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    Headlines About the Registry Hot Off the Presses

     
    Table of Contents

    No to a Nat´l Child Abuse Registry
    By posted by alex <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 06.09.2010
    Link to this news item: [00268]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00268, No to a Nat´l Child Abuse Registry,and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm This is a very important editorial from a major newspaper. Things are slowly turning our way!
    alex
    --------------------------------

    Don't create a national child abuse registry

    The Des Moins, Iowa, Register's editorial • September 6, 2010

    Washington lawmakers give life to some well-intentioned but dangerous ideas. Among the worst in recent history: a national child abuse registry.

    In 2006, they required the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to establish a national database of abusers. Most states maintain such registries, but Congress wanted a central database so states could more easily share information about those who may be a threat to children.

    That may sound like a good step, but it's not. And we know that because the same Congress also ordered a feasibility study for the registry, which has yet to actually be created. That study identified numerous problems - problems that never occurred to lawmakers when they were writing the law.




    Child abuse databases are a mess at the state level and would be an even bigger mess at the national level. The entire idea should be abandoned, and states should be questioning the value and constitutionality of their own lists of abusers.

    The Register's editorial board has expressed many concerns about Iowa's child abuse registry over the past year. People lack due process rights before social workers place them on a list that can prevent them from getting jobs. There are 50,000 names on the registry here, more than some states with larger populations. Innocent Iowans wait more than a year to have their names removed from the list. Recently, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled the state wrongly placed an Iowa City woman on the registry.

    Multiply such concerns and court challenges by the more than 40 states that maintain registries. A national registry could be a disaster - particularly because the 2006 law ordering its creation is so vague.

    For example, states aren't required to submit information, so a federal registry would be "of little practical value," according to the federal study. It's also unclear who could access such a list and why, raising questions about whether it would even be useful in protecting children. There are questions about the cost.

    Washington lawmakers also limited information about perpetrators who would be placed on the list to only their names. So if your name is John Smith and a guy with the same name elsewhere abused a child, whoever is looking at the list may think it's you. This would result in many false positives and false negatives when the database is checked, according to the study.

    And then there's the matter of due process. States have different standards for placing people on their registries. Whereas one may require abuse to be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt," others, including Iowa, require only a "preponderance" of evidence. The federal government would have to set its own minimum due process protections, which may conflict with those of states.

    In just the past few years, courts have found state registries unconstitutional because alleged abusers have no opportunity to defend themselves. The case of a California couple who say they were wrongly placed on the list - and had their children placed in foster care - is scheduled to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court this fall.

    State-based registries are riddled with troubles. The last thing anyone needs is a bigger, national list.
     

    Walling Off Sex Offenders from a Zoo
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 06.09.2010
    Link to this news item: [00267]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00267, Walling off Sex Offenders, and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm, and i¨ll send them to the man who sent this in.
    alex
    ----------------
    URL
    http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20109060310

    Barrier will divide Blank Park Zoo, sex offenders

    By WILLIAM PETROSKI • bpetroski@dmreg.com • September 6, 2010

    Construction could start as soon as this fall on a $1 million barrier to separate sex offenders housed at Fort Des Moines from thousands of people who visit the Blank Park Zoo.

    The Fort Des Moines community correctional facility, adjacent to the zoo, houses 279 offenders, including 15 sex offenders. Some offenders have already spent time in prison; others are there as a condition of probation.

    The Iowa Legislature appropriated $1 million for the barrier earlier this year. That decision came after lawmakers rescinded $18 million in state funding to construct a new correctional facility northeast of Des Moines where the sex offenders were to have been transferred. The spending cut occurred as legislators trimmed an already tight state budget.




    Mark Vukovich, the zoo's chief executive officer, said last week the barrier will be included in the design of a $15 million zoo expansion project starting this fall and to be completed in phases through May 2013. The work will include moving the zoo entrance about a quarter-mile north of where it is now.

    So far, Vukovich said, there have been no troubles with offenders entering the zoo grounds. "We have had some occasionally stumble in, but there have not been any issues that I am aware of," he said.

    But as the zoo expands farther north, moving closer to the Fort Des Moines correctional facility and drawing more children and their families, the need for a barrier will increase, Vukovich said. The zoo drew about 400,000 patrons last year and is expected to reach 500,000 annually after the expansion.

    Work on the barrier should begin this fall or sometime next year, depending on the progress of the expansion project, he said. The barrier's south side will include an earthen berm with trees and shrubs to match zoo exhibits. The barrier's north side, which won't be seen by most zoo-goers, will probably have a security fence.

    The Blank Park Zoo, which opened in 1966, and the Fort Des Moines Correctional Facility, which opened in 1970, have coexisted for decades with relatively few conflicts.

    But some Des Moines south-side residents complained last year after Michael McGill, a sex offender, was slated to be sent to Fort Des Moines. McGill, now 51, was quickly returned to prison after threatening to commit new sex crimes. He is now at the Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison.

    Jo Corigliano, president of the South Side Revitalization Partnership, said last week she is unhappy that sex offenders are still at Fort Des Moines. Constructing a barrier isn't a good solution, she said.

    "Heavens no. I am not satisfied with that. I think it is misguided and short-sighted," Corigliano said.

    She believes all sex offenders should be removed from Fort Des Moines, although she doesn't object to other offenders being housed there for minor crimes.

    State Sen. Matt McCoy, D-Des Moines, said the barrier is a short-term fix. He believes the Fort Des Moines correctional facility is incompatible with the south-side neighborhood.

    Over the next five years, McCoy said state officials should develop plans to relocate the Fort Des Moines facility to an area that is largely industrial and away from homes. He said the Fort Des Moines correctional facility is aging, and it would be more cost effective to build a new facility elsewhere.

    State officials have estimated the relocation cost at $35 million to $40 million.

    "Obviously, this is going to involve a great deal of money. So we need a plan and we need to determine how we are going to fund it," McCoy said.

    Fred Scaletta, a spokesman for the Iowa Department of Corrections, said prison officials intend to request state funding during the 2011 legislative session to build a new 170-bed community corrections facility in the Des Moines area. The plan anticipates the existing Fort Des Moines facility would remain open to help address a shortage of beds for community corrections programs. The proposal must first win approval from the Iowa Board of Corrections and the governor before it can be submitted to lawmakers, he said.
     

    Sex Offender Rights
    By posted by Donna <rsolmissouri@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 05.09.2010
    Link to this news item: [00266]
     
    Refer in comments to News item 00266, Sex Offender Rights, and send to rsolmissouri@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm . We´ve put up the URL for this tv news program with a video - excellent local news opinion frm the Buckley Report!
    --------------
    http://www.myfox8.com/wghp-story-br-sex-offenders-100824,0,4641486.story

    Sex Offender Rights
    Myfox8, Winston-Salem, NC
    Sept. 5, 2010

    There are thousands of registered sex offenders across North Carolina.

    With registries designed to keep track of those offenders, some former offenders wonder if there is a way to atone for their mistakes and get a place back in society.

    In this edition of The Buckley Report, Bob Buckley investigates whether all sex offenses are equal and how former sex offenders are treated after they have done their time.
    (Go to the URL to see the video)
     

    Barely a Teenager & Marked For Life!
    By tonia <toniat@sbcglobal.net>
    Posted on 03.09.2010
    Link to this news item: [00265]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00265 and send to toniat@sbglobal.net, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm .
    I´ll send them along to our Illoinois contact person, Tonia!
    ------------------------------
    BARELY A TEENAGER & MARKED FOR LIFE!
    This very important article echoes what RSOL and solresearch.org have been saying for several years now. This is outrageous! We urge all RSOL participants to write In These Times to congratulate them on publishing this important article, and to share it widely.
    alex
    ----------------
    Barely a Teenager and Marked for Life
    Federal law requiring juvenile sex offenders to register as predators for life does more harm than good
    By Caitlin Dickson
    IN THESE TIMES
    Sept. 3, 2010
    URL
    http://inthesetimes.com/article/6334/barely_a_teenager_and_marked_for_life

    Under federal law, a 14-year-old boy who has sexual relations with a 13-year-old girl could be branded for life.

    Juvenile justice experts argue that therapy is the most effective way to deter future offenses and that lifetime registration harms juveniles’ chances of reintegrating into society.

    In 1999, Anthony, a 13-year-old boy who weighed 350 pounds, told his four-year-old cousin to expose herself. Anthony, now 24, swears he did not touch her. Nonetheless, her father pressed charges and Anthony was found delinquent for assault with intent to commit sexual abuse, sentenced to sex offender treatment, and assigned a lifetime spot on Iowa’s public sex offender registry.

    Ten years after beginning treatment at Woodward Academy in Woodward, Iowa, Anthony, who asked that his last name not be published, finds it impossible to lead a normal life. Permanently associated with dangerous pedophiles and pathological rapists, his childhood mistake has hindered his ability to find work, housing and societal acceptance. Although he left Woodward when he was 18, Iowa’s residency restriction at that time—which barred sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school—forced him to leave his family’s home in Des Moines for a trailer with no electricity on land owned by his father in rural Osceola, Iowa.

    Anthony’s plight could soon become common among all of America’s juvenile sex offenders, who in 2009 were responsible for one-third of all sex offenses against minors in the United States. Following the 2006 passage of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), the federal government instructed all U.S. states and Indian territories to adopt a new sex offender registry system that includes juvenile offenders. But at the July 2009 deadline, not one state had complied.

    Iowa has long required juvenile sex offenders to register their crimes online. And it is moving closer to the federally mandated system—in 2009 Iowa updated its laws to look more like SORNA. As other states consider compliance—the Justice Department has set a new July 2011 deadline—the impact of Iowa’s already strict registry system offers a window into what adulthood might look like for juvenile offenders around the country.

    Therapeutic punishment

    The new federal legislation organizes sex offenders into three tiers, categorized by the severity of their crime. The tier to which a defendant is assigned determines the punishment and duration of registration. The highest, tier III, covers the most heinous offenses. Anyone 14 or older who has sexually offended against a child 13 or younger is put in tier III, and required to register for life.

    Critics of the juvenile registry system believe that tier III requirements are unnecessarily harsh when applied to all juveniles. Only 10 percent of young offenders will re-offend, according to the Center for Sex Offender Management. Yet young offenders who commit crimes against even younger peers are stuck in the most serious category.

    Juvenile justice experts argue that therapy, not registration, is the most effective way to deter future offenses and that lifetime registration harms juveniles’ chances of reintegrating into society. All juveniles judged delinquent (the equivalent of being convicted in juvenial court) for sex crimes in Iowa are required to undergo treatment. Woodward Academy, the largest of three sex offender treatment facilities in the state, receives kids from all over the country.

    “These kids are young enough that we can teach them right from wrong,” says Tonna Lawrenson, the academy’s program director. Woodward’s long-term sex offender treatment program treats juveniles whose offenses range from what experts call “Romeo and Juliet”-style statutory rapes (where the sex is consensual, but because of the participants’ ages, illegal) to flashing, fondling and forcing younger children to expose themselves.

    As is the case with many teen offenders, Anthony’s act against his cousin was not random, but stemmed from his own childhood abuse. When he was nine, a 16-year-old boy sodomized him and threatened to kill his mother if anyone found out.

    Children act out sexually for a variety of other reasons. Anthony Rodriguez, therapist and founder of The Men’s Center in Davenport, Iowa, is one of four sex addiction experts in the state and has worked extensively with sexually abusive youth. He says a lack of attachment between parent and child can cause children a great amount of anxiety—an anxiety that is relieved when they do something like look at pornography or touch someone inappropriately.

    Lawrenson also sees many young offenders exhibit behavior she says is not natural, but learned. “I’ve never believed that a child is born to be a sex offender,” she says.

    Stephen Draminski agrees. “They become what we call ‘sexually reactive,’” says Draminski, who leads a sex offender treatment group at the Robert Young Center in Rock Island, Ill. “They act out sexually in different ways, replaying their abuse over and over again.” He says poor social skills combined with sexual curiosity can also prompt an offense.

    Draminski’s group therapy focuses heavily on empathy, teaches kids to manage destructive emotions, and promotes healthy relationships and sexual behavior. At Woodward, intensive one-on-one therapy allows kids to discuss things that might embarrass them in front of peers. In one of these individual sessions, Anthony finally revealed his own abuse to Lawrenson, years after it happened.

    ‘Big enough to commit the crime’?

    Those opposed to lifetime juvenile registration suggest that it does not prevent future offenses, since sexual abuse is most often committed not by strangers but by someone in, or close to, the family. “Registration gives people a false sense of security, a false sense of hope,” says Randy Smith, who reviewed adult and juvenile sex offenders for courts in Chicago and Ohio.

    But despite the efforts of advocates, the futures of young offenders like Anthony are in the hands of elected officials unlikely to oppose a law that claims to protect children from sexual abuse. Smith says, “A lot of sex offender laws come from the six o’clock news, from the random person who buries the kids in the woods.”

    Iowa State Senator Jerry Behn, who authored the state’s original residency restriction in 2002, admits the law overreached when it applied to all sex offenders, rather than only dangerous pedophiles. But, Behn says, “anyone who votes to fix this now is going to be viewed as light on sexual predators.”

    Erin Lovejoy, a detective who tracks sex offenders for the Des Moines Police Department, admits registration is more effective at quelling public fears than preventing offenses. “It’s not going to prevent an act from occurring by any means. Nothing will do that unless they’re locked up,” she says.

    Anthony spent one year in prison after moving into his mother’s Des Moines home in 2007 to care for her as she died. This was a violation of Iowa’s harsh residency restrictions since she lived within 2,000 feet of a school. The 2,000-foot restriction was amended in 2009, but Iowa still prohibits registered sex offenders from working at or visiting places frequented by children, such as schools, public pools, libraries and fairs.

    Iowa Associate Juvenile Judge Constance Cohen believes employment and residency restrictions should factor in successful treatment and behavioral change. She says, “If you paint with such a broad brush, it will eliminate opportunities for these kids.”

    The new 2009 Iowa law also limits the power juvenile court judges once had to waive registration, thus bringing the state closer to compliance with SORNA. Cohen says this will force more juveniles to register whether or not they are at risk to re-offend. Behn, however, opposes judicial discretion. “If a person is big enough to commit the crime,” he says, “they’re big enough to pay for it.”

    Those who work closest with juvenile offenders maintain that the negative effects of lifetime registration are well-documented. But it is politicians like Behn who set the rules for juvenile sex offenders. This means Anthony, who at 13—like so many others—was “big enough to commit the crime,” will spend the rest of his life paying for it. 
     

    Chelsea´s Law PASSES UNANIMOUSLY IN CA
    By posted by Alex <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 02.09.2010
    Link to this news item: [00264]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 264, Chelsea´s Law Passes Unanimously in CA, and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm . This is incredible - for this to pass without opposition after so many good articles in the CA media, and so much organizing. We have a lot of work to do. See also comments after the article.
    alex
    --------------------
    URL
    http://www.news10.net/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=93095&catid=29

    SACRAMENTO, CA - A bill that calls for a one strike, life in prison penalty without parole for the most egregious sexual offenders is headed to the governor's desk.


    Assembly Bill 1844, also know as Chelsea's Law for 17-year-old Chelsea King, murdered by convicted sex offender John Gardner earlier this year, also calls for increased penalties for forcible sex crimes; lengthier parole terms for those who target children under age 14; and restrictions on sex offenders entering parks.

    The measure also includes the implementation of a risk assessment evaluation for sex offenders and for those risk scores to be publicly available on the Megan's Law website.

    Gov. Schwarzenegger has previously said he would sign AB 1844. The measure passed the Assembly unanimously 72-0.
    -----------------------
    Comments
    Afraid and Worried
    Kimberley
    -------------
     

    Campus Restaurants & Subway Fires S.O.s
    By Posted by many, including Tonia <toniat@sbcglobal.net>
    Posted on 02.09.2010
    Link to this news item: [00263]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No 00263 and send to toniat@sbcglobal.net, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm .
    Many of our state organizers, including of course Kimberley in Indiana, have sent us this unfortunate story. Please note that the Subway manger and owner were not happy, but were forced into this by Indiana law. We´ve had many comments - so many RSOL leaders have been fired in similar situations. See comments after the article from Kimberley, the Indiana contact person in the state where Purdue is located, Richard in Tennessee, among others. Sorry if I didn´t identify everyone. All our state organizers were weighing in on this one. Unfortunately, there´s not much justice when it comes to getting fired in the USA - most of us are naieve in thinking somehow we have rights not to be terminated unfairly. It appears this is seldom the case!
    alex
    NOTE - we are posting TWO versions of this important story
    (thanks to Tony Vanderwall of the RSOL Minutemen for sending the second one. The minutemen and the Responders are RSOL´s response teams for these kinds of stories. for information, email vandrwall@gamil.com)
    -----------------------------


    Purdue University Exponent
    By Ashley Mikutis
    Assistant Campus Editor
    09/02/2010
    URL
    http://www.purdueexponent.org/index.php?module=article&story_id=22253


    Three convicted sex offenders depicted in fliers distributed through a few residence halls were fired Monday after it was determined they were in violation of their parole.

    William Reynard, 32, Rusty DeWitt, 30; and Floyd Palmer, 57, are all registered sex offenders. According to the Indiana Sex Offender Registry, Reynard was convicted of sexual misconduct with a minor in August 2005. DeWitt was convicted in May 2003 for criminal deviate conduct and Palmer was convicted in January 1995 for child molesting and sexual misconduct with a minor.

    Housing and Food Services distributed fliers earlier this week to McCutcheon and Hillenbrand halls after receiving information about the individuals from the Purdue Police Department. The intention of HFS was to inform students where the individuals were employed so that the students could be extra careful since the location was close to campus.

    Reynard, DeWitt and Palmer had been employed by the Purdue West Subway for over a year before the controversy arose over their employment.

    The reason given for the termination of service on Monday of the three men, employed at that time by the Purdue West Subway, was simply that the restaurant is too close to a park on the west side of campus.

    Indiana law allows sex offenders to work or visit an area within 1,000 feet of a public place; however, some parole conditions may have other stipulations.

    Purdue police chief John Cox said it went against their parole agreements to work that closely to a public park.

    “The problem was that they were within 400 feet of Horticulture Park,” Cox said. “From my understanding, it was in violation of their parole to be within 1,000 feet from a park.”

    Shannon Woodworth, manager of the Purdue West Subway, said that it wasn’t until they spoke to the Purdue police that they realized that the men were in violation. She said they thought it was a soccer field instead because students play soccer there.

    “We didn’t know,” Woodworth said. “When you are surprised, it is kind of hard to react.”

    Woodworth added that the restaurant was unable to transfer the men to a different location due to several stipulations of their parole.

    “This is the only store that wasn’t around parks or daycare,” Woodworth said. “There are a lot of situations they can’t be around. The other stores hire minors, but this one does not.”

    On Monday, Woodworth described the three men as the hardworking and loyal.

    “They are the first to stand up to the plate to pick up extra shifts, to cover whatever they need to cover,” Woodworth said. “I wish everybody would work as hard as these guys do.”

    She said it was difficult emotionally to call each of the individuals and tell them they had been terminated.

