollars on GPS for people who are in their 60s and who are statistically just not going to do it again.”
Then there’s the issue of treatment. The public’s perception is that treatment doesn’t work—a sex offender is a sex offender for life. But not everyone who molests a child fits the clinical definition of a pedophile, for one thing—sometimes other self-destructive factors drive behavior, like drug addiction. Recent studies have shown that, for repeat offenders, therapy does, in fact, lead to lower recidivism rates. California, however, is one of the few states that don’t offer in-custody treatment; only once a person’s released from custody is treatment mandated. It’s puzzling, given that Jessica’s Law is putting people behind bars longer.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has plans to build a new locked treatment facility for sex offenders, but, as the state’s Sex Offender Management Board pointed out in its January report, nothing’s moved beyond the planning stage. Anyone who falls into the category of “sexually violent predator,” based on a pre-release assessment, is turned over to one of two state mental hospitals, rather than paroled, where the individual goes through a multi-phase treatment program, is reassessed and then, if he’s found by a judge to be stable enough, released back into the community.
Once someone’s off probation or parole, treatment ends and it’s rare that those who need it will seek it voluntarily, said Shess, the deputy district attorney.
“We did an experiment through the [county’s] Sexual Offender Management Council, offering resources to people who felt like stresses—whatever it was in their life that might be putting them in a situation where they might re-offend—and no one took advantage of it.” The counseling wasn’t free, but it would have been low-cost, Shess said. And, even then, the county would have made arrangements for someone who couldn’t afford to pay. “We didn’t even get that far. Nobody called to say, ‘Hey I’m a prior offender, I’m feeling like I might need help—no one.”
Around 90 percent of sex offenders aren’t under state or county supervision, Kubicek noted. “The 10 percent that are on parole are receiving the best supervision available,” he said. “My concern is, how do we enforce the 90 percent who are receiving no supervision, who are just registering?”
One might assume that when a sex offender goes in to register with the police each year (or, each month if he’s a transient), there might be a brief talk with a counselor or some other kind of assessment that happens. But, aside from an initial assessment when an individual first registers, there’s not much follow-up. The city of San Diego has only five officers dedicated to the sexual-assault unit (which includes sex-offender management): one sergeant (Mark Sullivan), two detectives and two code-compliance officers who staff the office where more than 100 people go to register each week.
What if, rather than putting restrictions on where a sex offender can live and move about town—strategies whose effectiveness isn’t supported by evidence—the City Council pledged to fund a risk-assessment counselor for the police department? Sure, money’s short, but it’s hard to argue when it comes to protecting kids. Hire an intake counselor or set up a hotline that someone like my mom could call to find out how to respond when her kid says the babysitter’s asking her to do things she doesn’t understand.
Another thing to think about: It’s difficult to turn in a friend or relative when you know that, unlike any other crime, this is one that will follow the person around for the rest of his life. Would my mom have turned the guy over to police if it meant a lifetime of public scrutiny and, in essence, banishment?
Probably not.
Write to kellyd@sdcitybeat.com and editor@sdcitybeat.com.
UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
Three San Diegans talk about life as registered sex offenders
"It's spread out too far"
“Thomas” is one of roughly 3,500 parolees (according to January numbers) who have to wear a GPS device around the ankle. He’s asked that nothing be included in this story that might identify him to his parole officer—such as his age, where he lives or why he recently did prison time.
Many years ago, barely out of his teens, Thomas was charged with a misdemeanor for a victimless crime that wasn’t considered a sexual offense until Jessica’s Law made it so. It doesn’t matter that the incident happened long before the law was passed. Because Thomas recently got out of prison, he’s considered a newly released sex offender. He’s not required to have his photo up on the state’s public registry of sex offenders—he’s categorized as a “low-risk” offender—but he must register his name and address with police.
Sex offenders who can afford it have to pay some of the cost of their GPS device, but Thomas doesn’t have a job. He’s in poor health, but he can’t access most public-assistance programs because of his sex-offender status. Until recently, he was living on the street, barred from entering any of the city’s homeless shelters. To charge up the GPS device, every day he had to go to a friend’s place. If the device goes dead, it could count as a parole violation.
“The only thing it’s costing me is mental stress and pain,” he said. His ankle’s swelled up, and he has difficulty walking. He’s terrified that someone will spot the device. “There’s people out there who take the law into their own hands,” he said.
Shortly after John Hartley, the District 3 City Council candidate, pleaded no contest to lewd conduct in public, Thomas gave me a call. He didn’t get it—why is it that he’s considered a sex offender and Hartley’s offense isn’t on the list?
Right now, someone’s helping Thomas pay his bills, but he’s not sure how long that will last. He has children of his own, and he generally supports stronger penalties for sex offenders. He just doesn’t get why a misdemeanor crime is going to follow him around for the rest of his life.