    “I was sobbing,” Woodworth said. “I hope someone can read this and say, ‘I’ve got the best job for them.’”
    --------------------------------------------
    (Second article,
    URL
    http://www.jconline.com/article/20100901/NEWS0501/9010325/1001/news

    Working Near Park Costs 3 Their Jobs
    by Eric Weddle
    Courrier- Journal (JC online)
    West Lafayette, Ind.
    Sept. 1, 2010

    Concerns about student safety prompted Purdue University officials to publicize the presence of three sex offenders working at a restaurant near campus.

    Now the men are without their jobs.
    Some people question Purdue's methods.
    Last week Purdue's Housing and Food Services pasted up fliers in five residence halls with the photos, names and ages of three men listed in the Tippecanoe County sex offenders registry. At that time, the men worked at Subway restaurant in Purdue West.
    "We have a pretty strong track record of being protective of our students," said Barbara Frazee, interim head of housing and food services.
    She noted that convicted sex offenders can not live or work in residence halls.
    "The fact that the three were concentrated in one place and were right outside the door of (McCutcheon Hall) made me believe that it was part of our effort to address safety issues."
    The posted signs read: "These 3 sex offenders work at Subway in Purdue West. Please be careful."
    Kenneth Falk, legal director of American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, said Purdue officials are free to post the fliers since it is repeating publicly available information, but he questioned the reason behind it.
    "This is an unfortunate thing to happen. If we expect that people are to leave jail and become productive members of society, this will not help," he said. "The real question is, what were the Purdue authorities attempting to achieve with this?"
    Police Chief John Cox said the department provides updates on sex offenders who may be working on or near campus. Notification about the three men at Subway was part of that. Purdue Police were notified of the men's work location as part of routine updates from state parole offices.
    "We realized they were near a public park, across from Horticulture Park," he said.
    Rick Loudermilk, supervisor of the 14-county Terre Haute Parole District, said the three men had not violated their parole previously. A parole officer is in contact with them weekly.
    The men were approved to work at the Purdue West Subway, Loudermilk said. On closer scrutiny by Purdue, however, it was discovered the men were in violation of parole agreements. Under those agreements, the men cannot "reside, visit, or be within" 1,000 feet of a public park.
    (2 of 2)


    The Purdue West Subway at McCormick Road and State Street is 400 feet east of the entrance to Horticulture Park, a public nature preserve owned by Purdue.


    Loudermilk expressed empathy for the plight of the parolees.
    "Those guys needed the jobs, and in this economy -- and especially after coming out of jail -- it is not easy," Loudermilk said. "They need money to pay for their treatment, to pay for their polygraph exams."
    The three men -- Rusty DeWitt, 30, William Reynard, 32, and Floyd Palmer, 57 -- are overseen by Loudermilk's officers.
    According to the Indiana Sex and Violent Offender Registry, the offenses were, for DeWitt, criminal deviate conduct; for Reynard, sexual misconduct with a minor, and; for Palmer, child molesting and sexual misconduct with a minor.
    Attempts to get contact information for DeWitt, Reynard, and Palmer were unsuccessful Tuesday.
    Roger Bauer, co-owner of the Purdue West Subway and several other Subway stores in Greater Lafayette, said the men had worked at the store for more than a year without incident.
    "They were great employees. We feel terrible. There is a mixed emotion here," he said. "Obviously they had done something wrong, but they paid their debt to society. When do we (as a society) just let them live their lives?"
    Bauer said the men were hired by a manager who no longer works at the store. Subway applications do not ask if the applicant has been convicted of a crime.
    Bauer said he cannot offer them employment at his other stores because, unlike the Purdue West store, the others employ people under 18. The men are not permitted to work with workers under 18.
    Under Indiana law, sex offenders are permitted to work or visit within 1,000 feet of a school, park or youth program but cannot reside that closely to such locations.
    However, parole agreements are often more restrictive than the Indiana law, Falk said.
    Frazee said she approved the fliers as part of her responsibility to students and was not dictating where sex offenders can or cannot work.
    "I never set out with the attempt for them to be terminated," she said. "My job is to make sure students are aware of their surroundings."
    The Purdue West Subway at McCormick Road and State Street is 400 feet east of the entrance to Horticulture Park, a public nature preserve owned by Purdue.

    Loudermilk expressed empathy for the plight of the parolees.
    "Those guys needed the jobs, and in this economy -- and especially after coming out of jail -- it is not easy," Loudermilk said. "They need money to pay for their treatment, to pay for their polygraph exams."
    The three men -- Rusty DeWitt, 30, William Reynard, 32, and Floyd Palmer, 57 -- are overseen by Loudermilk's officers.
    According to the Indiana Sex and Violent Offender Registry, the offenses were, for DeWitt, criminal deviate conduct; for Reynard, sexual misconduct with a minor, and; for Palmer, child molesting and sexual misconduct with a minor.
    Attempts to get contact information for DeWitt, Reynard, and Palmer were unsuccessful Tuesday.
    Roger Bauer, co-owner of the Purdue West Subway and several other Subway stores in Greater Lafayette, said the men had worked at the store for more than a year without incident.
    "They were great employees. We feel terrible. There is a mixed emotion here," he said. "Obviously they had done something wrong, but they paid their debt to society. When do we (as a society) just let them live their lives?"
    Bauer said the men were hired by a manager who no longer works at the store. Subway applications do not ask if the applicant has been convicted of a crime.
    Bauer said he cannot offer them employment at his other stores because, unlike the Purdue West store, the others employ people under 18. The men are not permitted to work with workers under 18.
    Under Indiana law, sex offenders are permitted to work or visit within 1,000 feet of a school, park or youth program but cannot reside that closely to such locations.
    However, parole agreements are often more restrictive than the Indiana law, Falk said.
    Frazee said she approved the fliers as part of her responsibility to students and was not dictating where sex offenders can or cannot work.
    "I never set out with the attempt for them to be terminated," she said. "My job is to make sure students are aware of their surroundings."

    ----------------------
    comments
    ----------------------------
    We aired this story on Tuesday to RSOL. I called Shannon, the manager of Subway. She and I spoke and she is going to the parole department and to the police station and raising trouble! The police told her they might have been mistaken about the "park" being considered a park because it only had a bench on the property. Yeah, now that three men have lost thier jobs! I also wrote to the exponent paper and viewed my opinions. An Indiana affiliate, posted my letter to the editor on the students billboard. The students are protesting the men's termination as well. They daid that they always treated them nice and respectful and flet no threat from them working there. This is a way to make it into a MAJOR university here and we plan on doing just that! Shannon and the three men have already contacted me and will be signing our petition!
    I'll keep you all posted!
    Kimberly DuBina
    RWsMom
    Indiana RSOL/SOSEN State Leader
    www.reformsexoffenderlawsindiana.com
    PS - The Subway chain did not want to fire them, they were made to by the parole board and police department. The owner and manager are fighting for these guys rights. The owner completely supports the Manager, Shannon, in her efforts. I spoke with her for over an hour Tuesday, when she called me! However, Indiana is an at will employer, so they too can fire you for what ever they want to.

    ---------------
    MORE COMMENTS -
    I was fired from my job simply because i was on the registry i was forced in 2007 to register for misdemeanor convictions in 1987 with resulted in 11 months and 29 days of probation i was unconditionally discharged from this probation in 1988, i was a productive law abiding citizen i had been working for a major corporation 2 years prior to being forced to register and was there 2 years after in October 2009 i was called in to HR and told my services were no longer needed because i was on the registry and it created an unsafe work enviorment even though there were no day cares, minors, schools, churches, or parks for miles around,the next day the plant held a plant wide meeting informing the employees they had made the plant a safer place to work and told who was discharged and why including listing our convictions, and in this state it is a work at will state so nothing can be done and according to attorneys i have talked to no rights have been violated. By Richard, TN organizer
    ADDENDUM BY RICHARD
    When i went to give my deposition at the unemployment office and i told the lady i was wrongfully terminated she just snickered and said there is no such thing as wrongful termination in Tennessee you can be terminated if the employer does not like the way you comb your hair and there is nothing you can do about it they lawyers i contacted after that pretty much said the same.

    -----------
    This is a case for the ACLU!
    --------------------
    This case has all the things that they say won't be infringed upon. Actually this could also be an EEOC case as well on top of the civil rights Equal Opportunity is there as well. Although that can vary from state to state. But definitely something to look into for those in the area.
    ---------------------
    This is a sad situation - you got guys who finally found a job, then they are "outed" and now fired ONLY because of probation/parole, not because they did anything wrong. Sad world we live in.
    ----------------------
    I would look up the EEOC laws in your state. I don't trust lawyers, they are only human and make mistakes ALL THE TIME. I double check their work always. I find it hard to believe that there are no civil rights laws or EEOC laws covering any kind of criminal activity and after release and how that information is used in a workplace environment. I could be wrong, but I find it really hard to believe that the EEOC laws don't have something in them. If not, I am sorry... that would be one more thing to work towards in each
    state to keep employers from canning people in that manner.
    Lara
    ------------------
    I try to tell every inmate I can to try and do their parole within
    the prison even if it takes another year. The parole and probation laws are so unreasonable there is no point even looking for a job. Might as well live with Mom! Alice in NM
    -----------------
    Except that now Indiana has a new law where in many SOs are now lifetime parole and they have taken away educational time credit from SOs and have created a separate good time class in which they only get 1 day of good time for every 6 they do.
    Michael in Indiana
    ------------------
    I live in Nebraska. We have gone down this road here. An employer here can legally fire you if they don't like the color of your shirt. Normally for RSOs the Human Resources department pulls the 'employee safety' lie, and says they must fire the RSO for the safety of other employees. I have also seen cases where RSOs are fired for the safety of the consumer (such as the recent Subway case). There are no rights you can claim if they pretend you are a threat to their employees or customers I hate this as much as you but until we get these laws overturned this is the reality. Remember the average citizen is asleep. They think the government is being responsible and only putting dangerous predators on the list. So they assume if you are on the list you are a helpless child rapist
    Brian in Nebraska
    ----------------
    More from Francie in Wisconsin:
    It makes me really angry. I have been bullied by an employer and I have a clean record other than some debt and speeding tickets and he tried to accuse me of stealing. Didn't fly. Won that on appeal to the Department of Workforce Development here in Wisconsin, then he tried to keep my last paycheck, that almost when to the DA for prosecution against him but he coughed that up at the last second.
    I get really angry when it comes to wrongs done to people for no reason other than money or clout. And what they do to RSOs has all to do with both of those things. There are just so many angles that need to be gotten to because of these issues. I can't believe it!
    --------------------
    From Fima in Minnesota
    As you may see, even without sex offender registry at all, there are
    huge problems with criminal records. There is no public registry in
    Minnesota, and no parks and residency restrictions, but I was fired
    several times after 1 day, when they got my record with so-called criminal sex conduct on it.
     

    SO Registries Are Creepy Reminders
    By posted by Alex <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 01.09.2010
    Link to this news item: [00262]
     


    Registering rationale
    By Benjamin Negley August 31, 2010
    for State Press, Tempe, Arizona
    URL
    http://www.statepress.com/2010/08/31/registering-rationale/


    The Arizona Sex Offender Information website is a creepy reminder that sex offenders are always nearby. The website allows anyone to search for registered sex offenders, using a variety of constraints. Interested in finding a sex offender near your house? Piece of cake. Want to know how many sex offenders are in ASU’s zip code? 14. Want to know whether or not any of them are a serious threat? Not quite so easy.

    Sex offender registries have become well known tools since the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act was signed into law by former President George W. Bush in July 2006. The act was named for Adam Walsh, a 6-year-old boy abducted from a Florida mall and later murdered, and created a national registry and required each state to create a registry. Any convicted offender can be found on both lists, making it possible to locate offenders, find mug shots, read up on physical characteristics and get a blurb about what kind of crime was committed.

    On the surface, the subsequent creation of registries seems like an important act of legislation with the interest of children in mind. But the registry is dangerous because it doesn’t do a good enough job of discerning between the most dangerous offenders, those who’ve committed despicable sexual acts with children, and the less dangerous offenders. Among the least dangerous offenders are the “sexters,” people who sent explicit pictures of themselves or others, via text message. Also on the lesser side of the spectrum are those who had consensual sex with a minor who was a few years younger than themselves (think high school sophomore girl with college sophomore dude), and those who’ve engaged in unacceptable acts like incest.

    A recent article on ESPN.com documented the story of Tony Washington, a former all-American lineman at Abilene Christian University who, at age 16, was convicted of having consensual sex with his 15-year-old sister. Now Tony Washington is a registered sex offender. Both parties maintain that it was consensual, and that it only happened twice. Nonetheless, as a result of a mistaken prostitution bust, Washington’s sister was arrested and questioned about her childhood. She revealed that she had sex with Tony, albeit consensually, and Tony was convicted of incest. What Tony did with his sister was despicable, and just plain gross. But, it was in no way a threat to the general public. Tony was not, and is not, a predator. He and his sister made a conscious decision to engage in incest. Most everyone would agree that what they did was wrong, but are they deserving of public humiliation? Is Tony a threat serius to the general public? The typical story ensues: guy finds football, goes to college and get over his sad past. The problem for Tony, though, is that the National Football League won’t touch his embarrassing rap sheet. Taking on a player with Tony’s baggage, even though his crime was non-violent, would simply be too dangerous for a professional club. And this is exactly the problem with sex offender registry reform. NFL owners know that hiring an NFL player would be to appear soft on sex offenders, and that’s just bad politics. And, politicians, who are ever-seeking reelection, know that appearing soft on sex offenders is not going to help anyone stay in power. After all, who wants sex offenders lurking at every corner, near every crosswalk and in every shopping mall?

    But it’s simply unfair to lump people like Tony Washington or Jorge Canal, the 18-year-old registered offender in Iowa who texted an explicit picture of himself to his 14-year-old girlfriend, or Phillip Alpert, the registered 18-year-old who e-mailed a naked picture of his 16-year-old girlfriend, in with the serious offenders who should be seriously monitored. In fact, it only detracts from the focus placed on the most serious offenders. It is unfortunate that non-violent offenders should face the type of humiliation that is associated with being a registered sex offender, but it is equally unfortunate that those in power are unwilling to make the most rational choices in the face of such difficult public safety issues.

    E-mail Ben at bnegley@asu.edu
     

    UNFORGIVEN: Tony Washington´s NFL Future Derailed
    By Mary Sue <marysueintx@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 29.08.2010
    Link to this news item: [00261]
     
    Please refer in comments to News Item 00261 and send to marysueintx@yahoo.com , with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm .
    A long read, as Mary Sue says, but worth it!!!
    Cases like this will eventually lead to change. Congrats to ESPN for publishing this.
    alex
    -----------------
    UNFORGIVEN
    Tony Washington´s NFL Future Derailed by Sad Past
    by Allison Glock
    for the ESPN Magazine
    URL:
    http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=5497517

    LOCATED IN A WAREHOUSE outside Dallas, the windowless Metroflex Gym is not air-conditioned, an aesthetic choice that edits the clientele to a select group of cops, bikers, bodybuilders and other masochists who thrive on the deprivation that exercising in unfiltered 110-degree heat produces. Inside on this blazing midsummer day, patrons are greeted by a 10-foot wooden cross and the rib-rattling sounds of speed metal or hardcore rap. The walls are plastered with bodybuilding glossies, pictures of champions past and present, including local hero and former Mr. Olympia Ronnie Coleman. Above the photos, artwork depicts the end times -- which, in the given environment, are easy to imagine.



    Below the cross, NFL hopeful Tony Washington is pumping out a set of curls. At 6-foot-7 and 310 pounds, the 24-year-old offensive lineman is easily the biggest man in a room filled with big men. His shoulders are the size of canned hams; his thighs cement-solid. As he pauses to swig water laced with protein powder, a 4-year-old girl toddles over and stops at his feet.



    "My mama is over there," she shouts, pointing a chocolate-covered finger toward the rear of the gym.



    Washington smiles, gives her a gentle high-five. "You gonna work out too?" he asks, crouching to meet the girl eye-to-eye. She shakes her head.



    "Is that chocolate bar for me?" he teases.



    "No!"



    Washington laughs, then nods to the mother, who gives him a thumbs-up. "Looking good, Tony!" she yells over the music.



    He returns to his reps, sweat running like water over his cheekbones and neck. A 20-something dude wearing long shorts and flip-flops passes by, reaches up, punches Washington in the chest. "What up, brah?"



    Washington nods hello while the dude raps along with the radio and rhymes right in his face -- "Put a cap in yo' muthaf---in' head!" -- bobbing up and down until, finally, he starts laughing, doubling over at his own drollery, then dances away, chin jerking like a chicken's.



    "That guy, he was born rich," Washington says impassively. "And his dad lost everything. So now he has to start over." He takes his baseball cap off, turns it backward, puts it back on. "He's trying to build himself a life from nothing." The big man smiles, lips tight. "Kind of like me."




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    THERE ARE LINES you don't cross. That's what we all believe, what we tell ourselves to make sense of this world and its chaos, a psychological life raft we self-inflate. One thing is okay and another is not, the lines sharp as razor cuts, impossible to ignore. We like it this way. Solid. In or out. Good or bad. Right or wrong. But the circumstances, they interfere. They smudge the lines, or erase bits completely, making everything hard to see. And then we find, all of us wandering in this world and its chaos, how easy it is to get lost.

    Tony Wells Washington was a joyful kid, the sort of boy other parents wanted to have over for barbecues and board games. This was before, during those brief idyllic years when his bartender dad, Thomas Wells, was still at home with them all -- Tony and older brother Kim and younger sister Caylen and mom Chrisilda Washington -- in a Dallas suburb. No one had gotten their hands on Tony yet, taken him to places he wasn't able to understand, excised his trust and replaced it with an abiding shame that led, inexorably, to the after.



    He was 9 years old. Too young, he says, to see what he saw. Too small to endure what he endured. Exposure to pornography. Unbidden touching. Sexual misconduct that he stops short of calling abuse. "It was nobody that matters now," he says. Then he adds flatly, "Close relatives."



    [+] EnlargeSarah A. Friedman for ESPN The Magazine
    Washington's football-ready body is the key to his redemption.

    When Washington was 12, his father left the family. "We moved to New Orleans, and he went someplace else," Tony says. No one ever said why. So he didn't ask. He was good at keeping quiet.



    The boy left behind his beloved go-kart, and the woods and the parks, as he and his siblings and their mother settled a block from the projects in Marrero, La., on the west bank of the Mississippi, across the river from New Orleans. Any aspirations he harbored before moving were quickly knocked down, shattered by the bone-deep apathy that seeped into the community like tea into porcelain, dark and permanent.



    Washington noticed how nobody ever talked about getting out. How nobody believed they could. Soon enough, neither did he. Months passed. Memories of Texas faded. His focus shifted from the future to the present. More specifically, to how he "could survive another day." This was not a metaphorical question. "Every day I left home, I realized I might have to fight," he says. "I spent most of my time making sure I didn't get killed."



    With his gentle nature, Washington was a frequent target. Gangs of boys would circle, pound him senseless, steal his shoes. He never started fights, nor was he very good at finishing them. His strength was in taking it, picking himself up off the sidewalk, hobbling home, saying nothing. "There was no one to tell," he says.




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    HIS MOTHER WORKED two restaurant jobs. He says his brother, older by three years, was a "street body," coming home late and only to sleep, before eventually enlisting in the Marines and leaving New Orleans behind. Washington spent many hours on the street himself, wandering, trying to avoid the wrong block, to avoid inadvertently pissing off the wrong guy. He saw things. Things he wished he hadn't seen. Like that girl down the road. She was 12 years old, maybe. They said she did everything. He never went to find out. But he saw her, all cutoffs and crazy hair. He looked into her eyes, knew that what they said was true.



    When he wasn't walking, he rode the bus. It had AC, and he could sit. He rode for hours to places he didn't care about. Rode in circles, watching folks get on and off. He took in everything, but felt nothing. This was something he taught himself. He called it "the swallowing."



    His family moved to a rougher neighborhood, then moved again. "We couldn't make rent," Washington says. Four more times they moved, putting him in three different schools. His only constant was Caylen, younger by a year. He looked after her, helped her with homework, made sure she ate dinner. She gave him purpose, reminded him of the person he used to be, before.



    Still, the images piled up. The broken faces, the men stooped by life, the young boys glimpsing their futures, their last stubborn desires, draining like a cut snake. He was no different. "I tried not to think so much," he says, "because when I would think, I would get depressed."



    So he shut it down, made himself "dead to the world." Happy, sad, it was all the same big nothing to him. He became concrete. He became the moon. And it worked. He was 16 years old now. Nobody could touch him.



    "I was never taught how to be good."




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    AFTER HIS WORKOUT, Washington is placing his order at a Chipotle in Plano, Texas. He requests a chicken burrito and a large bottled water.



    "You play football?" the cashier asks him, looking at his massive forearm as he reaches for his change. Washington sucks his teeth, doesn't answer. He sits down, gingerly eats half his lunch, wraps the rest for dinner. Four of his fingers are recently tattooed, the skin still flaking from the scabs. Perseverance. Dedication. Resilience. Faith. The words trail knuckle to nail. "My life in a nutshell," he says.



    Washington got the ink two weeks prior, in early July, when he heard that a Canadian Football League team was interested in signing him. "I was days from moving," he says. Then Canadian immigration officials intervened, forcing him and the CFL into a holding pattern because of his legal circumstances. "With my specific charge, it's harder to be let in. I get that. All I know is I am here, trying to make it right."




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    HE PUFFS HIS chest, then exhales hard enough to blow a napkin off the table. He watches it float to the floor. Like 716,750 other Americans, Tony Washington is a registered sex offender. You can find his picture online, a simple head shot; he is dressed in a black jacket, eyes low, resigned. He takes a new photo every year. It's a requirement, one of the easier ones to endure. The registry lists his address and provides a map to it. His height, weight, skin color, shoe size, employer and photos from previous years are all there too. The charge is at the bottom: prohibited sexual conduct.



    On May 9, 2003, Washington pleaded guilty to having consensual sex with his biological sister, Caylen. He was 16, she was 15.



    "Incest," he says, looking straight ahead.



    He says he didn't plan to do it. He was a teenager. Unstrung. Unsupervised. His world was at war. He was scared. Isolated. Except she was there, the two of them best friends, close as book pages. They loved each other, trusted each other. And one day that tipped into something more. Something neither one felt was wrong in the moment. "We were just sitting there, and it was like, 'Do you want to?'" he says. There was no discussion. "We did it. And it was like, 'OK, what's next?' We never talked about it after that."



    Both say it happened only once more. The two never kissed. Never shared true intimacy. Just spontaneous, ill-conceived connections. Needs met when few others were.



    A few months after they first had sex, Washington's sister went out one night to meet somebody. Her boyfriend, she says. Johns, the police suspected. Soon after, Washington's phone rang. His sister had been picked up by the cops. He needed to come get her, and he needed to come right away. "All I knew was my sister was in trouble," he says. "So when I showed up, and they asked me about the two of us, I said yes. I didn't know it was illegal."



    As it turned out, according to Caylen's account, the cops had been asking a lot of questions about her home life, digging to find out how a 15-year-old girl ends up on the streets. (The Magazine left multiple messages seeking comment from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and district attorney but received no answer.) Caylen denied she was a prostitute. So they asked her if there were issues at home. Was that why she ran off? Had anyone in her family touched her, abused her? For more than three hours, she stuck to her story: She left home to meet her boyfriend. She adored her brother. He was a good kid who took care of her. Their family wasn't like that.




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    MORE OFFICERS CAME into the interrogation room. Caylen was alone. She had no lawyer, just her and a passel of cops and detectives, and it got later and later into the night, and she was hungry and tired. It was then, four hours in, she says, that they started talking about jail.



    [+] EnlargeSarah A. Friedman for ESPN The Magazine
    Washington hopes the road to the NFL runs through the Plano, Texas, practice field of his Arena League team.

    Caylen did not want to go to jail. She wanted to leave. She says the cops promised her that if she confessed, everyone could go home, that she and her family would get free counseling and all this ugliness would end, and everyone could sleep in their own beds. They said it was her choice. Did she want to end up in prison? Her brother too?



    Caylen folded. She said things that she insists now were "half-true" or "complete lies." She nodded her head yes to every question and said whatever she thought they wanted to hear.



    "And then, like that, I was in jail," Tony says.



    Caylen was let go as promised. Her brother, a juvenile, was processed as an adult and put in jail with grown men. He was released after a month, only to find out he would have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.



    It was an exile to another world. Washington soon found himself in mandatory therapy groups with men who had collected violent child pornography, men who had raped preschoolers. "I never thought I belonged in that club -- not by a long shot," he says. "My offense was over with when I did it. It wasn't a struggle I had or have still."



    As a registered sex offender and on five-year probation, Washington could not live within 1,000 feet of a day-care center or school. He had to avoid playgrounds and churches. He could not move or travel without permission, granted at the discretion of a local officer. More immediately, he had to inform his neighbors of his crime: "I was required to put out fliers to a five-mile radius around my house. It was my name, my picture, what I was charged with. Incest."



    His voice catches on the word.




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    "AT FIRST, PEOPLE came around and talked to me. Then that stopped. I always knew when people found out."



    He tried not to care. He tried to crawl even deeper into himself. But there was nowhere dark enough to hide. Every time he left his home, he felt the eyes on him, heard the whispers. He was unredeemable, broken. His sin was written on paper, put in people's mailboxes.



    His mind began to betray him. Maybe he was what they said. A pervert. Sick. Maybe he didn't deserve to live. He considered suicide. "The intense humiliation," he says. "I began to feel like I deserved it. Maybe I wasn't so different from those other guys."



    Washington's family stood by him. His mom, who blamed herself for the incident -- "I wasn't around," she says -- resolved to soldier on for the kids, "to act like a normal family." His dad, who had moved to New Orleans that same year but had remained largely absent from Tony's and Caylen's lives, was more confused than angry. "I would never have conceived it," Wells says. "My son and my daughter?"



    Wells' friends advised him to let his son rot in jail. "But I didn't want to lose him," says the father. "If he had tried to hurt my daughter, I'd feel different. But he didn't."



    Wells says his daughter told him that "she was as much to blame as Tony," that they "were experimenting." He pauses, takes a deep, cleansing breath, searches his mind for a reason. "Say you're playing football. The coach wants you to play but then says, 'Hey, we don't have helmets or cleats, but go out anyway.'" His voice sounds weary. "Sometimes in life we aren't equipped to deal with the game."




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    ACCORDING TO THE National Center on Sexual Behavior of Youth, adolescent sex offenders have a low chance of recidivism -- 5 percent to 14 percent -- and are seen as highly treatable. Yet they are often prosecuted as adults and end up on the same state and federal sex-registration lists as violent predators, notes Patrick Maier, a former legal-defense activist specializing in sex offenders. "With these guys, the authorities can pretty much make it up as they go along," he says. Adds Bruce Cobb, an attorney in Beaumont, Texas, who is now looking into Washington's case pro bono, "Tony didn't get a fair shake. He was prosecuted as an adult. And he should not have been." Cobb has practiced law for 25 years, and he says he's disturbed by what he sees as an increasingly heedless mentality toward sex offenders: "The law is paved with good intentions, but we are starting to go crazy over this thing."



    Clemency for sex offenders is as uncommon as unicorns. Politicians who pardon them aren't rewarded with re-election. Cops who are lenient on the accused aren't promoted. The public wants to believe that everything that can be done to protect their children is being done -- as well it should be. Sex offenders can be dangerous, morally corrupt sociopaths. But some are just kids like Washington, reared in a soup of turmoil, unable to decipher what sex and love are supposed to be.



    "I believe I should face the consequences -- and I have," Washington says, his voice rising slightly. He is in line at a 7-Eleven, waiting to buy chewing tobacco. "I hated myself for a long time. I hated that I couldn't make a better decision. I hated what I did. I hated who I was."



    Looking back, he can see the true measure of his misjudgment. He can sense in his gut the inborn error, the bedrock level of wrong. He knows how it looks to others, and he does not expect to be understood or absolved. What he wants now, as a grown man -- what he prays for, from God -- is for someone, anyone, to appreciate the circumstances.



    "I'm more than what people see me as," he says, wiping his mouth with his thumb. "What I went through as a kid. I wanted to find love so bad. But I had no idea what love even was."




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    WASHINGTON WAS INTRODUCED to football like so many kids are, via Pop Warner. He was 9, tall enough that he played quarterback. His father jokes that he has video of a young Tony running the length of the field for a touchdown -- at his own team's goal line. "Just racing as fast as he could in the wrong direction!"



    The kid continued playing through middle school in Louisiana, until his life started "going south." After his first year of high school football, in 2002, he quit the sport. Dreaming about it had started to feel useless, like a trick he was playing on himself. Then the arrest happened. And jail. He dropped out of school for a year, moved in with his dad. He reduced his world to their apartment, pulled the blinds. "I just said 'Forget it.'"



    But his body continued to grow. Without lifting a single weight, Washington began to add size. Local coaches took note, pushing him to re-enroll. He did. And in 2004, his junior year, he played football at Alcee Fortier High School in New Orleans, dominating on the defensive line. He began to believe that his body -- the body that was betrayed, then betrayed him -- could be a tool. LSU expressed interest in recruiting him. "Every time I put on the pads," he says, "I felt my dream."



    But the dream was short-lived. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit, and Washington's family moved back to Texas for a fresh start. There, he enrolled at the University School of Las Colinas, a charter program outside Dallas. But there was no football team, and he fell off the recruiting map.



    School ended. With no college offers, Washington devoted himself to his new girlfriend, a staunch Christian he met in line at the DMV. "She was the first girl I met after the situation," he says. He was 17, she was 16. He called her for a date the same day. The two went to see "Pirates of the Caribbean." "We didn't even look at the screen." Two months later, he told her about his record. "She said she wasn't going anywhere just because of that."




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    WHEN HIS GIRLFRIEND became pregnant, they got married and moved in together into their own apartment. "She was everything to me," Washington says. "She looked past what I did. She just wanted to be with me. That's all I wanted in the world, just someone to sit by my side."



    The marriage lasted about a year -- "We were teenagers," he says -- but the friendship survived, and the two remain close, co-parenting their 5-year-old son, Tony Jr., and talking every day. (Washington also has an 11-month-old son, Tage, with his current girlfriend.) It was during his marriage, and shortly after his graduation, when a used-car dealer offhandedly suggested to Washington that he should play football. His wife saw it as a sign from above, so he went online and started searching for a coach and school that might accept him the way she had. He wrote letters, mailed grainy footage from his junior year. He implored and begged. He cast his humility like seed.



    Then it happened. A nibble. Mark Sartain, then the coach at Trinity Valley Community College in Athens, Texas, wrote back. He saw something in Washington. A hunger. He decided to take a chance. "I basically interrogated him," Sartain says. "I could sense the pain in his voice, on his face. He was being held hostage to this thing." Washington voluntarily confessed his sins the first time they met, which impressed Sartain. "We'd all be in trouble if we were judged based on something we did as kids," the coach says.



    Officials in both Louisiana and Texas had to ratify Washington's petition to move, something New Orleans officials initially ignored. But thanks to his persistence in seeing the process through, Washington eventually received permission. At Trinity, he started late in his first year, in 2006, after switching to the offensive line, then earned all-conference honors his second year. "There were no protests or boycotts about Tony being on the team," says Sartain, who's now the coach at East Texas Baptist. "No teammates quibbled about it."



    Opposing teams were less magnanimous. You f---ing pervert. You gonna rape me like you raped your sister?




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    "I HEARD IT all," Washington says.



    During the lineman's second season, a friend of Sartain's, Abilene Christian coach Chris Thomsen, called about transfer prospects. Sartain assured him that Washington would be a good fit, then even wrote a letter to Abilene's president, explaining the player's past and vouching for his character. Abilene, one of the most religious schools in the country, opened its doors. Washington started every game for two seasons, and was named a two-time Division II All-American. "One of the most gifted athletes I have ever been around," Thomsen says.



    At this year's NFL combine, in March, Washington finished with a 6.3 national grade, projecting him as a possible second-round talent. Then the whispers started. In team interviews, he had been up-front about his record. "No big deal," he says he was told by league gatekeepers. But Ben Roethlisberger and Michael Vick were causing a stir, ushering in a new tide of character scrutiny. And as the draft neared, owners and their decision-makers began to think it through. How do you defend your choice to draft a known sex offender? Would Washington need to announce his crime every time his team traveled to another state? (No.) Would teammates accept him?



    With the whispering came rumors. That he was a rapist. That his sister was mentally disabled. That he'd had run-ins with women since the incident.



    "None of which was true!" shouts his agent, former NFL defensive back Vann McElroy. "You get a feeling from bad guys. Things keep coming up. But Tony is clean, and has been for years."



    The big day arrived. Washington knew better than to expect to go during the first round of the draft. "But on the second day, we believed, maybe," he says. The call didn't come. Certain he'd be selected on the third and final day, he threw a backyard party in Dallas. There were more than 30 people -- his parents, uncles, aunts, his two kids, his girlfriend, his trainer, his trainer's family, Abilene teammates -- all watching together, eating barbecue and flipping dominoes, waiting for his name to be announced.



    By the fifth round, it started to hit him: Players with lower combine grades than his were being drafted. He began to pray, to beg God. The sixth round ticked by. Nothing. Then the seventh. Finally, the last pick came. No call. No one drafted him. "I couldn't explain it," he says. "I didn't want to have to explain it."




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    WASHINGTON GOT INTO the car with a friend, one of his Abilene teammates, and told him to "just drive." They ended up at a park, sitting there, Washington silent while his friend tried to convince him that his chance was still coming. But in the days and weeks after, there was only silence -- no invitations to camp, no tryouts, nothing. "I thought worst-case, free agent," McElroy says. "I did not sense, visiting with these teams, that no one would do anything."



    The agent begins ticking off the NFL players he knows with records or bad reps: "They've got guys with DWIs, guys who killed dogs, beat up women, smoked drugs, fought in bars, raped, worse. I could go down the list." By comparison, McElroy argues, Washington's offense was minor. "I'd have no problem letting him sleep at my house with my two daughters there."



    Before the draft, McElroy hired sports psychology consultant Robert Andrews to determine Washington's readiness for the pressures of the NFL. "You know what I say to people who want to throw this kid out?" Andrews says. "I say go spend six months in the worst part of New Orleans, and imagine yourself being a child there, and see if you can come to a place of understanding about how this could have happened."



    Andrews dug deep in his evaluation, administering a battery of psychological tests. Washington profiled as a leader. A sociable person. A man with resilience. "Nothing to indicate any trouble down the road," Andrews says.



    One front-office source from a team that dropped Washington off its draft board says the player didn't seem to show enough remorse. More to the point, the team didn't want to deal with the complications of having a sex offender on the roster. "He'd be a media distraction," the source says. "You have to ask, is he worth the headache?"



    "I get it," Washington says. "It isn't just about sports. It is politics and money. Why would they take on a sex offender? I wouldn't."




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    ON A LATE AUGUST evening, Caylen Wells, now 23, is resting in bed at her father's house in Fort Worth, Texas, where she lives with him. She punctured her eye as a child, jumping off a mattress. She can't see clearly, or drive, so he helps with all that. The two were rebaptized not long ago, she says. They wanted to renew their faith. They wanted God to bless them.



    "I feel for my brother," Caylen says calmly. "I was so happy when he got out of jail. He had no reason to be in there."



    She wants this to be known, to be clear: "My brother never, ever raped me. He never tried to hold me down. Or threaten me. Or abuse me. Or frighten me. Or anything like that. What some of these people are speculating, none of that ever happened."



    The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office recounts it differently in an arrest report that says, in part, "victim tried to push and resist the subject, but was unable as he used his body weight to hold her down."



    "They twisted our stories around," Caylen says. "They wanted us to incriminate each other. They told me if I said that, we could all go home."



    Caylen remembers Tony's return from jail, how they hugged each other and cried with relief, how they "thought everything was done with." She didn't understand then what her brother's sentencing meant, how the ghost of their choices would haunt him, the specter trailing him until death. "We thought we could all just move on with our lives."



    She insists now, eight years later, that they have. Her brother Kim is in Kuwait, a sergeant in the Marines. Her mother lives in Jamaica with her husband of five years. Tony has his football. "I would go to the ends of the earth for Tony," Caylen says. "I love him. And I know he loves me. He would never do anything to hurt me. And I would never hurt him. Not intentionally."



    She reminisces about how sweet Tony used to be when they were kids, and how funny. He is less funny now. "Tony and I, we talk," she says. "Sometimes we hang out. I support him, I go to his games. We have a nice relationship. Just like any family."




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    Washington is idling in the parking lot outside the high school field in Plano, where he practices with his Arena football team, the Dallas Vigilantes. He's early, so he rolls down the car windows and waits. He says hello to a few other players who amble past, some he knows from watching the NFL, men "who used to pull millions."



    He earns $400 per game. His regular season is four months long, from April to July. He has no insurance, no benefits. The team has little budget for perks, like ice water, so training sessions are sometimes brief and halfhearted. Still, Washington keeps on. He loves to play. He needs to play. "With my record, it is damn near impossible to get a job," he says. "So really, this is all I got."



    Although his sister's admission to police has irreparably altered his life, he insists that he has never felt betrayed by her. "We were kids," he says, then stops. He shifts in his seat, turns away.



    At 24, he is just learning how to cry. Without the benefit of counseling, which he can't afford, he is trying to evolve, grow into a man. Part of that, he believes, is sharing his story. Stepping in front of the gun and waiting to see if the world will pull the trigger. "I let everyone in my life know my record," he says.



    On his arm, Washington sports a tattoo of the NFL logo. Around his collarbone is more ink, several inches high and running shoulder-to-shoulder, which he got after the draft: "Only God can judge me." Both, he realizes, are wishful thinking. There are rare weightless times, moments when he almost forgets. When he is driving his car and his only concern is the snarl of traffic. But most days it feels as if he will never escape the heat of his past, like he is a giant, pressing his cheek against the sun.