“I wouldn’t think my crime warrants a GPS,” he said. “It’s spread out too far. Low-level offenses shouldn’t be put in that category.”
"They can't crucify people quick enough"
Shortly before California’s sex-offender registry went public, a reporter and cameraman ambushed “Mike” (he asked that his real name not be disclosed) outside his apartment.
“Sir, would you like to comment on your conviction for molesting a child? Are you a threat to the community? Do you realize that there’s a daycare center around the corner?” he recalled.
“You know—Fox News, chasing sex offenders. I didn’t say anything; I just got in my car and drove off. Sure enough, they had a 10-minute piece where they had me and two other guys, you know, living amongst you.”
Nine years ago, Mike was convicted of molesting a 7-year-old girl, one of his son’s friends.
“I had a lot of problems in my life—bad marriage and drinking and porn addiction,” he admits. “I was just a mess, and it just mucked up my thinking to the point where this somehow became an acceptable thing to do. I mean, you’ve talked yourself into it, rationalized it, even though I know it’s wrong.”
The personal problems don’t excuse what he did, he said. “It’s really hard to believe that I did it. I mean, I know that I did it, and I’ll always accept the responsibility for it.”
A judge gave him probation; if he’d been arrested today, he’d be subject to a mandatory three-year sentence under Jessica’s Law. The judge and prosecutor took into account that Mike had never been in trouble before, took responsibility for his actions and, in terms of child molestation, it was a relatively minor incident. His wife divorced him (though they remain close), he had to move out of his house and he’s since had to explain to his son, now 14, what happened—why he couldn’t take him to the community pool, for instance (a term of his probation) and, more recently, why he’s had a tough time finding a job. In 2004, the company Mike was working for—one that kept him on, even though his supervisors knew what happened—moved out of state. Most of his co-workers went to work in the defense industry, but with a felony on his record, he couldn’t get security clearance. A software engineer, he’s gotten by since then with contract work, but every time a company wants to bring him on full-time, they do a background check.
“The background authorization form—that’s become the bane of my existence,” he said.
It’s been several months since he’s been able to get work, and he’s just scraping by financially. He’s signed up with temp agencies, but they always want to know why someone with his education and job experience wants to work a $10-an-hour job.
Shortly after the sex-offender registry went public, someone in his condo complex made up fliers with his photo and apartment number and hung them throughout the building and stuffed them into mail slots. His first reaction was shame and guilt, he said, “but now I’ve got so much anger. I feel sorry for the next person who comes up to my door… because I’m going to be snapping pictures of him, telling him I’m going to be calling the police.
“They just can’t crucify people quick enough,” he said. “So you put all the sex offenders in this group—so now all the evil people are over here and, whew, boy, now the rest of us are safe.”
He’s written a letter he wants to send to state lawmakers. He doesn’t want it to be anonymous, but he’s not mustered the courage to sign his name.
“[There is] a large population of people who want very much to lead healthy, productive, law-abiding lives,” the letter says, “but find it impossible to do so, due to society’s unfair characterization of every registered sex offender has a high-risk sexual predator waiting to attack their children.”
“Do I deserve it?” Mike asks. “I don’t know. I’m not saying I do. People commit crimes and need to be punished, and I’m not saying that it’s—.” He hesitates for a moment.
“I don’t know—I don’t know what the answer is.”
‘I can’t get rid of this’
Last week, for the first time in nearly two decades, “Lisa” (she asked that her name not be disclosed) talked to the person the police would describe as her victim.
“He’s fine,” she said. “He’s, like, ‘Tell me what to do. How can I help? This is ridiculous; I can’t believe you’re still going through this,’” she said he told her.
Seventeen years ago, Lisa’s ex-husband offered her to his nephew as a present for the boy’s 14th birthday. First he gave Lisa, a recovering alcoholic, a glass of vodka.
“Years later, he told me he spiked my drink,” she says. “I’d like to think that so I can live with myself. I don’t know if he would have had to—I was a pretty good drunk.”
Prosecutors later determined that the boy was a few days shy of 14. If he’d been 14, she would have been charged with a less-serious crime.
She pleaded guilty and was ordered into rehab rather than jail time. She was told that if she remained clean for 10 years, she’d get a certificate of rehabilitation and the crime would be expunged from her record.
“And that would be it—it would be over. It would be done,” she said.
“I kept watching the clock, and six months before my 10 years, I went to a lawyer and I said, ‘Here’s all my paperwork. Let’s go through this stuff so I can get rid of this.’ And he said, ‘You can’t do this—the law changed. If you had come to me last month, I could have probably slipped it through.’”