    Last night, his credit card was denied at Walmart. He had to leave his shaving cream and deodorant on the belt. "I'm used to it," he says, spitting Grizzly dip into a busted Styrofoam cup. Washington is broke. He buys gas with change, bums his protein powder from friends. McElroy is paying for his motel room, his rental car. Both men are counting on that one elusive big break. "My chance for salvation," Washington says.




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    HE OPENS THE car door, heaves himself from the cramped space. "I know how people think of sex offenders," he says, citing cases involving predators who rape children. "But that wasn't me." He pulls a shoulder to his ear, rubs the two together. "If someone did that to one of my kids, I'd kill them."



    Moments later, Washington is easy to spot on the field, like a great white shark in a sea of baby seals. The day is brutally hot, wilting players like leaves. Most of them go through practice with the enthusiasm of sullen teenagers, but Washington's outsize body twitches with desire for the hit. He speeds through the drills, intense, purposeful, cocking his head to listen as the coach advises him to hold back a touch, to attempt patience. He tries again. Tamps down the eagerness. Makes himself a wall. Braces for impact. Hours pass. His exhausted teammates goof and lounge on the grass, helmets at their feet. Washington stays dressed, keeps on running, trusting somehow that it matters.



    After practice, the sun finally setting, he races in his car to visit his boys before bedtime. Unshowered and damp with sweat, he is reciting his poetry. I'm cold and shivering, weak in the knees. The poetry was a therapeutic exercise he learned in jail. His first poem, the one he is reciting, is called, "Why?" I think to myself, how could you do this to me?



    Washington makes a point to visit his kids every day. (The boys live with their mothers in the Dallas area.) He and Tage's mom plan to marry. Despite everything he has suffered, he still believes in true love. It is, he says, all he has ever really wanted. "I had a notebook full of love poems," he says, "but they were destroyed by Katrina." He hasn't written any lately. "If I wrote a poem now, it would be called, 'When is it over?'" He laughs a hollow laugh.



    "What I dream for, it may not ever come to me," he says softly, eyes skipping over his NFL tattoo. "But I have to be ready to receive it. Just in case. Otherwise, what am I doing?"




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    RECENTLY, THERE HAS been a slim ray of light. A scout from a UFL team has been sniffing around, albeit cautiously. "I'm trying to make that jump from a kid having a tough time to a kid who has sex with his sister," the scout says. "No one is going to argue that Tony is not talented enough. We just need to know the ramifications of putting him on the roster."



    Washington isn't celebrating yet. He has learned his lesson about hope, fallen through those trap doors too many times. He has slogged his burden around for eight years -- longer if you start counting at age 9, when he was just a boy in a go-kart, tracing the Texas fields. He has learned something else, too, something about life and lines and what happens when you cross them. "I used to always be in such a rush," he says. "Now I wait."



    For what?



    "For change. For a chance. For somebody to decide it is enough. Because in the end, no matter how much right I do, it isn't my choice to say, 'You're forgiven.'"



    Until that day, for as long as the universe will allow, he will put on his pads, and he will stand in the heat, on that line, and he will take the hits, one after another, unflinching. It is the thing he does best. It is, he believes, what he deserves.
    Allison Glock is a contributing writer for ESPN The Magazine.


     

    Tonia Craft Sues Accusers
    By Vicki <vicki.henry@sbcglobal.net>
    Posted on 22.08.2010
    Link to this news item: [00260]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 260, TONIA CRAFT SUES ACCUSERS, and send to Vicki.henry@sbcglobal.net with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm .
    This article is a bit dated, but important
    ------------------------

    URL: http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_176349.asp

    The Chatanoogan
    Chatanooga, TN
    May 24, 2010


    Tonya Craft Sues Accusers In $25 Million Federal Lawsuit
    Defendants Include Parents Of Accusers, Investigators


    Tonya Craft, who was absolved of all charges of child molestation in a highly-publicized trial at Ringgold, has filed a lawsuit against her accusers in Federal Court in Rome, Ga.

    The 52-page complaint asks $25 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

    The defendants include parents of the children who brought charges against her, the lead detective in the case, the Catoosa County sheriff and officials who investigated the complaints.

    Defendants are Sandra Lamb, Sherri and Dewayne Wilson, her former husband Joal Henke and his current wife Sarah, Kelli McDonald, Sgt. Tim Deal, Catoosa County, Catoosa County Sheriff Phil Summers, Suzi Thorne, Stacy Long, Laurie Evans, the Childrens Advocacy Center of the Lookout Mountain Judicial District and the Greenhouse Childrens Advocacy Center.

    The complaint did not name prosecutors Chris Arnt and Len Gregor, who enjoy prosecutorial immunity.

    The suit says the children who brought charges against her were coached and that the allegations were not corroborated.

    It says the former Chickamauga Elementary School teacher suffered humiliation and embarrassment by the two-year ordeal.

    After a trial that lasted into the fourth week, a jury in Catoosa County cleared her of 22 counts of child molestation.

    The suit was filed by attorneys Scott and Cary King of Atlanta, who were part of the four-person defense team at the trial.

    It says "false and malicious" statements were made against Ms. Craft, including charges that she is a sexual pervert, a criminal and a parent whose behavior was totally inappropriate.

    The suit says the "extreme and outrageous conduct of defendants was designed to subvert the parental and familial relationships between the plaintiff and her family."

    It says the defendants conspired "to manipulate the youngest member of plaintiff's immediate family into the role of sex abuse victim."

    The complaint says charges were brought against Ms. Craft "through fraud, corruption, perjury, fabricated evidence and/or other wrongful conduct undertaken in bad faith."

    The suit says she "was arrested on charges she did not commit."

    It says the charges "had no reasonable basis, were not supported by probable cause and were initiated out of sheer malice on these defendants' parts."

    The complaint says she suffered humiliation, outrage, indignity, conscious pain and suffering and loss of custody of her two children.

    It says she also suffered mental suffering and sorrow, headaches, emotional stress, grief, anger, horror, fright, the stress and costs of legal fees and scores of court appearances, and "outright distrust of law and judicial officials."

    The suit asks that the name of Tonya Renee Craft be removed from the records of any Georgia site or list of child abusers.

    It asks that the court "establish a protocol to competently investigate claims of sexual abuse, which includes corroborating information and/or competent forensic evaluation" and "establish a protocol to competently conduct investigatory interviews of children concerning possible sexual abuse which specifically requires video taped interviews and avoids adult interviewer sexualization of the interview, use of leading questions, multiply repeated questions, disconfirmation, and anatomically detailed dolls."

    It asks that agencies "competently train and supervise their employees to enable them to effectively investigate claims of sexual abuse and interview children that have alleged sexual abuse in keeping with the established protocol."

    The complaint says there was "development of a program of indoctrination of the minor children into the role of sex abuse victims despite significant evidence that sex abuse never happened."

    It says there was "constant emotional pressure akin to torture upon the minor children under the guise of 'therapy' to coerce them to 'remember' - adopt and rehearse defendants' version of their statements in the Suzie Thorne, Stacy Long, Tim Deal and Laurie Evans interviews."

    The suit says Ms. Craft now lives in Soddy Daisy and the Henkes live in Ooltewah.

    It says Ms. Lamb lives at Ringgold and the Wilsons in Rossville. Ms. McDonald is from Chickamauga.

    Ms. Thorne is employed by the GreenHouse Childrens Advocacy Center and Ms. Long and Ms. Evans by the Childrens Advocacy Center of the Lookout Mountain Judicial District in Fort Oglethorpe.

    The suit says on May 19, 2008, Ms. Lamb reported in a phone call to state social worker that her minor daughter had been involved in "child-on-child sexual touching" with Ms. Craft's daughter, who is two years younger. It says Ms. Craft was not implicated "despite repeated and suggestive questioning in which Ms. Craft was continually mentioned by name" by Ms. Lamb.

    It says four days later, during a last-day-of-school party at the Wilson home, Ms. Wilson noticed that a minor child used sidewalk chalk to write "sex and kissing xoxoxo" in six-inch letters. It says Ms. Wilson called the child's parents, who came to her home and had a detailed discussion in which the Wilsons "made numerous false and derogatory comments" about Ms. Craft.

    The complaint says the parents afterward began "repeatedly and suggestively" questioning their children about inappropriate touching.

    It says one of the children made a statement about inappropriate touching "after hours and/or days of such inappropriate questioning."

    The complaint says one of the children was then interviewed by Ms. Long and she said she knew about the touching because "My momma told me."

    It says another child told Sgt. Deal, "My momma told me which is which and where they touched me."

    The complaint says Tonya Craft's children were then removed from her custody and placed with the Henkes.

    It says the Henkes began to "suggestively question" her daughter.

    The suit says Sarah Henke had showered with the daughter and shaved her genital area while in the shower with her.

    It says such actions "were psychologically devastating to" the girl.
     

    Tonya Craft Has Own Radio Show
    By Kelly <gfr1@gasorr.org>
    Posted on 20.08.2010
    Link to this news item: [00259]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 259 and send to Kelly Piercy, gfr1@gasorr.org , with a copy to alexm60fastmail.fm . WE URGE PEOPLE TO VOTE IN THIS NEWSPAPER POLL!!!
    --------------------------


    Chatanooga Times Free Press
    Aug. 13, 2010
    Craft Has Radio Show


    Tonya Craft, the former North Georgia kindergarten teacher who was acquitted of 22 counts of child molestation, aggravated sexual battery and aggravated child molestation, will be hosting a talk show on WGOW-FM 102.3 beginning Sept. 7, the station announced Thursday.

    The show will be called “The Truth of the Matter” and will air every other Tuesday from 3 to 4 p.m. The show will be produced by Kevin West and will feature Craft talking with callers and with studio and call-in guests discussing criminal cases, civil cases and other topics dealing with the legal system, he said.

    According to news director Bill Lockhart, Craft was hired through December, when things will be re-evaluated.

    “In metro Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the year 2010, there is one name, one individual, that I think everyone would agree is a household name. (She is) a person that everyone wants to know what they think about, what they are thinking, what makes them tick and that person is Tonya Craft.

    “She is very intelligent and articulate and passionate. We are very pleased that she is on our team,” Lockhart said.

    Craft said in a news conference at the station that she did not ask for the fame that came with her much-publicized trial, but it has given her a platform to speak out for truth and she plans to use it.

    “I will do what I feel like is the right thing, no matter who it ticks off,” she said. “It’s not about me. It’s not about this situation. It is about the children and what they go through.”

    She said she was frustrated when her trial, which should have been an exercise in finding the truth, became more like a game between attorneys.

    “It’s offensive really. Whenever you go into a trial it’s perceived almost as if you are going into a tennis match. Point here. Point there. It’s not a game,” she said. “People who have been in my situation and sat in my shoes, know it is not a game and it shouldn’t be a game to anyone.”

    The idea for hosting the show came from a discussion with one of her lawyers in Atlanta and she approached WGOW about being involved, she said. She hopes to study to become a lawyer and will be taking the LSAT test in October, she said.

    “I am going to focus on a few specific laws. I am working on a national minimal standard for people who forensically evaluate on children. I want to work on that locally, statewide and nationally,” she said.

    Chickamauga resident Sandy Hunt, who said she followed Craft’s trial, said she is excited about the show.

    “I think she has a lot to talk about,” Hunt said. I think she is a strong person and to me what happened to her could happen to anybody, anywhere, and I am thrilled that she is taking the initiative to change things.”
     

    Inside the Latest CA S.O. Law
    By Al Rodbell <alvrdb-12@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 20.08.2010
    Link to this news item: [00258]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 258, Inside the Latest CA SO Law, and send to Al Rodbell, alvrdb-12@yahoo.com , with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm We urge all CA RSOL participants to bring this to the attention of CA lawmakers NOW!
    ----------------------
    Inside the Latest California Sex Offender Law
    For OpEdNews: Al Rodbell - Writer
    August 19, 2010
    URL
    http://www.opednews.com/articles/Inside-the-latest-Californ-by-Al-Rodbell-100818-117.html


    The state of California is close to passing a law that is aimed at preventing sexual attacks, yet because of distorted reporting of the rape and murder of two young women including one whose name was incorporated into Chelsea's Law, the effect of this law will probably be just the opposite. And the same forces that has driven this law to near passage also prevents serious objections such as this from reaching the public.


    My conclusion to oppose this law was triggered by obtaining a report on the sentencing, imprisonment, parole regulations and procedures surrounding this case produced by the California Sex Offenders Management Board. After carefully reading this and many other documents, and interviewing the chairman of the board of this body, along with other officials, I became convinced that passing this law as is now pending will be a continuation of the legislative mistakes that have occurred over the last six decades.

    As the CASOMB report concluded:

    California has not effectively prioritized when making policy decisions about the management of convicted sex offenders. Many decisions seem to have been made for political reasons or what feels good at the time. As a result, money and time have been wasted on policies and programs that are politically popular but do not make our communities safer.

    When these crimes occurred, The San Diego Union Tribune, the sole remaining metropolitan area newspaper, had recently been sold to a venture capital group. Their business model is to turn around the paper by increasing circulation for a quick profitable sale. As the case progressed, after many hundreds of editorials, articles and letters focusing on the heinous details of the crime and of the criminal, they ran a front page editorial described as "a call to action."

    Civic responsibility and increasing circulation are not always compatible, so there was a tendency to ratchet up the rage while minimizing reporting the actual complexity of this particular type of crime, rooted as it is in the dysfunction of our most primitive drive, sexuality.

    Since this single metropolitan newspaper still controlled the dialog, they were able to do what was necessary to conflate the early crime, which was relatively minor, with the ultimate murders and rapes by the post prison John Albert Gardner. With no articles, or editorials or even letters printed to challenge them, the perfect poster boy of evil was created, as details could be ignored or reshaped as needed. The law that was forming to prevent crimes such as his could be as loosely constructed as was his biography. Then a phone call by Gardner to the local CBS affiliate complicated things.

    In this hour long conversation, Gardner made certain assertions; that his first conviction was an act of rage, a blowup with a friend that turned violent without sexual motivation, and that he accepted a plea out of fear of an even longer sentence. He described his adjustment to life under parole after his release in 2005, which for the first year was without any infractions, something confirmed by the CASOMB report.

    He then described what is the most crucial point relating to passage of the current law, how it was only when the residence restrictions of Jessica's Law were implemented that he was forced from his apartment, with no alternate housing available, causing him to live out of his car and lose his steady job, making it impossible to continue child support and the relationship with the mother of his two children.

    He requested and recieved a commitment from the interviewer that his statements be validated, not accepted on face value, but investigated. Not only were they never verified or refuted, the substance of this interview has never been reported. And although the full interview is available on their website, the second part of the news report on it was canceled.


    Based on my recent conversation with the Chief of staff of Nathan Fletcher who sponsored Chelsea's Law, while his office acknowledges that residence restrictions are problematic, they have no intention of redressing it. Not at this time, not when they are so close to passing this law, not when there is unanimous approval from those in both parties, not when this will be met by accolades from the Union Tribune that may never again mention the "grotesque" effect of forced homelessness due to excessive residence restrictions.

    So with the passage of Chelsea's Law, those convicted of early sex crimes against children will spend their lives in containment, some inside prisons, others sequestered by constantly monitored GPS bracelets paid for by imaginary funds from a bankrupt state. And as the Union Tribune admitted, "has the likely practical effect of turning some relatively minor sex offenders into far worse and of spurring paroled violent sex offenders into acting again on their dark impulses."

    Democratic state Senator Mark Leno who heads the criminal code committee and Republican Nathan Fletcher have agreed to put off discussion of Jessica Law residence restrictions until next year, although Fletcher has now publicly stated his opposition. The reality is that only at this moment of heightened public emotion could such correction occur, as it is too easily construed as the politically toxic accusation of being "soft on crime."

    We must not allow politicized public outrage to continue to produce laws that actually increase these crimes. We must not continue to ignore a painful reality, that It was the tragic flaw of Jessica's Law that may have derailed the rehabilitation that set in motion the chain of events that resulted in the death of two innocent young women. It would be the darkest of ironies if a law named to commemorate the life of one of these young women left this provision that may have contributed to her death unchanged.
    ----------------
    AlRodbell.blogspot.com has further details and links to sources mentioned in this article.

    (c) Al Rodbell, 2010
    Mr Rodbell's essays can be found at AlRodbell.blogspot.com
     

    I´m Angry and YOU SHOULD Be Angry Too!
    By Lila Forster <scrsol@ymail.com>
    Posted on 19.08.2010
    Link to this news item: [00257]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 257, and send to scrsol@ymail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm .
    --------------------------------------------------


    Letter to the Editor
    from Lila Folster
    Feb. 2009
    Chester News and Reporter
    Chester, SC


    IAM angry!!! You SHOULD be angry! We all SHOULD be angry enough to try to protect our children and other loved ones from the raging epidemic that is laying waste to many, many, many, innocent lives across our nation.

    From the deep dark past of our country, the spirit of the accusing fingers of the Salem Witch Hunt Trials have reached into our future to again destroy those that they can.

    Years ago, I sat in a courtroom as the man who destroyed the lives of my two little girls, basically walked off Scott free. He molested and sodomized them and threatened them with death to buy their silence. He plea bargained out and the justice system let him walk with 2 years probation AND without serving a single moment of incarceration. Less than a month later, the laws in that state changed and his charges WOULD have earned him a minimum of 20 years in prison.

    I later knew a 17 year old young man who was starry-eyed in love with a dark-haired girl he met through friends. Fearing he wouldn’t like her because of her age, she told him she was 15. She also adored him, so much to the point that she entered the following record into her diary; “ he is soooo cute! We made love tonight and it was the most wonderful thing in the world!” Her feelings were all well and good, in the context of fantasy. Unfortunately her mother violated the young girls’ right to privacy and that fantasy phrase ended their hope for a relationship and remanded the young man to a life of poverty and persecution. He cannot join the military, cannot work at any job where there is a possible contact with children, cannot attend college without reporting his offender status and suffering expulsion without notice, for any reason without any kind of proof. This will be his life for the next 25 years. Needless to say he suffers from depression, but still manages to get up and try to make it through another day.

    Those are two examples that lead me to believe our sex offender laws need a very serious re-vamping.

    The death penalty for murder was dropped in most states because of the percentage of people who were put death and were later found innocent. Most crimes require positive proof in order for the assumed perpetrator to be found guilty. That is not the case in sexual offenses. All someone has to do is point a finger and say “He/she touched me, or behaved inappropriately with me.”

    Actually, to be totally candid, you can end up on the sex offenders list for indecent exposure if you relieve yourself on the side of a county road because you can’t hold it any longer and there is nowhere else to go for miles. You sense of relief is suddenly turned into a 25 year nightmare, even if you plea bargain.

    It is important to know the difference between a sexual predator and a sexual offender. My first example was undoubtedly a sexual predator, someone who preys on innocent children. Using not only their bodies, but the child’s fragile ego, self-esteem or loneliness, whatever they can to feed their own depraved desires. These are the people who BELONG on that list.

    I have perused the list of offenders for Chester County, at length, among others and under each profile, beneath the offenders picture is a simple statement, or listing Predator: yes or no. As I read through profile after profile, that listing reported in the negative time after time after time.