Then she got a letter from the California Department of Justice saying her photo and home address was going up on the state’s public sex-offender registry. Her attorney, public defender Juliana Humphrey, managed to get Lisa off the public registry, but not before her photo was up for two weeks. In that short time, she got a couple of angry phone calls and, last year, a neighbor asked Lisa if she knew that a sex offender used to live at Lisa’s address, unaware that Lisa was that woman.
Last month, she was notified that her record was expunged. “I was walking on air,” she said. Then, another letter arrived saying her exemption from the public registry was no longer valid.
“If they put me on, every e-mail in the neighborhood is going to go off,” she said. Her neighbors are the sort who sign up for alerts.
Sex-offender registries were made available to the public as a community service—to let parents know whom they should tell their kids to avoid. But the information on most state registries is sparse—you get the person’s name, photograph, what they’ve been convicted of and, in most, but not all, cases, their home address. You don’t know how long it’s been since the person committed the crime, if they’re on parole or probation or if they’ve successfully completed those steps.
“Law enforcement knows who they are,” said Phyllis Shess, head of the San Diego County District Attorney’s Sex Offender Unit. But if a member of the public wants more accurate information, he or she would have to look up the person’s court file. “It puts a little bit more responsibility on each of us, of course,” Shess said.
“For awhile they talked about putting categories” on the website, Lisa said, “but we all just seem to be in one big lump. You’re working on people’s fears.”
Lisa’s not able to volunteer at her daughter’s school or chaperone field trips—doing so requires a background check—nor sell her artwork at a local farmers market. That requires a background check, too. If her picture goes public, “I lose everything,” she said.
“You take all the crap, keep your head down and hope that some day it’ll go away.”
BATON ROUGE, La. -- The Louisiana Senate has approved a proposal to impose physical or chemical castration on sex offenders.
The bill by Sen. Nick Gautreaux, D-Meaux, would give judges the option of imposing chemical castration on those convicted of aggravated rape, simple rape and indecent behavior with a juvenile.
Chemical castration would be mandatory on second offenses, and the offender would have the option of choosing physical castration instead.
The bill moves to the House.
[Ed: Previously, the use of castration as a punishment has been used against blacks convicted of rape (often with very thin evidence) in the Jim Crow South as well as against racial or genetic "inferiors" by the German National Socialists. This is an evil policy motivated by the darkest of impulses. Those who would support it have much to examine within themselves.]
VALPARAISO, Indiana
The Porter County Sheriff's Department invests a lot of time and money in maintaining the county's sex offender and violent offender registry.
But starting May 1, the department will charge fees to offenders to recoup some of the costs of keeping track of them.
Offenders -- such as convicted child molesters and rapists who are required to register -- will have to pay a $50 annual registration fee. Offenders who move will pay a $5 change of address fee.
Because the registry is part of a state mandate, Indiana law allows counties to implement the fee. State law also dictates who must register for the local lists.
"We've had to create a position to track and register these offenders. New equipment and manpower is needed to do this, and that's the reason for the fees," said Lt. Chris Eckert, police spokesman.
With 125 to 150 offenders to keep track of, several of whom move each month, the fees are expected to raise $6,000 to $10,000 annually. Ten percent of the fees will go back to the state, and the remainder will remain with the Sheriff's Department.
The registry is designed to let residents know if a sex offender or violent offender is living near them. To see the registry, visit portercountysheriff.com and click on sex offenders. [ED: So now sex offenders are going to have pay for the privilege of having vastly fewer rights and suffering continuous legally sanctioned harassment. This is reminiscent of the Nazis charging the Jews for the damage caused by Kristallnacht in which hundreds (of Jews) were killed and terrorized and their homes and businesses destroyed.]
METHUEN, New Hampshire — A School Committeeman is proposing some schools hang fliers showing the faces of the city's most dangerous sex offenders on its walls to help children protect themselves.
Committeeman Evan Chaisson wants to put these fliers showing Level 3 sex offenders' names, photographs, personal information and crimes inside locked glass cases in the main offices of schools. He wants the posters to be seen by students in grades five and up.
He says it will help students recognize the offenders if they ever see them in person.
"They're at the age where they could understand what a sex offender is," Chaisson said.
Chaisson's comments came after school officials moved a bus stop located in front of the home of a man who, according to police, may have to register as a sex offender.
Methuen has four registered Level 3 offenders, which are considered to be a "high risk" to re-offend, according to the state's Sex Offender Registry Board. The fliers of these men's faces have made it into some public areas, including the Nevins Memorial Library — but not in public schools.
Besides hanging the fliers in a spot where they cannot be tampered with, Chaisson said, teachers could incorporate the information into their curriculum.
"We could incorporate, maybe, into the health programs and their DARE programs and stuff like that," Chaisson said.