    How on earth are we to sort out who is going to hurt our children in such a blanket generalization of who is or is not a true sex offender? There are now thousands of CHILDREN who are known as “juvenile sex offenders”. When they turn 18, they are required to register on the adult sex offenders list. Their crimes, usually a healthy sense of curiosity, what used to be called “playing doctor”. That is not saying that there are not also true cases of molestation there also.

    A counselor once told me, “Children DO NOT lie about such things.” Among my older daughter’s many trips to a juvenile center, she heard a conversation between two other girls in which one bragged to the other, “ Yeah, I got the video game I wanted by threatening to turn my foster dad in for molesting me if he didn’t buy it for me!” This young girl HAD been molested previously and decided to turn it to her advantage.

    Something desperately needs to be done, something that has nothing to do with the leniency or severity of the sex offender laws. It has everything to do with the burden of proof, just the same as any other law of the land.

    PLEASE THINK ABOUT IT. If your child was molested wouldn’t you want it pursued to the letter of the law? If you were a foster parent wouldn’t you want protection from a troubled child. If you had a teenager falsely accused wouldn’t YOU like to have the knowledge that they had a right to be proven as such without being terrified into plea bargaining (which is technically an admission of guilt)?

    PLEASE search your very being and answer these questions in your own heart. The whole system is being bogged down and choked with the falsely accused to the point that the true offenders are being lost in the shuffle and back on the streets.

    If you listen closely enough you will hear the whispers of the innocent spirits of the “Witches” of Salem, Massachusetts.


    Thank you so much, it is my greatest prayer that I might be able to touch lives and help correct injustice and if my words can do that so be it.


    Lila Folster
     

    Wypijewski Interviews RSOL Moms for CounterPunch
    By JoAnn Wypijewsk <jwyp@earthlink.net>
    Posted on 13.08.2010
    Link to this news item: [00256]
     
    Defending the 700,000 Most Despised
    People in America:
    The Mother’s Rebellion
    CounterPunch, August 2010 Print Edition
    By JoAnn Wypijewski

    Early this summer an organization representing arguably the most despised people in America, and calling itself obliquely RSOL, for Reform Sex Offender Laws, met in Washington D.C. to allow people from across the country to talk strategy, lobby Congress and simply step from the heavy shadow of fear and shame.

    From the looks on their face, it seems never to have occurred to Congressional aides that the 700,000-plus people on America’s sex offender registries might have loved ones, or might themselves finally have grown sick of keeping quiet. The aides surely were as clueless as I had been that in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico some of these people have been stopping ever more punitive legislation
    or revising existing law in the direction of sanity, and that the wives and, mostly, mothers of people on the registry had discovered the radical essence of simply speaking up.

    I talked to three women. Only one, Mary Duval, who started a group called SOSEN in Oklahoma and co-hosts a weekly radio talk show, wanted to be identified by her full name.
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Sarah: Don’t get me wrong: my son made a mistake. As soon as he saw “14 years old” on that Internet chat, he should have said, click, goodbye. But I want this to be recognized as a total entrapment, by a crooked system. And if I have to walk from Mansfield, Ohio, to Washington, DC, to bring attention to what’s going on in this country, that’s what I’m going to do. I threatened to walk naked, but nobody wants to look at me naked.

    JW: That might make you a registered sex offender. But let’s go back a little bit. You are originally from Lebanon?

    S: My mother was born here, in Chinson, West Virginia. Her father had come from Lebanon. He worked and accumulated money, took the family back to Lebanon and bought lots of land. My mother married my dad there, and later on she faced a lot of hard times, so when she was 38 years old she left seven kids behind and came back to the United States, the land of freedom and second chances. Uneducated, she worked and brought all her kids here, originally to Wheeling. My older sister, who was like a second mom, she eventually moved to Mansfield, Ohio. Her husband worked at GM, in a new plant there. By that time Wheeling was on the downhill slide, so we just followed her one after the other, and I am still in Mansfield.

    JW: Is the GM plant still there?

    S: It went out of business last year. So Mansfield right now is on the decline. You can’t hardly get a job. You can’t sell a house. You can’t do anything, so it’s very much a different scenario. I worked at Frigidaire for twenty-nine years, until they moved to Mexico eleven years ago. At one time we had like 2,500 people there. But, you know, if you are a survivor you just say, “There’s an opportunity somewhere else.” I didn’t even apply for unemployment. I got a job in the hospital working in the outreach lab, where we do in-home draws on patients who need blood work.

    JW: How many people had worked at GM?

    S: About 1,800. We have so many factories closed it’s like rat haven. That’s what we call it because that’s who inhabits the buildings. The steel mill is still there, but, again, it went from almost 3,000 employees to maybe 350. My in-laws, they came here from Yugoslavia after the war. He opened an industrial fabricating business. At one time he had 120 employees, they were working 24/7; now it’s hard to even bid jobs. How he stays in business, because he’s a union shop and they pay high wages, I will never know. They’re using their personal money to keep their doors open. Really, almost all we have right now in Mansfield is a lot of law enforcement. So this is the sign of the time.

    JW: Now tell me about your son.

    S: I met my husband, a very nice family. He worked for his dad; he did industrial roofing. We got married. We built a house. We had a really good life, and then he got sick and passed away. But before that, we adopted my son from Lebanon. I brought him home December 19, 1982. He was our early Christmas present. His dad died when he was 2 and a half; from then on it was just J. and myself, so I prioritized him in my life. He’s a good kid, graduated high school on the
    National Honor Society. J. went to a college in Northern California, in Humboldt County, and, oh, it’s beautiful! The mountains are here, the ocean is here. He started a Greco-Roman wrestling club there, and then he decides that he wants to go to the Olympics as a Greco-Roman wrestler! I said, “J., people who go to the Olympics start when they’re little kids.” He started in high school. But he was relentless, and when he graduated college, in 2005, the coach of the US wrestling team in Colorado Springs said, “I’m going to give you a chance.” So in January 2006 he was training at the Olympic Center, working, pursuing a graduate degree in kinesthiology at University of Colorado, and he was there three months when this happened.

    JW: What’s “this”?

    S: He was living with other Olympians, and they were never around. He was lonely. It was a Saturday night and he was on the Internet looking for a girl. Unlike what you see on TV, he was on adult Yahoo chat. He said, I’m new in town, I would like a friend to do things with. That’s when cops come in on your conversation. This cop starts alluding to sexual things, and then “she” says, “I’m 14.” This is a 46-year-old cop. His job is to sit behind a computer and do this work on the Internet. Now, what’s a 46-year-old cop doing pretending to be a 14-year-old girl? He and his wife; these are their full-time
    jobs. The country is broke, but the federal government funds these people to do this.

    JW: Have you seen the transcripts?

    S: No. I just requested his whole file, because I want to put it out there. But I know the “girl” asked my son to send a picture of himself. He sent a picture of his wrestling team, five guys, and really goofy-looking guys; you know, wrestlers are the goofiest-looking people you could meet. She typed back, “Is this the best
    that you can do?” He said, “What do you mean?” Naïve. Very naïve. She asked him if he has a condom. “Yes, I have a condom, but I’m not interested in sex. You’re too young for that stuff.” The conversation went on, and she asked him to come over. “I’m really tired, it’s 10 o’clock,” he said. “You know, I’m trying to meet friends in Colorado; I’ll come over tomorrow.” She said, “My mother will be here.” He said, “So what? I’ll meet your mother. I’m just trying to make friends.” “No, I want to meet you tonight.” Well, he made a huge mistake; he did go over. But first he asked her to send him a picture. She sends a picture of a 25-year-old Hispanic girl. He said, “You sure look old for 14.” He gets to the decoy house and sits outside thinking about it. And the decoy, who is not a child, she comes to the door and says, “Come on in.” He says, “You come out. I don’t trust too many people.” Finally, after coaxing, he goes in, and there’s a SWAT team there. So he goes to jail; 3 o’clock in the morning they start interrogating him. Well, the guy who interrogates J. tells him, “Of all the nineteen kids we got here tonight, you’re the only one I believe, because I read your [Internet] transcript.” Well, my son starts talking, which he shouldn’t talk, period. He had no experience, didn’t know the law, knows absolutely nothing. That was Saturday night. I get a call on Sunday; he’s in jail. And my life ended right there.

    JW: Do you remember the date?

    S: March 26, 2006. He called me on Sunday, the 27. I had to arrange a bond of $15,000. They charged him with enticement. Who was enticing who? They charge him with a felony five, attempted sexual assault on a child. What child? And one other charge, I don’t remember. Well, anyways, I cashed my IRAs in and hired an attorney. He didn’t do, excuse me, shit. I think J. said three bad words on the chat; he’s so embarrassed he wouldn’t tell me, but the attorney told me. He said J. kept saying, “What’s a young girl like you doing on the Internet? Are you sure your parents don’t mind you doing this?” The DA accused my son of being nice to get into her pants. Fox News Channel 9 ran a series about the sting for a whole week, “Predators at Your Door.” Before these kids even had their day in court! In the newspaper the sheriff and the DA were saying, Look at these kids: none of them have any prior offenses. None of them look like sex offenders. They mentioned my son, a kid from the Olympic Center. The sheriff, his exact words were, “They’re all 100 per cent convictable.” Finally, J. took the plea. The judge gave him two years’ probation with six months’ work release and lifetime registration. We’re luckier than most mothers, believe me. I talked to a judge in Ohio, a very nice man, and he arranged for J. to do his probation in Ohio, because in Colorado, you not only have to pay $50 a month for your probation, you have to pay $500 a month for your treatment.

    JW: I didn’t know people had to pay money for probation.

    S: How is the state going to get Money off of you? Why do you think we’re increasing criminal prosecutions?

    JW: And Ohio is better?

    S: Twenty dollars a month for probation. Twenty dollars a week for treatment. In Mansfield, J. was able to work for family, making plastic piping for steel mills for two years. His probation officer was angry with him because he signed up for college classes without approval. In Colorado, before the sentencing we had to get permission so he could take his finals. Sex offenders can’t go to college in Colorado. Well, he got a 4.0. Under all this stress, this kid gets a 4.0! Now he’s taking earth science courses at Ohio State in Columbus, and doing research on water quality and applying to graduate
    schools.

    JW: So kinesthiology is out of the picture.

    S: That’s working with people. He was told he could never work with people again, ever. In Ohio, he has to register once a year. If he travels – right now he’s in Utah on a research trip – he has to register with the sheriff’s office there, and every state has different rules so you have no idea how many obstacles there are in front of you. In Colorado, it’s barbaric.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------

    D: My son is 25, on probation in Denver, and before he goes anywhere, he has to fill out a safety plan, and the probation officer has to approve it. He wants to go to the eye doctor, he has to have a safety plan, explaining what he’ll do if a child shows up.

    JW: So, say, I will be brought to the appointment by an adult in a car and if a child comes in I’ll run down to the parking lot and sit in the car until the kid is gone?

    D: That kind of thing.

    S: You have no idea how inhumane. Tell her about that test, D.; what’s it called – plasmo-something?

    JW: Plesmograph?

    D: You go into a room with an examiner. They hook your penis up to a monitor. They show you pictures of women in different states of dress, and they monitor the flow of blood in your penis. My son’s test came back as “inconclusive.” It didn’t show that he had any sexual deviance, but it didn’t show that he didn’t either. So the recommendation was that he go to therapy to learn to manage his
    sexual deviance, and to learn the patterns of his sexual deviance.

    JW: “Learn the patterns”? What does that mean?

    D: Well, I’m not really sure because he doesn’t have any. In the evaluation it states that he accepted responsibility for what he did. But then it said that he needed to go to classes to learn to accept responsibility and the consequences of what he did.

    S: : My son had that test too. We had to pay for that as part of the $1,100 risk assessment to determine how dangerous he is -- on top of the $17,000 for the attorney; $2,500 to the bondsman; travel back and forth to Colorado three times; $3,000 in court costs for the victims. What victim? The state is supposed to be the victim. He passed with flying colors, thank god.

    JW: What are some other rules in Colorado?

    D: My son was told he was on probation, we got a list of things we had to do for him to comply. We had to take all the alcohol out the house, which is a given. But I was shocked when I was told that I had to take all of the pictures of my great nieces and nephews and anyone under the age of 18 off my walls and out of my house. He has to call his probation officer every morning. He cannot go anywhere without permission. He works at UPS part-time, so he leaves at 2:30 in the morning. He has to call this recorded line, tell them he’s leaving, tell them his destination, how long it’s going to take, what time he’s going to arrive. When he gets there, he has to call in to say he’s arrived. When he leaves at 8:30 in the morning he has to go through the same process. He has to do this process every time he leaves the house. He had to take random urinalysis and breathalizers, which averaged out to be about four breathalizers and one urinalysis a week. We had to pay for those – the urinalysis is $11, the breathalizers $3 – and the place will only accept Money orders or cashiers’ checks. And, oh, you can’t go into the post office or bank, so you have to have somebody else get them. Anyone that comes to our house has to sign a disclosure form saying that they know my son is a sex offender and what the did.

    JW: So if someone comes to deliver, I don’t know, a refrigerator?

    D: They have to fill out the form. The neighbor asked if my son would rake his leaves. He had to ask permission from his probation officer. There was a girl walking down the street, and he had to run into the house. When we moved, he would open the door, look outside both ways, hurry to the trunk of the car, looking around, get the stuff and take it back into the house. It takes him about fortyfive minutes each time he has to do a urinalysis because he’s so tense. Somebody stands there and watches him pee. You have to take a polygraph exam every six months, I believe. He failed the first one on the alcohol question, so they make him take Antabuse, the medicine that makes you sick if you drink alcohol. He has to go to an office three times a week where they administer the medication, and he has to sit there for twenty minutes to see if he has a reaction. He goes to individual therapy once a week for $70 each time. He goes to group therapy once a week; that’s $50 each time. The polygraph is $240, and you mean to tell me that the polygraph examiner doesn’t know that if he fails the test, he’s going to have to turn around and pay another $240 to take another polygraph exam within a week or two weeks?

    S: It’s a racket.

    D: And if he fails it, he has to take Consequence Classes for four more weeks, $50 a week. Now, the other important part of my story is that my son has been on antidepressants since he was about 18. The doctors said he was chemically depressed, and what drug works now may not work next month, or next week. In probation he has to continue to take his medication or he’s not in compliance. He made a remark in group therapy once that he was going to stop taking his medication, meaning he was going to get a new one because the old one wasn’t working. His probation officer later said to him, “You know, I can get a court order to make you come to my office every morning to take your medication.” Two weeks ago today I took him to a mental health facility, because he was sobbing, “Mom, please take me to the hospital so I don’t hurt myself.” He was in the hospital, they changed his medication; completely different kid, night and day. But as they were releasing him, he was arrested and put in jail.

    JW: Why?

    D: Last November he missed two meetings with his individual therapist. Do you know what a hookah pipe is? Well, they’re perfectly legal, and for his birthday he got flavored tobacco and movies, and they were on the table when she came through for a home visit. She told him the hookah was a bong. Then she saw the movies and she said, “You know, R rated movies; you’re not supposed to have them. You need to get rid of all of them.” If you’re noncompliant with your probation, you can go to jail. He just got out.

    JW: And what was his original crime?

    D: He was 23. He was on the computer, in an adult chat room on aol. This person came in; they started a conversation. I have the transcript so I know how it went down. This person said she was 14.

    S: Same detective as my son, but a different sting.

    D: The conversation turned sexual, and it was very graphic. I’m not whitewashing that; it was wrong. She asked for his phone number multiple times, and he said no. She asked to meet him multiple times, and he said no. And so they got off the computer. He was on a few days later, and a girl that was 21 from Omaha, Nebraska, started asking questions about the Boulder area, da-ta-da-ta-da. She said she was moving out there for a job, she didn’t know anybody, she was leaving the next day, didn’t know how she was going to get the truck unloaded. My son gave her his phone number, and said “My friends and my brother and I will come and unload your truck for you.” When he gave that phone number, that’s how they tracked him down.

    JW: For the 14-year-old? Who wasn’t any more real than the 21-year-old.

    D: Right. They called him, portraying themselves as representatives of aol, asking him to come to the Jefferson County Police Department to sign a paper, banning him from aol. He said, “I can’t do that, because I don’t drive.” Earlier he had had a DUI. They said, “Well, where can you meet us?” He said, “The Starbucks at this corner.” He rode his bicycle to the Starbucks. They left the bicycle there when they arrested him.

    JW: He never saw it coming. Did he go to trial?

    D: He took the plea. We hired an attorney for $10,000; he met with us approximately four times: once in his office, and about five minutes each time before we went to court. In September of last year he got three years of probation. About three weeks in, he told his probation officer, “I’m just coming to terms with what I need to do to get through the three years.” She said, “Well, you know, if I don’t feel that you’re fit to go back into society at that time I can extend that.” Her words to him the first time he went into her office were “This isn’t about your rehabilitation. There is no cure for you.
    This is about keeping society safe from you.” The neighbor asked if my son would rake his leaves. He had to ask permission from his probation officer. There was a girl walking down the street, and he had to run into the house. I have told many people that my son didn’t have a problem when he went into the system, but he sure as hell will have one when he comes out.

    JW: Hardly any situation is neutral. Say he was here, packing up, and there was a child walking across the parking lot. He’d have to call his probation officer and say, “I’m in the parking lot of the Quality Inn, 501 New York Street NE, Washington, DC, and a child just walked across and nothing happened”?

    D: Mhmm. Because if he doesn’t report that and he goes to a polygraph exam and they ask, “Have you been in close proximity to a child?” And he says no and it shows “deceptive” and he comes back and says, “Well, there was this kid in the parking lot but I didn’t report it,” he’s just failed his polygraph. Now, once he passes his first polygraph he has to take a sexual history polygraph, asking about every sexual encounter that he’s had.

    JW: How graphic do they get?
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    MD: Have you had sex with animals? Have you had sex with dead bodies? When you have sex, what position are you in? What do you do? When you have sex, what position are you in? What do you do? They didn’t actually say “dead bodies” they used a word—

    JW: Necrophilia.

    MD: Right. Ricky went up to the examiner and said, “Um, my mom and I don’t know what this word is.” The examiner said, “Don’t you bullshit, me, boy.”

    JW: So every moment of atoning for your supposed sexual obsession is drenched in sex. Every life experience is turned into a kind of pornography for the treatment provider and the probation officer and the truth examiner.

    MD: We mothers are going to change this. Every registered individual is a child of somebody. Somebody loves them. You know we’ve started Women Against the Registry. I, personally, want the registry abolished.

    S: That’s where my heart is. I’m very angry with this country. It’s like a pólice state. We’re not a herd of animals that you can stamp some of our foreheads with a number so you can track us down.

    JW: Did you feel that way before your son got caught up by law enforcement? Because an awful lot of people have been swept up by what you now call the pólice state for an awfully long time.

    S: Oh, no, I was a very happy-go-lucky person. It didn’t affect me, so why should I care? Now it’s hitting a new group of people. We lost the war on drugs; now we have the war on sex. We always have to have a group of people to condemn and punish and ridicule and isolate; look at our history. But I didn’t know that. Oh, no, I was a very happy-go-lucky person. It didn’t affect me, so why should I care? Now it’s hitting a new group of people. Look at our history. But I didn’t know that history before this.

    MD: This is a system that is exiling a whole generation of our young men. One-third of the registry is youths under the age of 25. So we need more mothers like Sarah and D. and Mary Sue Molnar from Texas Voices and myself to stand up and do some serious ass kicking. I was just in California, and I’m gonna be very honest, I cried every time I met someone who said, Hi, I’m Mel; I’m a 290. I’m Steve; I’m a 290 – 290 means registered sex offender in California. These are human beings being forced in the streets with nothing. I’m a victim of sexual abuse. I believe in treatment. I believe in rehabilitation.

    I meet moms like D. and Sarah and I say, what the hell is going on here? Four years ago I was dumb as a box of rocks. I thought this registry was the most wonderful thing on the planet. I carry guilt with me every day for what happened to my child, and I carry guilt for being so stupid. So my ultimate goal is to link all the moms and fight the fight. It’s not just about the RSO anymore; it’s about human and civil rights in the United States of America.
    -------------------------------------------------------
    COUNTERPUNCH
    JoAnn Wypijewski is on the road, filing reports for CounterPunch across America. She can be reached at jwyp@earthlink.net .
     

    Levine's Take on RSOL Conf. And Polanski Release
    By posted by Fima <estrinyafm@gmail.com>
    Posted on 30.07.2010
    Link to this news item: [00255]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 0255 (see also Monthly Message 73) and send to estrinyafm@gmail.com, with a copy to judith@judithlevine.com, and to alexm60@fastmail.fm .
    We were very pleased to have Levine on the floor of the RSOL conference, and we appreciate her honest description of our work and our people.
    alex
    ---------------------------------------------------
    URL
    http://7dvt.com/2010redeeming-worst


    Redeeming the Worst (Polanski & the RSOL Conference)
    SEVEN DAYS
    Vermont's Independent Voice
    BY JUDITH LEVINE [07.21.10]

    Last week in Switzerland, Roman Polanski walked free from the chalet where he’d been under house arrest for a year. Swiss authorities declined to extradite the filmmaker to the U.S. to face new indictments for the sexual assault of a 13-year-old in 1977. After taking her picture and plying her with Champagne and drugs, Polanski allegedly forced sex on the girl. A plea to lesser charges got him 90 days under locked psychiatric evaluation. After serving 42, on the eve of sentencing, he heard the judge planned to scrap the deal, and fled to Europe.

    Last year, Los Angeles County prosecutors reopened the case. European artists and intellectuals rose in Polanski’s defense. A survivor of both the Holocaust and his wife’s murder, they said, he had suffered enough — and had repaid society with his prodigious contributions to the cinema. Back in the States, the victims’ rights community bellowed for Polanski’s head.

    Meanwhile, another criminal has been gathering sympathy: David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, whose shooting spree in the 1970s left six New Yorkers dead and several wounded. He said he was following the orders of the demonic black Lab who lived next door. Since then, however, the murderer has found Jesus, and with him a circle of “admirers,” including many evangelicals. According to the New York Times, Berkowitz today enjoys a wide correspondence and participates in several ministries, including one that steers youth from Satanism.

    Critics call both these men manipulators of the system. Polanski used his fortune and fame to escape deserved punishment, they say. Berkowitz was a con man on the Evil One’s team (he later claimed members of the cult to which he also belonged committed some of the murders), and he’s still a con man, now allegedly serving God. The cop who took his confession called Berkowitz’s jailhouse conversion a “charade” to get “access to the outside world.”

    Of course, Polanski’s elite connections didn’t hurt him, and his wealth bought an armada of attorneys on both sides of the Atlantic.

    As for Berkowitz, I wouldn’t put a little calculation past the guy. Even if he was genuinely seeking God, surely being born again into a media-rich, noisily proselytizing Christianity gleaned him a better bang for the Bible verse than returning to the Judaism of his birth would have done.

    Still, money and manipulation play walk-on roles in these dramas.

    What we’re watching is a morality play about the meanings of crime and punishment, a play whose antagonists have shaped the history of the American penal system.

    On one side are those who seek retribution. To them, criminals, especially sex criminals, are unchangeable (or, in modern parlance, incurable), their sins indelible. The state’s duty, therefore, is not just to protect society but also to avenge the victims.

    The other side believes, foremost, in rehabilitation — in moral language, redemption. To their supporters, Polanski has attained secular redemption through art; Berkowitz, divine redemption through worship.

    Evidence overwhelmingly favors rehabilitation. An inmate who kicks drugs and gets a college degree behind bars is less likely to return to crime than one who’s had nothing to do in prison but deal pot and learn how to hack bank websites. A humanely treated prisoner, moreover, is less enraged when he gets out than one who’s been locked in solitary. The rehabilitation principle dominated American criminology for much of the 20th century.

    But in the law-and-order 1980s, the punishers began to win. That was thanks to (among other things) racism, political pandering, privatized prisons that lobby for harsher statutes, and a victims’ rights movement that started out distrusting the police but soon married the punitive state, becoming its financial dependent and political helpmeet.

    Lately, recessionary budgets have opened new space for the rehabilitators. Alternatives to incarceration, especially for nonviolent offenders, are back on the table.

    Except for sex offenders. The endless sex panic has seen to that.

    And so Polanski’s and Berkowitz’s cases are not what they were 33 years ago.

    Polanski’s escape tipped the scales of justice hardly a whit. But it humiliated the district attorney. In the past, the prosecutor might have wiped the egg off his face and moved on.

    Today, those 48 unserved days allowed current DA Steve Cooley to enlist the U.S. Department of Justice and foreign agents in an extensive international chase. The age of the victim gave him the public support to spend tax dollars on a personal vendetta (and boost his run for state attorney general). “If [Polanski] admitted sleeping with a child, then he should be in prison for the rest of his life,” a typical commenter wrote on a news blog. “Sleeping with” a 13-year-old and sexually assaulting her have now melded both in statute and in public discourse. With the question of her consent deemed irrelevant, the now-adult victim’s beseechings that the prosecutor drop the case could be ignored.

    Is there no statute of limitations? Not for the sexual abuse of a minor. Moreover, federal law now requires sex-offender registries to list even people who completed their sentences decades ago, according to the laws of decades ago. The Constitution prohibits ex post facto — after the fact — punishment, but federal courts have thrown that objection out. The registries are “regulatory, not punitive” measures, judges have ruled, even though registrants are condemned to homelessness, unemployment, civic disenfranchisement, social stigma and violence.

    The effort to punish Polanski again, and harder, is not uncommon, either. Minor registration infractions — say, failure to report the purchase of a car — can send a sex offender back to prison for as long as his original sentence.

    I might add that if the photos Polanski took of that 13-year-old ended up online, a person who downloaded them could get more prison time than Berkowitz got for serial murder.

    And what of Berkowitz? He has been interviewed warmly on Focus on the Family radio. A testimonial tract about his life and faith is distributed at rescue missions and motorcycle rallies. A Texas postal worker runs a website for him, called Arise and Shine, and promotes his book, Son of Hope, on it.

    Don’t get me wrong. Rehabilition is a good thing. The man went on a homicidal rampage under orders from a dog. He needed treatment, not punishment.

    But it is one of numerous ironies of the crime and sex panics that some of those responsible for them are now among the only ones able to find good in people written off as evil.

    RSOL CONFERENCE
    I spent a recent weekend with both these groups of people — ex-sex offenders, along with their families and allies, at the national convention of an extraordinary national movement, gathered under the umbrella of RSOL, or Reform Sex Offender Laws.

    Meeting in the community room of a Washington, D.C., church, the group looked more like a church convention than a civil-rights organization. They were mostly white and middle or working class. Few had ever been involved in politics — until a teenage child was arrested for sex with a 15-year-old, or a brother chatted with a federal agent posing as a minor online. As a group, they are temperamentally libertarian. Yet, from California to Maine, they are writing op-eds, attending community forums, and lobbying to shave away at the massive legal and social iceberg that freezes former offenders out of American life.

    According to one of their pamphlets, RSOL members are “average, liberty-loving Americans.” As Americans, they cherish the second chance as a birthright.

    These folks are not “sex radicals.” They read sexual nonconformity as pathology and trust in cure. Like AA members, the offenders speak of themselves as “in recovery.” Many are devout Christians; prayer accompanies their politicking. They believe in sin — and in redemption.

    The inmates whose crimes had real victims say they feel remorse, have learned empathy and tried to make amends. I was moved by the respect and compassion they show one another.

    Yet even these folks can slip into the punitive and paranoid logic of modern sex-offender law. Lobbying their legislatures, some who started out demanding the abolition of the registries as cruel and unusual, and ineffective in protecting the public, now accept registry of “the worst of the worst.” They push to remove only the “low-risk” offenders, such as consensual teen lovers and public urinators, who may compose the majority of the 700,000 registered.

    This tactic leaves the question unanswered: Who is the worst of the worst?

    Late on Sunday, during an open-mic session, the group got an answer.

    “I don’t feel welcome here,” began a tense, middle-aged man named Martin. “You’re all for the ‘innocent’ accused, the falsely accused. But ‘the worst of the worst’ — you’ll leave them to twist in the wind.” He paused, breathing. “Let me tell you who I am.” Then Martin described his crimes: He held up convenience stores and, after robbing the cash register, would make a woman perform fellatio on him at gunpoint. “That’s me. The worst of the worst,” he said.

    “But I sat in my cell for 20 years trying to figure out what happened, trying to be a different man,” and in the 13 years since his release, he’s been “crime free,” he continued. “I paid my debt. When do I get to stop paying?”

    First there was silence. Then applause. We looked at each other, as if to ask: Who among us has not sinned? Somebody whispered, “Amen.”
     

    Stricter Laws in TX Challenged by Texas Voices
    By posted by alex <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 19.07.2010
    Link to this news item: [00254]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00254 and send to marysueintx@yahoo.com , with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm .
    Things just keep getting worse, but at least the RSOL local voices are heard in the media. Great news that Mary Sue Molnar was quoted correctly and forecefully in this otherwise depressing story.

    The overall url for the story in the Waco paper is
    http://www.wacotrib.com/news/3-Waco-area-cities-pass-strict-anti-sex-offender-laws.html
    Here's Mary Sue's comment, buried down in the story:
    ------------------
    Texas Voices is one group concerned about increasing restrictions for people on the sex offender registry. The group is primarily made up of people on the registry and their family members.

    Director Mary Sue Molnar said society needs to track true sexual predators. The problem is the registry and related rules have a blanket approach.

    A better approach would be to reserve the registry for offenders who pose a real danger to society, as determined by scientific evaluation, Molnar said.

    With more than 60,000 Texans now on the registry, it’s difficult for the public to know which offenders they need to look out for, she said.

    Molnar added that ordinances restricting residence can give people a false sense of security.

    “If someone is dangerous and they’re going to re-offend, restrictions like that are not going to stop them,” she said.

    Several experts who spoke at a recent Texas Senate hearing about the sex offender registry largely agreed with Molnar.

    Most people on the registry don’t pose a high risk, they said. Similarly, research has shown that requiring sex offenders to register does not reduce recidivism, they said.

    Those experts included members of the Council on Sex Offender Treatment, a governor-appointed body that the state health department describes as “the experts in the treatment and management of sex offenders.”

    The council recommended to the senators that Texas “de-register” low-risk offenders so resources can be targeted to truly dangerous offenders.

    Council representatives even recommended that Texas not cooperate with federally-directed efforts to create a national sex offender registry. Such a refusal would cost Texas federal funding.

    cculp@wacotrib.com



    The URL for this story is
    http://www.wacotrib.com/news/3-Waco-area-cities-pass-strict-anti-sex-offender-laws.html
     

    Sex Offenders' Privacy Violation
    By posted by alex marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 14.07.2010
    Link to this news item: [00253]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00253 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm. I will send them to the TN contact who sent us this article. Also see Action Item No. 101, and CONTACT THIS TV STATION to tell them how outrageous this is! It's a violation of all Constitutional rights to privacy. Only in America!
    ------------------------------------------

    Arrests in Sex Offender Check Up
    By: Alisha Searl
    asearl@wbbjtv.com
    Video included, showing sex offenders being nabbed! Go to the URL
    http://www.wbbjtv.com/NewsStories/100712ArrestsinSexOffenderCheckUp.html

    Multiple sex offenders in Haywood County are in court today, after being picked up Monday for not complying with the sex offender registry.

    The sex offender compliance check started around seven Monday night and lasted until all 46 sex offenders were accounted for.

    Three different sex offender violations, one final destination, but how they got there is a different story.

    In 2001 Jimmy Hicks was convicted of first degree sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl in Wisconsin. Now out and living in Haywood County, Hicks was arrested again for allegedly giving a false address when registering as a sex offender.

    Lt. Kim Williams, with the Brownsville Police Department, says, "A parole officer, probation officer went to his home and was told that he never had lived there, that he had given that address and told these people to lie to the police and say he lived there."

    Vincent Bell is listed as a violent sex offender for attempted aggravated sexual battery.

    Williams, adds," His victim was a minor child, so he can't live in a home with a minor child unless it was his natural child."

    Bell was cuffed and sent back to jail because according to police, he was found living with children he couldn't prove were his.

    Elton Tyus is also a violent sex offender, and while he was found in compliance with the sex offender registry, he was locked up for allegedly having crack and a gun in his house.

    Of the 46 sex offenders living in Haywood County, six were arrested, four for not being in compliance, two for drug related charges.

    Williams, adds, "To keep our children and community safe, we need to know where they are and if they're living where they're supposed to be, and the ones who are not supposed to have children there, don't have children there."

    Three offenders, one commonality; no one had anything to say to the camera when asked about their current violations.

    The convicted sex offenders will be back in court August 5th for their preliminary hearing.

     

    SHRED YOUR SEX OFFENDER MAPS!
    By posted by Tonia <toniat@sbcglobal.net>
    Posted on 12.07.2010
    Link to this news item: [00252]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00252, SHRED YOUR S.O. Map, and send to toniat@sbcglobal.net, with a copy to Patricia at pwp63@yahoo.com .
    This is a very important article - pass it around!
    URL


    Shred Your Sex Offender Map
    Lenore Skenazy, 06.25.10
    Forbes.Com

    If anything, the sex offender registry is making our kids LESS safe.

    Recently I consulted my local Serial Killer Registry and found out I'm living next door to a guy who killed three lunchroom ladies when they refused to give him seconds on the chili!

    Oh please. I'm kidding. There's no registry of murderers out there. There's no armed robber registry either. Not even one for drunk drivers. No, the only easily available registry for all Americans to consult is the Sex Offender Registry.

    Because ex-sex offenders are so much scarier than murderers?

    No, the reason there's now a sex offender registry in every state--most of these lists dating back only to the 1990s--is that sex offenders have become the focus of intense parental fear. Who could blame us moms and dads, when we hear about kiddie kidnappings 24/7 on the news? The problem is not with nervous parents. The problem is with the registries. Turns out, they're worse than useless.

    They are making our kids LESS safe. How? Well, there are three big problems with the registry.

    1. The first is that we have not decided, as a country, which crimes we really want to see registered. And so, in five states, a man can end up on the registry for having sex with a prostitute. In 13 states, it is a registerable offense to urinate in public, and in 32 states, it's just as bad to be caught streaking. Yes, streaking. That means that when we look at a little map of our neighborhood and it's covered with red “Sex Offender” dots, there's often no way of telling whether the guy down the block is a child rapist or a jerk wearing a headband (and nothing else), bent on re-living the Carter years.

    Seeing a bunch of dots is enough to make us lock our kids inside, where they get fat, bored and addicted to "Halo 3," because we think it's "Halo 3" outside. Goodbye, any sense of community! Which is ironic because community--knowing and looking out for each other--is exactly what makes neighborhoods safer.

    2. These lists waste our cops' time. Police are unable to concentrate on the very worst offenders when they have to keep track of ALL offenders, even the ones who once peed on a tree.
     

    Newark Post Article on RSOL Conference
    By posted by Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 01.07.2010
    Link to this news item: [00251]
     
    Refer in comments to news item 0251 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    This was the very first posted article about the RSOL national conference in Washington last month - it features speaker, Chyrsanthi Leon of the University of Delaware.

    ----------------------------------------------

    Newark Post,
    Newark, Delaware
    June 25, 2010
    URL
    http://www.newarkpostonline.com/articles/2010/06/25/news/doc4c254dfcb23a3729767149.txt

    University of Delaware study says state wastes millions of dollars on treating low-risk juvenile sex offenders

    An examination of Delaware's approach to juvenile sex offenders finds the need for reform. Research released today shows the system costs taxpayers millions each year, treating many kids as high risk who simply do not fall into that category, while distracting the state from the truly risky offenders.

    University of Delaware professor Chrysanthi S. Leon, J.D., Ph.D., will speak about the overuse of sex offender registration and residency laws in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, June 26 in the opening session of the conference of the national group, Reform Sex Offender Laws.

    On Monday June 28, Leon and others will lobby Sen. Tom Carper and other members of Congress to amend the federal Adam Walsh Act, which can withhold funding from states that do not comply with its terms. At noon, Leon will participate in a press conference across from the Hart Senate Office Building, 245 2nd Street, NE. Leon and Smith College professor David L. Burton, Ph.D., authored, “Net Widening in Delaware: The Overuse of Registration and Residential Treatment for Youth Who Commit Sex Offenses,” which will be published in an upcoming issue of the Widener Law Review.

    Last year, Delaware spent more than $5.1 million to send 62 youths out of state for treatment (FY09). In FY04, that expenditure was $2.9 million. These costs, Leon and Burton say, can only be justified if the youths are serious offenders who cannot be treated in the community and pose high risk of re-offense. But, the Delaware Youth Needs Evaluation, included in the article, shows they are low-to-moderate risk.

    Leon and Burton argue Delaware's compliance with the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act goes far beyond what is necessary. The unintended consequences of Delaware's registration laws are forcing the state to pay for unneeded treatment out of state. In total, Leon and Burton write, “the juvenile sex offender registry is the exact opposite of evidence-based corrections.”

    They say the law needs revision, using methods proven effective in other states. Doing so would not entail new costs to the system. In fact, it would likely provide a cost-savings by properly focusing resources.
     

    Sex Offenders Meet the Media
    By posted by Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 01.07.2010
    Link to this news item: [00250]
     
    Please refer in comments to News Item 0250, Sex Offenders Meet the Media, and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm . This was one of the early media reports on the RSOL DC Conference last month - posted on the MSNBC website, newsvine.com , but from a blog by an RSOL member.
    alex

    ------------------------------

    SEX OFFENDERS MEET THE MEDIA
    Newsvine.com
    June 30, 2010
    By Michael Machinatious

    A group of former sex offenders and experts in the field of sexual offenses met with members of the press Monday, following the 2nd Annual Conference of Reform Sex Offender Laws (RSOL). RSOL seeks to reform or repeal legislation like the Adam Walsh Act, which has a current deadline for implementation of July 1st but has only been completely adopted by 4 states.