"I think it's a great idea," said Robin Gordon, a member of the Methuen High School Parent Teacher Organization. "Too often kids ... they think strangers are going to look different than your next-door neighbor. It could be your next-door neighbor. It could be anybody."
Schools' reaction
Superintendent Jeanne Whitten has "mixed feelings." Officials need to be careful not to frighten children, she said.
"These are scary faces, and the text is very scary," she told the School Committee. "We have to do this with great sensitivity and thoughtfulness."
"But on the other side of the coin," she said during a recent interview, "you want kids to be aware."
Whitten noted principals have binders full of the Level 3 sex offenders' postings. That information is available to school staff, but it's not put on display for students to see.
The principals will soon discuss Chaisson's proposal, Whitten said.
The city has 43 Level 2 sex offenders, which are deemed a "moderate" risk of re-offending. People can get information on those offenders by requesting it from the Police Department or through the Sex Offender Registry Board. Level 1 offenders are considered to have a "low" chance of re-offending, and their information is not publicly available.
Staff members at Nevins Memorial Library — the city's public library — post Level 3 sex offender fliers on the kiosks around the building, near where they hang advertisements for community events.
"The Police Department asked us to a long time ago," said library Director Krista McLeod. "We feels it's public information. We just feel that people need to be informed."
Library patrons have not had much of a reaction to the fliers, at least that McLeod is aware of.
"I'm sure that people see them, but I've never had any concerns one way or another," she said. "For the most part, I think people probably think it's a good idea."
But is it right?
If school officials are going to hang sex offender fliers, they should incorporate some education about predators at the same time, said Doreen Arcus, a University of Massachusetts Lowell associate professor of psychology with a specialty in childhood development.
"To just have these fliers up, I think, runs the risk of being threatening to students," Arcus said. "Unless it's part of a whole effort designed to help them put it in context and to help them develop the good boundaries and good safety skills, and to empower them."
Chaisson agreed.
"At least we're all on the same page," he said. "We all have the children at heart here."
Educators should teach students to recognize potential predators and to know what to do when they encounter one, Arcus said.
It's not good to simply make children think "there's danger lurking on every street corner," and they run the risk of "immobilizing" students if they simply hang fliers without doing anything else, she said.
"Because you don't want kids walking around being scared all the time — that's not good for them," she said.
School staff members need to be mindful that some students are victims of sexual abuse, and teachers often do not know who those students are, Arcus added.
"For a child who has him or herself been sexually molested, to see these faces leering off school walls can be a very stressful experience," she said. "And although we don't like to think that our children have had those histories, there is a substantial number of children who have."
Arcus said she wouldn't like to see the posters hung in schools without being counterbalanced by positive messages about who is there to protect them.
Nancy Scannell, director of policy and planning at the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, raised similar points.
"Obviously, we support, totally, the notion of providing kids and communities with every tool possible to keep themselves safe," she said.
But efforts like this can have unintended consequences when "they're implemented piecemeal," she said.
"We're very concerned about the possibility that there could be a posting of a family member of a child in the school," Scannell added.
The society believes parents are best suited to discuss sex offenders with their children. Also, students can get a false sense that the sex offenders on the fliers are the only people they need to be aware of, Scannell said.
She said Chaisson's proposal "requires some discussion" and there is no easy answer on what is best to do.
Veteran School Committee member Robert Vogler said hanging fliers should be part of a broad educational effort.
"It has to be done not to instill a certain amount of fear in the kids," he said.
The state Department of Education could not say whether other schools have posted these fliers in their buildings, saying it was a local issue.
[Ed: Run children! Run for your lives! The boogeymen are coming to get you!]
New South Wales, Australia
In the past years, 10 men have been kept in NSW prisons months after they finished doing their time. Their sentences have expired but the Government brands them "high-risk, hard-core" offenders, and the courts have ordered further detention.
All are serious sex offenders - men with a long history of raping or sexually assaulting women, girls or boys in abhorrent crimes.
It has been a year since the introduction of the Serious Sex Offender legislation, which allows the detention or close supervision of serious sex offenders past their release date "for the safety and protection of the community". The legislation is designed to encourage them to undertake treatment, which is believed to reduce the chance they will reoffend.
The new law has caused a debate over the best way to deal with sex offenders - whether they should be freed at the end of their sentence, locked up forever or released only after successful treatment.
The Government defends its tough stance but others are unconvinced about the law's effectiveness. The real test will come after those men who have agreed to treatment seek release.
Already the Government has applied to keep two of the men, who have enrolled in the recommended treatment program, in jail for up to five more years when their detention ends.
When it was introduced, the Government said the scheme was designed for "a handful" of serious offenders who had not tried to rehabilitate in prison. The intent was to allow them to be placed under long-term supervision, or "in only the worst cases, kept in custody".
Only one of the 10 men kept in prison since the law was introduced - Neville Francis Hadson - is living in the community under strict supervision, after four extra months in prison.
Another, Raymond Barry Cornwall, was released on supervision last December but removed his electronic anklet within an hour of being freed and is serving a sentence for this breach.
The first of the men subjected to the new law, Kenneth Davidson Tillman, was kept under surveillance by private investigators from 6am to 6.30pm for 12 days when released, before he was returned to detention after an appeal.
Those who have been detained are expected to finish approved treatment programs, available only in custody, to reduce their likelihood of reoffending before they are considered for release.
But Tillman's case has reportedly been taken up by the UN Human Rights Committee. The legislation has strong opposition from the civil rights lobby.
The public has "charged emotional views" about sex offenders, says Cameron Murphy, president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties. "Many of the measures sound good, make people feel good, but I'm struggling to see how they in effect assist the community," he says.
Detention is additional punishment which undermines the criminal justice system, Murphy says, and it is the human right of prisoners to know their maximum prison term at the time of sentence. In effect, people are being incarcerated not for something they have done, but something they might do in the future.
Not so, says Howard Brown from the victims support group VOCAL. They are not being punished for possible future offences but for their failure to seek treatment in the past. In a democracy "the needs of the greater [community] sometimes supersede the needs of the individual", he says.
Murphy counters that, if we want sex offenders detained for life, we should debate this publicly, but the full punishment should be known at the time of sentence.
It is not the first time the NSW Government has detained people past their sentence. However, the legislation to detain the killer Gregory Wayne Kable in 1994 was later ruled unconstitutional.
Legislation to detain serious offenders in Western Australia withstood a High Court appeal in 2004, against the dissenting opinion of Justice Michael Kirby. He invoked the spectre of 1930s Germany, before saying: "In Australia, such punishment … is not available for crimes that are feared, anticipated or predicted to occur in the future, on evidence that is notoriously unreliable and otherwise would be inadmissible, and by people who do not have the gift of prophesy."
Queensland and Victoria also have legislation allowing for the detention of serious offenders.
NSW's deputy senior public defender, Andrew Haesler, SC, says Victoria leads the way with its program of preparing offenders for release, with planned and funded supervision and psychiatric treatment.
Some states in the US provide for mandatory "chemical castration" - medication that reduces testosterone levels, hence suppressing sex drive. Others have followed New Jersey in adopting "Megan's law", which allows for the public to be notified about the location of released sex offenders.
In Britain, sex offenders are sometimes kept under strict surveillance. Canada and New Zealand have similar schemes.
The NSW law has been criticised as an example of the Government wanting to be seen as tough on crime, but not spending the money to support it or offering alternative approaches.
Sex offenders are being targeted, suggests Dr Stephen Allnutt, a psychiatrist and conjoined senior lecturer at the University of NSW, because the public find their offences "quite abhorrent". But statistics show they actually reoffend less often than other criminals.
Among those classified in the worst category of sex offenders, 45 per cent will reoffend within 10 years. But within only two years 47 per cent of other offenders will have returned to prison, the Supreme Court was told in one of the cases.
Probably those most likely to commit further crimes when they come out of prison are untreated drug offenders, says Haesler, who has represented serious sex offenders fighting detention orders.
"I don't condone what my clients do, just because I am a defence lawyer. But we've got it wrong in locking them up for ever and ever."
The Government stands by its decision to target sex offenders only. "High-risk sex offenders who have not made any attempt to rehabilitate whilst in prison pose a very real threat to the public," says a spokesman for the Attorney-General, John Hatzistergos.
While many factors turn someone into a sex offender, the profiles of the 10 men detained under the new law have similarities: alcohol abuse, relationship problems, broken homes, intimacy issues and - often - being the victim of sexual abuse.
Statistically, someone might fall into the group of high-risk offenders, sharing many of the risk factors, but there is no way of telling whether they will reoffend, says Linda Valenta, president of the Australian & New Zealand Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abuse.
Asked if she would mind living next to a known sex offender, Valenta says abuse is close to home for many people. "A lot of people probably already do live next door to people who are abusing."
But treatment is proven to reduce recidivism rates by between 15 and 30 per cent, she says.
Brown is less optimistic, comparing sex offenders to alcoholics, who are never cured but can sometimes abstain.
Some psychologists believe treatment doesn't work, and argue that more treated than untreated offenders reoffend because they lie when they realise they can "graduate" only if they parrot the lines fed to them by therapists.
But even those pressured into treatment often change their attitude and receive real benefits from it, Valenta says.
Research shows recidivism is high for treatment dropouts. Interrupted treatment may make offenders worse by introducing them to bad role models and a range of new, sexually deviant behaviours and fantasies.