    Surprisingly RSOL does not seek for the immediate abolishment of the Sex Offender Registry but for a more directed approach to Registration and other sex offender related laws. According to Dr. Chrysanthi Leon, University of Delaware, Professor of Sociology and an Expert on Sex Offender recidivism who presented at the conference, “the limited resources of law enforcement are being diluted by the blanket registration of all sex offenders.” “Credible statistical studies over the last 15 years “since the registry was implement show that “it has had no impact of the recidivism rate.” We can go back to studies from the 1940’s on, long before the registry was implemented, and show that the rate of offenses has remained remarkably consistent over the intervening years.

    RSOL advocates a more directed and individualized approach to registration using scientifically based data to identify those offenders who pose a significant treat to society and who are truly “dangerous.” Right now it is impossible for parents or even law enforcement to accurately determine an offender’s potential risk because of labels such as “sexually violently predator” which are blanketedly applied to all offenders who have committed a specific set of offenses rather that using individualized assessment to apply that designation. Having over 700,000 people on the registry nation-wide makes it difficult for law enforcement to narrow the field quickly when a child goes missing.

    “We are as concerned about the safety of children as anyone else” says Kelly Piercy, a former offender, and chairman of Georgians for Reform, but “we don’t believe that the current legislation is effective in doing so, it wastes resources and punishes those who are trying to reintegrate as productive citizens.”

    Interestingly several children both of non-offender presenters and children of former offenders attended and roamed freely about the conference seemingly without fear of any kind.

    Besides Dr. Leon, and Piercy other presenters at the conference included: Norman A. Pattis, Connecticut defense attorney, Nancy M. Steele, PhD, a Clinical Psychologist and sex offender treatment specialist, and Rev. James L. Powell, PhD, DD, a Methodist Minister whose Atlanta- based church welcomes sex offenders but under strict perimeters. Powell is also a licensed clinical psychologist and regularly counsels with former sex offenders. “There is much that the church and other community based organizations can do to mentor and help former sex offenders who want to reform,” thus increasing the net of safety that we all seek when dealing with those who have previously offended, particularly when the offense involves children.” Another presenter Mary Duval of Oklahoma, CEO of SOSEN, another sex offender advocacy group, became vehement in her fight for change, when her teenaged son Ricky was convicted of having sex with a younger teenaged girl. At that time there were no “Romeo and Juliet” laws which exempt consensual teenage sex from prosecution. Duval’s lobbying efforts help create these laws. Though completely blind, Duval actively lectures and campaigns throughout the United States, she also co-hosts weekly radio shows on ARC Talk Radio which focus on human rights and sex offender issues.

    The conference concluded Monday after concentrated lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill. Portions of the Conference were recorded and links will soon be available online. These and other information about RSOL are available at their national website www.reformsexoffenderlaws.org .
     

    What We´ve Become: S.O.s in America
    By posted by alex <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 14.06.2010
    Link to this news item: [00249]
     
    Refer in comments to news item 00249 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm .
    JoAnn Wypijewski writes the most hard-hitting, honest articles about sex offenders in America. This week´s article in THE NATION, What We´ve Become,¨ is an important indictment of the American ¨justice system.¨ Write THE NATION and congratulate them for this article, and earlier ones by Ms. Wypijewski. You may also email Ms Wypijewski at jwyp@earthlink.net .
    THE URL IS
    http://www.thenation.com/article/what-weve-become

    --------------------
    What We´ve Become
    by JoAnn Wypijewski
    THE NATION Magazine
    June 7, 2010

    This psychiatric examiner concludes with a reasonable degree of professional certainty that Mr. Johnson does have a mental abnormality. —Jacob Hadden, PhD, evaluating a prisoner for the State of New York's Office of Mental Health

    When Mr. Johnson was 18 to 20 years old he had a lot of sex. He thought about sex a lot, too. He met girls on the street or partying. They got it on at Motel 6 or in rooms in apartments with mattresses on the floor, sometimes near another couple. He didn't ask about age. Everyone was young, usually poor, usually solo and scared for a sea of reasons that might vanish at least for a while in a kiss. One girl was 13, another 15. Mr. Johnson "used charm and coercion to secure sexual contact," and boasted about his conquests, sometimes dramatically. Call that Exhibit 1 in psychiatric examiner Hadden's conclusion that Mr. Johnson is a sicko who requires indefinite civil confinement now that he has completed a criminal sentence.

    Exhibit 2: Until he was 20, Mr. Johnson "led a nomadic lifestyle," was reckless and impulsive, had no long-term plans and "changed locations and relationships often" in New York City and upstate. He has "no formal work history," having made a living selling drugs until a bad deal and a guilty plea on that and two counts of statutory rape and reckless endangerment sent him up. Abandoned by his parents as a child, too much for his grandmother to handle, he had been thieving, surviving on the street and in and out of correctional institutions from age 9. He once said he didn't think he'd live past 24.

    Exhibit 3: Mr. Johnson went to strip clubs "once or twice." In prison he "looked at Buttman (hard-core pornography magazine), but now doesn't." At 33, he "doesn't currently masturbate, but did years ago." It's unclear whether Examiner Hadden thinks Mr. Johnson is a sicko because of overindulgence or manly restraint. In an unsolicited, notarized response, Mr. Johnson wrote, "You had a lot of officers that used to sell [porno] years back in the prison system. I don't masturbate and never told [Hadden] that I did years ago."

    Exhibit 4: After thirteen years in prison Mr. Johnson "is sexually preoccupied." He "may have deviant sexual interest in pubescent females, but this is not clear given that he was relatively young at the time of his offenses." Still, because he insists he didn't know the two girls were underage—and once stated, "If they're old enough to be in the street and smoking dope, they are old enough to fuck"—"he is prone to further sexual contact with underage individuals because of deficits in his emotional capacity to understand why this is wrong."

    Exhibit 5: Mr. Johnson is married. His wife, by whom he claims four children, ages 12 to 20, is a certified nursing assistant who lives in Richmond, Virginia. Examiner Hadden notes that Mr. Johnson says "he loves his wife," but she is of interest to the psychiatric examiner primarily as an accessory to his sexual obsession. "He claimed that his wife 'says she wants it all the time.'" Mr. Johnson denies he said that but agrees that fulfilling her sexual desires "is my obligation as her husband."

    Mentally abnormal because he was a randy youth, because he had sex with randy minors, because he lived by the logic of the street and the lockup, because he fought and lied, because he might fantasize, because he wants to please his wife: any way he turns, Mr. Johnson is a sicko.

    Most important, he is HIV-positive. "Mr. Johnson" is an alias, one of many used by Nushawn Williams, whose name became notorious in 1997 when health officials in upstate New York plastered it, his face and HIV status on posters calling for his former sex partners to get tested.

    The state claimed Williams deliberately tried to infect women. No evidence supports that claim, but Williams was labeled "the devil," because he had been informed he was HIV-positive and didn't tell. His sex partners didn't tell their status, either, or look out for their own safety or his—that part of the sexual equation was ignored. To officials, the women, many white, were all victims of Williams, who is black, and their numbers mushroomed in a media panic to hundreds without basis beyond say-so. Thirteen women tested positive, though the source of infection cannot be pinpointed. His guilty plea involved three individuals.

    Now every past bad act equals a personality disorder in the present, as the facts, half-truths and fabrications of 1997 merge in the state's filings to keep Williams locked up under Article 10 of New York's Sex Offender Management and Treatment Act, passed in 2007. Williams should have been a free man on April 13, but he entered State Supreme Court in shackles on May 6, when a judge ruled there was probable cause to hold him as a sexually dangerous person.

    Williams's attorney has filed a motion to dismiss. If the judge punts, a six-person civil jury may decide whether the state has demonstrated by "clear and convincing evidence" that Williams has a mental abnormality that might, hypothetically, predispose him to commit a sex crime at some unknown future time. If yes, the jury will punt back to the judge, who will decide to confine him to a mental institution or to house arrest, GPS monitoring, etc., perhaps punting back in deference to Examiner Hadden and other medico-scientific hacks on the state's payroll.

    The insidious nature of panics is that they exceptionalize the ordinary, and then make ordinary the legal machinery supposedly instituted for extraordinary circumstances. Civil libertarians and the left mostly don't get too exercised about the punishment industry's capacity to roll out a new product every few years when the qualifying offense involves sex. Williams was made into a monster without much dissent, but some 350 people have been prosecuted for HIV-related "offenses" whether or not anyone got infected. Thirty-two states specifically criminalize nondisclosure, handing down sentences of twenty-five, thirty years, even dangling the prospect of the death penalty. New York and others tweak existing law, with similar draconian sentences. To follow legal developments on criminalhivtransmission.blogspot.com, assembled by the international civil libertarian Edwin Bernard, is to peer into the cold, dead heart of the society we've become.

    If New York succeeds in confining Williams to the bughouse, he will join about 3,000 Americans quietly put away not for what they've done but for what someone fears they could do. About the only organized opposition is from advocates for the garden-variety mentally ill, who worry about stigma by association. In the recent Comstock case every Supreme Court justice accepted the underlying fact that some government has the power to order the civil commitment of "sexually dangerous" persons, and Elena Kagan argued the case.

    The best that Williams can hope for is release with lifetime monitoring. His wife, Nina, had been learning about sex offender registry requirements from Virginia State Police when news came that Nushawn wasn't getting out. "He's had plans for the future," she told me, "happy thoughts, pleasant thoughts. He's seeing a different way of doing things. And to hear he might be civilly committed, it's, like, wow, someone's gonna come in and say, 'After all these years you're the same old cat that you was when you were thrown in prison.' It crushed him; it really did. He's a tough person, but he cried. He has emotions, you know."

    In his unsolicited response to Hadden, Williams apologized to those he hurt. "I'm in search of redemption," he wrote, quaintly.

    JoAnn Wypijewski
     

    Confab Looks at Queers & S.O.s
    By posted by Alex <alexm60@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 06.06.2010
    Link to this news item: [00248]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00248 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm, and I¨ll send them to Yasmin Nair, the lesbian writer who did this piece.
    ---------------------


    Windy City Times [Chicago, IL]
    June 2, 2010

    URL: http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=26778

    Confab looks at queers and sex offenders

    by Yasmin Nair

    "What's queer about sex offenders? Are sex offenders the new queers?" That was the provocative title of an all-day conference on sex-offender laws, hosted by the University of Chicago and the Center on Halsted and held at the Center May 27. Speakers included literary theorists, activists, artists, legal scholars and political scientists.

    Richard Wright, assistant professor of criminal justice at Bridgewater State College and the editor of the recent book Sex Offender Laws: Failed Policies, New Direction, provided a broad overview of the shifts in sex-offender laws and their effects on the rights of registered sex offenders (RSOs) , and argued that the laws had gone too far and needed reform. Over the last many decades, laws punishing and registering sex offenders have so increased in severity that several legal critics now consider them draconian. In early May, federal judge Jack B. Weinstein of the United States District Court in Brooklyn ruled that the electronic monitoring of Peter Polouizzi, a man awaiting retrial on child pornography,
    was unconstitutional, saying that it violated his procedural due process rights. Currently, depending on the city and state, an RSO may be barred from living in federal housing and may find it impossible to get a job. Many RSOs slide into lives of poverty and despair as basics like housing are put out of their reach.

    One major problem with the punishment of RSOs is that the laws are made so that "one size fits all," instead of being calibrated to reflect the severity of the crime. For that reason, someone who looks at child pornography may be punished exactly like someone who rapes a child. According to Wright, these laws are not only burdensome on RSOs but also extremely expensive because state and local agencies have to funnel valuable time and energy into constant monitoring of sex offenders. In addition, he said, "there is no definite empirical evidence that exclusionary zones reduce sex offender recidivism" and, in fact, by banishing RSOs to a few
    areas, the laws aid "the development of high-risk sex offender enclaves."

    But what does any of this have to do with queers? Don Kulick, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and a conference organizer, said that until recently, "homosexuality was a sex offense, homosexuals were sex offenders." Joe Fischel, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Chicago and event organizer, pointed out a historical concurrence: the relatively high level of acceptance and even protection of LGBTs in the past 15 years has coincided with a rise in the punishment and
    monitoring of RSOs. As he put it, "the sex offender takes up the space now vacated by the homosexual."

    Speakers also pointed out that children's sexuality has been erased from culture. Yet, the figure of the queer child and his/her relationship to older cultural and/or sexual mentors has long been a mainstay of queer culture and literature. Kathleen Stockton, professor of English at the University of Utah and author of The Queer Child, looked at key moments in fiction like Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, where children possessed a degree of agency and response to their sexuality.

    Laurie Jo Reynolds-artist, activist and adjunct professor at the Film and Video Department at Columbia College-holds a 2010 Soros Justice Project Fellowship; her current work considers the impact of sex-offender statutes in Illinois. She presented a series of staged photographs that provided a visual counterpoint to the traditional banishment of RSOs. In one, an RSO is shown returning from prison to the welcoming arms of family and friends. Reynolds said that the point was to ask what would it mean for an RSO to be meaningfully reintegrated back into their community. She noted that activists had to work with the "dead silence" around laws from both RSOs and
    their families and what we might presume to be their "natural allies" on the left.

    A session with Fischel and Rose Corrigan, assistant professor of law and politics at Drexel University, indicated some tension as the two differed on the ways in which sex-offender laws have been unsuccessful. While Fischel felt that punishment and registries were overly punitive, Corrigan, who has worked with survivors of sexual and domestic violence, stated that not enough was done to provide support for victims of rape and abuse. She also posed a question: "Why do prosecutors who hate rape cases [in that they
    don't prosecute them enough] love sex offender cases?" Her answer was that "getting people on the sex-offender registries was an easy way to show they are 'tough on crime' without doing a lot of work."

    During question-and-answer sessions, RSOs and their families spoke up and addressed their frustrations at the laws. Craig A., who did not give his last name for reasons of privacy, stated that he had been found guilty of possession of child pornography in Downers Grove in 2006. He was a journalist and a competing newspaper publicized his arrest. According to him, "all the aldermen were suddenly confronted with the fact that a newspaper reporter, who looks 'just like me' is also a sex offender." Craig's point was that there could be no stereotypes of the "typical" sex offender. He added, "we need to be out and loud."

    Craig A. told Windy City Times that he liked the conference, saying that "it was freeing to be able to get up in a group of strangers and admit what I've done, and not be condemned for it. This was the first time [I found] acceptance and support [among strangers]." Stuart Michaels, undergraduate program chair at the University of Chicago's Center for Gender Studies and an organizer, added, "This tells me that we have to look at some intersectional and difficult questions. It's quite historic to have in the same room sex offenders, academics, activists and artists talking about
    these issues." The conference ended with a session about the 2007 film Zoo, about zoophiles, which included a conversation with the director Robinson Devor.
     

    NH SO LAWS KILLED - OP ED BY RSOL Activist
    By posted by Chris <cldornin@aol.com>
    Posted on 22.05.2010
    Link to this news item: [00247]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00247, SO BILLS KILLED - OP ED BY RSOL ACTIVIST, and send to cldornin@aol.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm. Chris Dornin is the RSOL contact person for New Hampshire. Good work, Chris!
    -----------------------------
    We are losing the war on sex offenders

    By Chris Dornin
    OP in the Laconia Citizen, Laconia, NH
    May 12, 2010

    But not the way you think. The stereotype of the mean stranger watching the schoolyard underlies the last two decades of sex offender laws. Ironically, these feel-good, knee-jerk statutes endanger the very kids they aim to protect.

    State Sen. David Boutin (R-Hooksett) is sponsoring House Bill 1628 this spring to encourage police departments to use active public notice when sex offenders are released into a neighborhood. He filed the bill to please constituents hoping to drive all the sex offenders from Hooksett. Joel Dutton, a man on the sex offender registry, had been charged with a new sex crime. When Dutton made bail, his neighbors started a website against him with these and similar comments:

    "You show true restraint by not beating the tar out of this lowlife." Chris Johnson

    "I hope you guys get rid of the bastard. What a piece of crap." MTgirl

    "This is an incestuous family of whack-jobs and psychopaths, and it makes me feel good to know they are going down." Steve

    "Hang'em high and let the sun set on em. Only in a perfect world right? Haha" Josh T

    Boutin echoed those feelings in his Senate testimony. "Late September of 2009 a convicted child sex offender heinously struck again and was charged with felonious sexual assault against a 7 year old Hooksett girl," Boutin told lawmakers. "Quick adoption of this bill and dissemination of notification guidelines to local law enforcement will go a long way towards preventing another sexual assault, with regrettable consequences for the victim, family and community, who all share in the burden of the pain."

    There was much more to the story. The prosecutor has dropped the case against Dutton for lack of evidence. A neighbor had accused Dutton of molesting his own niece, who still lives with Dutton, his wife, and his brother in law.

    States like Pennsylvania and New Jersey evaluate all their sex offenders for threats to the public and save active notice for the worst of the very worst. That lifelong punishment after incarceration can include mass emails, newspaper ads, wanted-style posters, and hostile PTA meetings. Those states also have strong safeguards against vigilantism. In the last decade dozens of registered sex offenders have been murdered.

    These laws shame the very group of ex-cons least prone to do another crime. The recidivism rate for new sex charges against registered sex offenders is averaging about 1 percent per year in state after state. Likewise, the research says more than 95 percent of sex crimes are committed by people who have never been convicted before, usually the loved ones of the victim. Between a third and half of the offenders against kids are teenagers or younger themselves.

    The middle school in Hooksett had a bizarre episode of active notice this winter. Jennifer Frank, a visiting detective from Plymouth State University, displayed student Facebook pages in front of the whole school. Some belonged to the children of local sex offenders. Then she posted their fathers' Internet mug pages from the state registry. Charles Littlefield, the Hooksett superintendent, confirms that these children were "traumatized." Steve Harrises, the principal, says he was "blindsided" by the assembly.

    Something worse happened when Frank went to Fall Mountain High School. Steve Fortier, a school parent, gave this testimony at the Senate hearing on HB 1628. Fortier is not a sex offender, by the way.

    "Many of the sex offenders whose information was shown (in front of the school) are family members of teens who were sitting in the audience," Fortier said in written testimony. "Because most youth sexual abuse is committed by a family member or someone else known by the victim, there was an even more troubling consequence. Many of the victims of the sex offenders were watching the assembly. This retraumatization, including the stigma associated with being a teen sexual abuse victim, was, in my opinion, not worth whatever gains were made through the assembly."

    Other Fall Mountain parents have said kids ran out crying and stayed away from school for days. One couple has asked the Civil Liberties Union to represent them in litigation.

    The hysteria sweeping New Hampshire against sex offenders has already reached a critical stage. Hostile neighbors drove convicted child murderer Raymond Guay from Manchester to Chichester to New Hampton last year. Along the way he stayed with the family of Pastor David Pinckney, whose parishioners gave the ex-offender meaningful handyman jobs to do. Pinckney told senators that men like Guay can assimilate safely back into society.

    "I would welcome him back in my home," Pinckney testified.

    Mobs gathered outside the apartment of registered sex offender Gloria Huot in Manchester a couple of years ago. People burned dolls on her wooden porch, according to news reports. Huot shared the apartment with another woman and her kids.