However, another study found those who deny their offences and accept no treatment reoffend less than others who seek treatment.
Allnutt warns about the reliability of such studies because for ethical reasons there are no control groups that receive "placebo" treatment.
The Custody-based Intensive Treatment program runs in the prison system for offenders deemed to present the highest risk of reoffending. They do no chores and do not socialise; their sole focus is the program.
David Bright, a research fellow at the University of NSW, helped set up the program in 1999 and led changes to it in 2005. He says the course aims to change prisoners' risk factors.
"Men who offend against children, for example, will often have attitudes that allow them to reoffend - that children enjoy sexual contact with adults, or that children or teenagers are allowing them or consenting to sexual activity," he says.
"We can look at changing their attitudes towards women or towards children and sex."
Most men who agree to treatment are not doing it because they are dissatisfied with their lives or remorseful. They seek parole or better conditions. Even so, many of them have to wait for a vacancy: the program only has 40 places.
" The program has gained momentum and gained credibility, particularly with the new legislation, which I think that has motivated (in inverted commas) a lot more men to seek the program or at least to agree to it," Bright says.
A study of 104 offenders who completed the program and were released found they reoffended #at less than the rate expected, given their risk factors.
A Government spokesman claims research has shown the program reduces sexual offending by 75 per cent. Some of the 10 men targeted by the legislation had previously refused to enrol in the program. Others had started it, but then dropped out.
[Ed: The English-speaking world continues to lead the pack of sex hysterics worldwide!]
LONDON (AP) -- The British government wants to ban convicted pedophiles from using social networking Web sites such as Facebook, the Home Office said Friday.
The plan involves forcing sex offenders to give any e-mail address they use to police, who will then ask the Web sites to block their access, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said.
Smith said the proposal is aimed at sending out the message that the Internet is ''not a no-go area when it comes to law enforcement.''
''We are changing the law ... so that we have got better control over the way in which child sex offenders are able to use the Internet,'' Smith said on GMTV.
The government wants to prevent pedophiles from using social networking Web sites to groom children to be sexual abuse victims, according to the Home Office.
Under the proposed legislation, it would be a crime punishable by up to five years in prison for a convicted child sex offender to use an e-mail address that has not been registered with police, a Home Office spokesman said on condition of anonymity in line with government policy.
However, the government acknowledges it has yet to work out the details of how the plan would work.
The proposal faces many hurdles, including the fact that anyone can instantly create a new e-mail address online and that Facebook, MySpace and most other popular social networking sites are based outside Britain.
In addition to the new proposal, British police already have a range of means to monitor and assess the threat convicted sex offenders pose over the Internet, including obtaining warrants to search convicted pedophiles' home to make a risk assessment, the spokesman said.
The legislation is expected to be put before parliament by the end of the year and will apply to the more than 30,000 sex offenders already on the register as well as any new convictions, the Home Office said. [Ed: Further evidence, as if more is needed, that the United Kingdom is going down the road of hysteria-fueled fascism. See the story below about British vigilantism.]
SURREY ADVERTISER (U.K.)
A POPULAR children’s entertainer, who was exposed as a sex offender this week, has fled after his Leatherhead home was trashed by vigilantes.
Kevin Hart, whose stage name is Billy Wand, was arrested by Surrey Police last year after pornographic images of children were found on his computer – for which he was punished with just a caution.
This week, locals took the law into their own hands and vandalised the 49-year-old’s Kingston Road home, smashing his windows with rocks and spray-painting the word “Paedo” in red over his front door and on the side of the house.
Mr Hart, who appeared at the TV programme Blue Peter’s 40th birthday celebration and was signed up to help with the Government’s Sure Start scheme for children under five, was nowhere to be seen this week.
In the past he has worked at events across Surrey as a children’s entertainer and magician and even performed his famous Punch and Judy show in front of dozens of children at Wotton Village fete in August last year – just a month before his arrest.
Police officers raided his home and seized his computer in September after tracking him down though his credit card details.
A Surrey Police spokesman said: “A 49-year-old man from Leatherhead was arrested on September 5, 2007, on suspicion of making indecent images of children.
"On Friday, October 12, 2007, he was cautioned and placed on the sex offenders’ register for two years.
“Taking into account his previous record and the number of pictures found, the CPS found it appropriate to give a caution in this case.”
He would not comment on the number or seriousness of the images found.
The police force would not comment directly about the attack on the magician’s home this week but said its Public Protection Risk Management Unit (PPRMU) was looking into the case as a whole.
A spokesman added: “Surrey Police works with the Probation Service, Prison Service and other agencies under Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) to manage the risk posed to the public by sexual and violent offenders who have been rel-eased from prison on licence or are registered sex offenders.
“We cannot discuss the circumstances of individual cases but every person subject to MAPPA receives a full risk assessment, which takes into account the perceived risk to local people and the views of the community."
[Ed: In the midst of a witchhunt even greater in scale than that underway in the U.S., comes this tale from our English neighbors that serves as an additional, chiliing, confirmation of the obvious purposes to which "public shaming" and public registries are being put. It would seem the level of hysteria in the U.K. has overtaken all reason and that the mobs may now give full expression to their most vile instincts. But the U.S. is not far behind...]
Already under pressure to make reforms, the Atascadero facility is now dealing with the death of Lawrence Paul Rael. Another patient has been charged with murder.
By Lee Romney
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 4, 2008
ATASCADERO, CALIF. -- — When Lawrence Paul Rael was involuntarily committed to Atascadero State Hospital 10 years ago, his parents considered the placement appropriate.
Born prematurely and with a severe hearing loss, Rael had been in and out of mental health facilities from the time he was a child, with a tentative diagnosis of autism. At 18, he molested two boys and was sent to prison and then to Atascadero.
"We were comfortable with the fact that he was somewhere where he was watched," said Rael's father, Lorenzo, of Rancho Cucamonga. "He was supposedly in a hospital. We thought at least that he wouldn't get hurt."
But early Sunday morning, the slight 37-year-old man was found dead in his bed with a towel around his neck -- the victim of the first homicide in the Central Coast facility's 54-year history.
On Thursday, fellow patient Richard Earl McKee, 44, was arraigned in San Luis Obispo County Superior Court on one count of murder in Rael's death and one count of assault with a deadly weapon in connection with an attack on another patient.
The death of Rael, who was well-liked by patients and staff, has deeply shaken the hospital. For the last two years, Atascadero has struggled to transform its approach to patient care under a federal consent judgment that mandated sweeping changes.
The judgment applies to four of the five state mental hospitals and requires them to address issues of patient safety, over-medication and excessive use of restraints. It also calls for changes aimed at more thoroughly involving patients in their own recovery.
In the midst of the transition, Atascadero -- like the state's other mental hospitals -- has had to contend with an exodus of experienced staff members to higher-paying prison jobs. An emergency move to raise salaries has eased recruiting woes in recent months but has brought an influx of staff members inexperienced with the criminal mentally ill who populate Atascadero.
The hospital treats a volatile mix of patients, with hardened predators often housed with more vulnerable residents.
Staff members have repeatedly complained that pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice to reduce the use of restraints and antipsychotic medications has contributed to an increase in assaults by patients.
"We can't even protect our patients and that's our job," one psychiatric technician said, adding that one resident greases his face to deflect punches and pads his body by dressing in several shirts and pairs of pants. "They can't exactly get well when they're constantly in fear."
Meanwhile, staff members contend that increased paperwork requirements have detracted from time spent building the kind of relationships with patients that can defuse violence.
The hospital's executive director, Jon DeMorales, called the death "devastating" and said the hospital is planning a "top to bottom analysis" to find ways to enhance patient safety.
He said the hospital is considering patient-operated bedroom door locks that could protect them from predators while they sleep, surveillance video cameras, enhanced training and supervision for novice staff, and night-vision goggles to aid in rounds.
"Our mission is evaluation, treatment and protection," DeMorales said, "and in that last regard we failed."
DeMorales acknowledged an increase in patient violence on the evening shift in recent months and said administrators were studying the causes. Though the transition to a system of more rigorous documentation has been hard on the staff, DeMorales said, he called it the best path to improved patient care and denied that it had detracted from relationship building.
Convicted of molesting two girls, McKee arrived from prison at Atascadero in 2005, categorized as a "mentally disordered offender," meaning he had a severe mental illness such as schizophrenia that contributed directly to his criminal behavior. Court records show that when he stopped his medication in prison he had become hostile.
Last year, a hospital spokesman said, his status was changed to "sexually violent predator." Patients said McKee developed a reputation for abusively threatening patients who he believed to be child molesters or homosexuals.
He was bounced from unit to unit -- housed mostly with other sex offenders, who generally do not suffer from the types of severe mental illness that require intensive psychiatric care.
Last month, McKee lost a legal appeal challenging his confinement, records show. He became increasingly distraught, abusive and paranoid, patients said.
"A lot of guys had expressed concern about him," said Bill Langhorne, 51, a fellow patient with McKee and Rael on Atascadero's Unit 22. "He was talking to himself, making threats, pacing up and down, making lists."
On Saturday, Rael stayed up past midnight watching a vampire movie in the unit's "dayroom" and quietly playing his Game Boy, Langhorne said. About 3 a.m., a staff member heard screams and found McKee assaulting another patient in his bed. McKee was placed in seclusion. But it was not until shortly before 8 a.m. that Rael's battered body was discovered in his room.
DeMorales said logs show that staff members conducted mandatory patient checks every 20 minutes. However, Rael's attorney, San Bernardino deputy public defender Jeff Lowry, questioned how they could have failed to notice Rael's body. More thorough patient checks were in order given McKee's assault on the other patient, he said.
"Staff totally dropped the ball," said a distraught Lowry, who described Rael as "a really nice kid" who had been nicknamed "Shaky" because of a neurological tremor.
Patients and staff described Rael as "kind," "mild-mannered" and "benign." He loved science-fiction and Stephen King novels, his father said, and hospital records show that he tithed a portion of his meager monthly earnings from his canteen job to a North Carolina televangelist.
"He was everybody's kid brother. He was everybody's nephew," said Ron Barrett, 53, a convicted sex offender who was at Atascadero with Rael until February. "I miss that boy so much already. My heart is broken."
By Jon Murray
jon.murray@indystar.com
The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana filed a lawsuit today challenging a new provision of the state sex offender law that will require those who register to agree to searches of their computers.
Passed earlier this year by the Indiana General Assembly, Senate Bill 258, which takes effect July 1, addresses several issues related to sex offenders. One is that when a sex offender begins probation, parole or enrolls in the state's sex offender registry, they must sign a consent form agreeing to searches of computers or Internet-enabled devices at any time. Also, they must agree to install software that monitors Internet usage at their own expense.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Indianapolis, says placing the restriction on sex offenders who aren't in probation or still on parole violates the U.S. Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. Sex offenders generally must register for 10 years after their release from prison, though some must register for life.
"It seems to be, in our estimation, a pretty clear violation of the fourth amendment when you're not on parole or probation," said Ken Falk, the ACLU of Indiana's legal director.
The ACLU is not challenging the requirement to consent to computer searches as a condition of parole or probation. The lawsuit names the prosecutors and sheriffs of every Indiana county and the Indianapolis mayor, since they are responsible for maintaining the registry and prosecuting violations.
It filed the suit on behalf of a Marion County man using the name "John Doe" and a Scott County man, Steven Morris, 41, who has convictions for child molesting and sexual misconduct with a minor. Both are required to register for life as sex offenders and have concerns about the privacy of financial and business information on their computers, the suit says.
BY BRIAN BRUEGGEMANN
News-Democrat
A parent suspected that a man attending an Edwardsville school carnival might be a registered sex offender. So the parent left the event, found the man's picture on an Internet registry, and called police, officials said Tuesday.
The parent's actions resulted in Madison County prosecutors on Tuesday charging Michael E. Cox, 40, of East Alton, with unlawful presence in a school zone by a sex offender.
Cox was arrested at 8:50 p.m. Tuesday at his residence, and remains jailed on $20,000 bail. The charge is a felony and carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison.
School and law-enforcement authorities said Cox attended the Woodland Elementary School carnival Friday with a girlfriend, who has children there. The parent who recognized Cox as possibly being a registered sex offender approached Cox's girlfriend about the matter, Superintendent Ed Hightower said.
By the time the parent had called police, Cox and his girlfriend had left the carnival.
State law prohibits registered sex offenders from being on or near school grounds. But Hightower said school personnel have no way of knowing whether someone attending a school event is a sex offender.
"This individual understands the rules. He shouldn't have been there," Hightower said.
In February 2006, Cox was sentenced to two years in prison for fondling himself in the presence of a minor at an Alton pool.
[Ed: The "Felony" with which this man is being charged dramatically illustrates the sea change which has turned American jurisprudence on its head in recent years, to wit: Acts committed by those thrown into one group of society are now considered, and prosecuted, as "criminal" while others within society are allowed to freely exercise that act as a right".
We have turned a corner: Beware! ]
By DANIEL BLACKBURN
The man suspected of strangling a fellow Atascadero State Hospital (ASH) patient to death with a towel over the weekend was on the losing end of an important, recent California Fourth District Court of Appeal decision upholding the constitutionality of Proposition 83, the so-called Jessica’s Law.
The murder and assault occurred as a federal judge in another case was demanding ASH officials show cause why they should not be held in contempt of court in the aftermath of a finding that two employees violated the civil rights of a patient.
In a prior case involving a similar failure to protect a patient, a federal judge ruled that two ASH employees violated one patient’s civil rights and ordered the pair to pay $1,000 to that SVP patient. The judge now wants to know why the ASH employees have not yet done so.
U.S. Central District Judge S. James Sotero ruled in December that employees Melissa A. Roper and Michael C. Groom were found to have made “a substantial departure from professional judgment, practice and standards” and thus were responsible for injuries suffered by patient Theodric Van Smith in assaults on him by other two patients.
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