    John Crawford, a former Laconia State School resident on community placement, was bludgeoned to death in 1981. Three former State School residents were awaiting trial on molestation charges. Rumors that Crawford was a sex offender had spread through his neighborhood before his murder.

    A man at NH Prison stabbed two sex offenders in Concord and tried to burn an apartment building with seven sex offenders. The Maine vigilante who killed two sex offenders in 2007 was coming here next. After his suicide, police found a New Hampshire hit list on his computer.

    Nobody can identify the very few predatory child rapists among the 2,700 mug shots on the New Hampshire registry. Judging by registry data from other states, most are incest offenders at low risk to commit a new crime. Some are husbands stung on the Internet without an actual victim. Some are drunken college guys who misunderstood a no for a yes. Some are former Romeos with 15-year-old girlfriends. Those are all criminals, I'm not minimizing their crimes, but they were well punished in prison. Few will recidivate. No one can tell if the folks branded by the registry have families to share the horrors of active notice.

    None of the names comes with a clinical risk score. On line they all look bad. If HB 1628 becomes law, bullies will follow the children of sex offenders. Some will lose their jobs. Landlords will evict some of them. Some could become those mythical strangers watching the sandbox from the shadows.

    Chris Dornin is a retired Statehouse reporter and religious volunteer into N.H. Prison working for criminal justice reform.
     

    S,Ct, Nominee Not Good on SO RIGHTS
    By sent by Sandi <sandihr@sbcglobal.net>
    Posted on 21.05.2010
    Link to this news item: [00246]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00246, S.CT. Nominee Not Good on S.O. Rights, and send to sandihr@sbcglobal.net , with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm . Ms. Horzek´s comment is below the article, as also published in the Charlotte Observer.
    -----------------------------------------
    ASSOCIATED PRESS
    Charlotte Observer
    Charlotte, NC
    May 17, 2010

    KAGAN WINS CASE ON IMPRISONMENT OF SEX OFFENDERS

    WASHINGTON Supreme Court justices on Monday handed a victory to the woman who could soon be joining them, upholding a federal law allowing for the indefinite imprisonment of inmates considered "sexually dangerous."

    The case was one of six Solicitor General Elena Kagan argued on behalf of the government during the past nine months.

    Although the dispute was over the continuing imprisonment of people who have finished serving their sentences, the issue before the court was whether Congress has authority to step into an area usually handled by the states.

    Kagan compared the government's power to commit sexual predators to its power under the Constitution to quarantine federal inmates whose sentences have expired but have a highly contagious and deadly disease.

    "Would anybody say that the federal government would not have Article I power to effect that kind of public safety measure? And the exact same thing is true here. This is exactly what Congress is doing here," she said.

    Justice Antonin Scalia, a dissenter with Justice Clarence Thomas on Monday, was her most skeptical questioner.

    Scalia repeatedly asked Kagan why the federal government should not just leave the whole matter to the states.

    Kagan said states are not always willing to bear the roughly $65,000 annual cost and responsibility of taking in a former federal inmate.

    "What this statute is designed to do is to deal with that transition period and to make sure that sexually dangerous, mentally ill people don't fall through the cracks between federal custody and the reestablishment of state control," Kagan said.

    No matter how often Scalia made his point - "that's a state police function, it's none of our business" - Kagan stuck to her line of argument that Congress had reason to believe otherwise and could not risk the danger to the public.

    Justice Stephen Breyer, in his majority opinion, adopted some of Kagan's points in concluding that the law at issue is "a modest addition to set of federal prison-related mental-health statutes that have existed for many decades."

    Kagan now has won two of the three cases she argued that the court has so far decided. Her other victory was in the dispute over the war memorial cross in the Mojave Desert. The Supreme Court allowed it to remain standing while a legal battle continued over its presence on federal land.

    Her one defeat so far came in the high-profile campaign finance case that was her first argument in September. The justices voted 5-4 to strike down federal laws prohibiting corporations and labor unions from spending unlimited sums to call for the election or defeat of candidates for Congress and president.

    Read more: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/05/17/1441903/kagan-wins-case-on-imprisonment.html#Comments_Container#ixzz0ob3s5Jqw
    ---------------
    Comment from Sandi Hrozek, RSOL Participant

    United States and the separation of powers between the legislative and the judicial branches but also advocates the federal government usurping the powers accorded to the individual states.

    Sex offenders who have served their sentences today; who tomorrow? Certainly seems like drug dealers are an ongoing threat, especially to children and youth. And they have to be mentally ill as many of them are also users, and surely nobody in his right mind would put that stuff in his body. Hmmm, with a little thought, I imagine a case could be made for just about anybody. And the point about the states not being willing/able to bear the financial burden of transitioning and treating these individuals, I guess that since the federal government is so solvent and has such a surplus of funds, that makes sense too.

    ---------------------------------
     

    Supreme Court: SOs Can Be Held Indefinately
    By posted by Robin <vandrwall@gmail.com>
    Posted on 20.05.2010
    Link to this news item: [00245]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 0245, Supreme Court: SOs Can Be Held Indefinately, and send to vandrwall@gmail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm .

    THIS OUTRAGEOUS SUPREME COURT DECISION MUST BE CHALLENGED!
    WE URGE ALL RSOL PARTICIPANTS TO WRITE LETERS IMMEDIATELY TO NEWSPAPERS AND OTHER MEDIA TO DEMAND A RECONSIDERATION
    alex marbury
    SEE COMMENTS AFTER THE ARTICLE!
    ----------------------------------------------------


    URL
    http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/05/17/scotus.sex.offenders/index.html#disqus_thread

    Article by Bill Means, Court Reporter
    May 17, 2010

    Washington (CNN) -- The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday the federal government has the power to keep some sex offenders behind bars indefinitely after they have served their sentences if officials determine those inmates may prove "sexually dangerous" in the future.

    "The federal government, as custodian of its prisoners, has the constitutional power to act in order to protect nearby (and other) communities from the danger such prisoners may pose," Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the 7-2 majority.

    At issue was the constitutionality of federal "civil commitment" for sex offenders who are nearing the end of their confinement or who are considered too mentally incompetent to stand trial.

    The main plaintiff in the case, Graydon Comstock, was certified as dangerous six days before his 37-month federal prison term for processing child pornography was to end. Comstock and the others filing suit remain confined at Butner Federal Correctional Complex near Raleigh, North Carolina.

    Three other inmates who filed suit served prison terms of three to eight years for offenses ranging from child pornography to sexual abuse of a minor. Another was charged with child sex abuse but was declared mentally incompetent to face trial.

    All were set to be released nearly three years ago, but government appeals have blocked their freedom. The government says about 83 people are being held under the civil commitment program.

    Corrections officials and prosecutors determined the men remained a risk for further sexually deviant behavior if freed. The inmates' attorneys maintain the continued imprisonment violates their constitutional right of due process and argue Congress overstepped its power by allowing inmates to be held for certain crimes that normally would fall under the jurisdiction of state courts.

    The law in question is the 2006 Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which includes a provision allowing indefinite confinement of sex offenders. A federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, ruled lawmakers had overstepped their authority by passing it, prompting the current high court appeal.

    "The statute is a 'necessary and proper' means of exercising the federal authority that permits Congress to create federal criminal laws, to punish their violation, to imprison violators, to provide appropriately for those imprisoned and to maintain the security of those who are not imprisoned but who may be affected by the federal imprisonment of others," Breyer wrote.

    Breyer equated the federal civil commitment law to Congress' long-standing authority to provide mental health care to prisoners in its custody, if they might prove dangerous, "whether sexually or otherwise."

    In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the federal government overstepped its bounds.

    "Congress' power, however, is fixed by the Constitution," Thomas wrote. "It does not expand merely to suit the states' policy preferences, or to allow state officials to avoid difficult choices regarding the allocation of state funds." He was joined by Justice Antonin Scalia.

    The case represented a victory for the federal government and the woman who argued the case on its behalf, Solicitor General Elena Kagan. President Obama nominated Kagan last week to serve on the Supreme Court.

    A key lawmaker behind the Adam Walsh act applauded the ruling.

    "The court's holding today is a victory on behalf of the American people," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    "The process to enact this law to protect our children from those who would do them harm was difficult. I am heartened to see an overwhelming majority of the Supreme Court uphold this important child protection law."

    The justices in April 2009 had blocked the imminent release of dozens of sex offenders who had served their federal sentences after the Obama administration claimed many of them remain "sexually dangerous." Chief Justice John Roberts ordered the men be kept in custody while the case worked its way to the high court.

    Most violent sex offenses are handled at the state level, and at least 20 states run programs in which sexual predators are held indefinitely or until they are no longer considered dangerous. The federal government's civil commitment program is relatively new.

    The Adam Walsh act was named after the son of John Walsh, host of TV's "America's Most Wanted."Adam Walsh was kidnapped and murdered by a suspected child molester in 1981.

    The act also increased punishments for certain federal crimes against children and created a national registry for sex offenders. Those aspects of the bill were not being challenged in this case.
    ----------------------
    COMMENTS from RSOL PARTICIPANTS:

    The decision is disheartening. When a 36 month sentence can turn into a lifetime, after a definitive sentence was handed down, we need to take a hard look at where we are headed as a society.
    Who will stop our government now from expanding this to other crimes or rounding up those that have already served their time? The very courts that were created to protect the people from our government and uphold The Constitution are increasingly not doing that and becoming an extension of the government as it pertains to the rights of individuals.

    The courts have given our government free reign to pass any laws they want in the name of "protection" as they deem just and proper. That leaves all of society in jeopardy.


    Courage to all who fight,

    Scott O
    ------------------------------------------
     

    TONYA CRAFT FOUND INNOCENT IN GA!
    By posted by alex <alexm60@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 13.05.2010
    Link to this news item: [00244]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00244 (also posted as a monthly message on our homepage today, May 13), and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm . THIS IS A BIG VICTORY!
    ------------------
    TEACHER AQUITTED ON 23 COUNTS OF MOLESTATION IN GEORGIA
    In one of the most important false accusation cases in US history, Tonya Craft, a kindergarten teacher, has been found innocent on 23 counts of molesting children. See the TODAY show interview with her -she is an extremely articulate woman who did research on false accusations for her own case. She, with her lawyer´s backing, insisted on testifying in her trial (many lawyers, often wrongly, advise against this!). She has won hands down - in Ringgold, GA (near Chattanooga). She lost custody of her children, lost her teaching job and her home, and has received death threats. Now she is FREE! See the interview here:
    http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/37103478#37103478
    ANYONE WHO CAN REACH HER, ask her to JOIN RSOL and to speak at our Washington conference in June!
     

    Nev. Female S.O. Sentenced to Life
    By posted by Alex <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 08.05.2010
    Link to this news item: [00243]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00243 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm, with a copy to Donna, rsolmissouri@yahoo.com .
    See also Action Item Nop. 092, and make your protests known via FAMM (Families Against Mandatory Minimums).
    alex marbury
    ----------------
    ALL RSOL PARTICIPANTS - Join FAMM (Families Against Mandatory Minimums) in their action to protest the incredible, draconian life sentence for female sex offender Lyn Taylor! See contact info. below.
    alex marbury for RSOL
    -------------
    Does the Punishment Fit the Crime?
    An Elko County woman convicted of forcing a 13-year-old-boy to touch her breasts was sentenced to life in prison.
    Apr 15, 2010
    kolotv.com
    Reno, Nevada
    Email Address: news@kolotv.com


    An Elko County woman convicted of forcing a 13-year-old-boy to touch her breasts was sentenced to life in prison.

    Michelle Lyn Taylor, 34, was convicted of lewdness with a minor under 14 in November.

    Taylor’s attorney, Public defender Alina Kilpatrick says it is the harshest sentence ever dealt to a female sex offender in Nevada. Kilpatrick called the sentence unconstitutional.

    “This is cruel and unusual punishment,”Kilpatrick said. “She put his hand on her boob while she was wearing a bra, now she’s getting life.”

    Kilpatrick noted the case of Stacey Thoman who actively participated in the sexual abuse of her daughter , but received a four-to-20 year sentence.

    Elko County District Attorney Gary Woodbury said Taylor was "convicted of precisely of what she did," and under the state’ sentencing guidelines, life in prison was mandatory.

    Woodbury says Taylor did not want to negotiate a plea deal because she did not want to have to register as a sex offender.

    Woodbury says Taylor felt her life would be over if she had to register (as a sex offender) so it wouldn't matter what she was convicted of.

    Woodbury says while it might be some adolescent male's fantasy to have sex with a woman, in this case it was a traumatic event. The child has needed, and continues to receive therapy.
     

    RSOL´s Ill. Voices Gets Good Press
    By posted by Alex <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 06.05.2010
    Link to this news item: [00242]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00242 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm, with a copy to toniat@sbcglobal.net . This is a sad article about yet more restrictions on sex offenders in Illinois, but it features a great interview with Tonia, the Illinois Voices (Ill. RSOL) contact person. Way to go Tonia!
    Alex
    ----------------------
    May 5, 2010

    BY PHIL KADNER
    SouthTown Star
    Chicago, Ill., Suburbs

    If you like sex offenders, raise your hand. Few people are willing to defend the civil rights of people convicted of sex crimes.

    So it didn't surprise me that a bill banning registered sex offenders from getting within 500 feet of public parks, forest preserves or conservation areas had unanimously passed the Illinois Senate and overwhelmingly passed the House.

    But I hadn't heard about the law until an e-mail arrived from a former south suburban man who is listed on the state's sex offender registry. Years ago he was convicted of downloading child pornography off the Internet.

    "I was convicted of possession of child pornography and served 30 months probation," he wrote, asking that his name not be used. "I never touched or attempted to perpetrate an illegal act on any physical child."

    If Senate Bill 2824 is signed into law by the governor, he could not legally enter any park or forest preserve.

    "I couldn't go to Bear games at Soldier Field, the Air and Water Show, Millennium Park, Grant Park, most municipal festivals, arboretums and conservatories, and even bicycle trails," the man stated.

    An assistant Illinois attorney general noted that there are hundreds of laws on the books regarding sex offenders, and many are not enforced until someone with a record acts in a suspicious manner.

    Sex offenders are already prohibited from living near schools or public parks or attending school functions without the approval of a school official.

    In addition, the current law prohibits them from entering a park, forest preserve or conservation area if a child is present.

    "The difference between the old law and the new law is that the new law draws a bright line on what is not allowed," said state Rep. Jack Franks (D-Woodstock), a co-sponsor of the legislation. "If you fall into this category of sex offender you can't enter a park, whether or not children are there. People with children have a right to feel that their youngsters are safe entering a public park."

    But what exactly is a "sex offender?"

    Most people probably think of someone who has molested a child or raped a woman.

    But a 19-year-old man who had sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend could be convicted of a sex crime and would be listed on the sex offender registry. A man who downloaded child pornography would fit that description as well.

    "There are people who make those arguments, but whenever you look into these cases there is usually a lot more to them," said Cara Smith, an assistant attorney general. "I assume many high school students are having sex, and very few of those instances end up in the courts. There are usually circumstances that generate a criminal complaint that go far beyond the norm."

    I told the man who e-mailed me that by downloading child pornography, he was perpetuating an industry that destroys the lives of thousands of youngsters.

    He responded that at the time he rationalized his actions, believing that he was hurting no one. Now he realizes that people such as himself do cause harm to children.

    Still, he has had to move out of his home twice, and anyone who lives near him can find his name and his criminal act on the Internet.

    A convicted murderer who served his time can have greater anonymity in this state and throughout the nation.

    I don't like the way sex offenders get grouped together, often tossing violent criminals in with those who are not.

    And I'm not convinced it's wise for a community to harass a group of people endlessly, a modern version of the old scarlet letter. History tells us that society usually regrets that sort of persecution.

    But no one wants their child, or a neighbor's, exposed to a sexual predator.

    Tonia Maloney is president of Illinois Voices, an organization that's trying to create laws to protect youngsters while preserving the rights of people convicted of sex offenses.

    Her son, at age 19, was branded a sex offender when he had sexual relations with a 16-year-old, she said.

    "Many elected officials agreed with me that this law is too harsh, but they said there was no way they could vote against it," Maloney said. "Their political opponents would use that vote against them when they were up for re-election."

    Indeed, any politician who votes "no" on this kind of law is going to see that vote appear on an opponent's campaign literature.

    Sex crimes are often horrific. As for the statistics on repeat offenders, you can find a number to back up whatever theory you believe in.

    The man who called me said the punishment for his crime never ends, and new punishments keep getting added after he served his sentence.

    It seems to me that sex offenders are modern day lepers, relegated to lives of increasing social isolation.

    Maybe we should just put them all on an island. Would anyone vote "no" on that
     

    Young Republican Activist Unfairly On PA Registry
    By alex <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 29.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00241]
     
    Refer in comments to news item 00241, Young Republican Activist Unfairly on PA Registry and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm . The story is a year old, but Mr. Curtin continues to be unfairly smeared and punished on the registry in Pennsylvania. Please send me your comments and I´ll send them along to Mr. Curtin.
    This young man, John Curtin, has contacted RSOL with his support for our work. He has been unfairly treated in a romeo and juliet case, and deserves our full support.

    URL for this story -
    http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090519/NEWS/905190328

    By Andrew Scott
    Pocono Record
    Northeastern Pennsylvania
    May 19, 2009

    Supporters of former Monroe County Republican state committeeman John Curtin say six to 18 months in jail is too harsh a sentence on what they believe are false sexual offense allegations.

    Assistant District Attorney Michael Rakaczewski considers the sentence not harsh enough — and less than what the law requires for such felonies.

    Related Stories
    State's supreme court refuses to hear Curtin's Stroudsburg sex assault appealHigh court changes Curtin's charge to a felonyState court upholds verdict in John Curtin caseCurtin denied acquittal, new trial after sexual assault convictionStiffer sentence, new trial among requests in Curtin sex-assault caseDA mum as time runs out for Curtin's attackers to be chargedCurtin's supporters await state's reply on request to probe DA's caseConvicted molester Curtin says his attackers should be chargedJudge grants Curtin leniency in sex assault caseJudge stays Curtin's sentence for appeal processOne count reversed in Curtin caseCurtin acquitted on one charge, to be sentenced on the restA jury in 2007 convicted Curtin of sexual assault and contacting or communicating with a minor to commit a sexual offense (both felonies) and indecent assault, providing alcoholic beverages to minors and corrupting minors (misdemeanors).

    The charges stem from an August 2005 incident in which Curtin, then 20, sexually molested a minor, then 17, outside the Budget Host Inn in Stroudsburg, according to police.

    The incident happened during a drinking party attended by some partygoers who were underage in a hotel room rented by Curtin.

    Curtin admitted to renting the room and providing the alcohol, but has steadfastly denied the sexual offense charges.

    After Curtin was convicted, Monroe County Court Judge Jerome Cheslock sentenced him to six to 18 months in county jail, to be followed by a year's probation.

    Usually, defendants begin serving their sentences immediately and go through the process of appealing verdicts while in county jail or state prison. In Curtin's case, Judge Cheslock stayed Curtin's sentence, pending the outcome of the appeal process, and allowed him to remain free on bail until all appeals had been exhausted.

    The judge ruled that Curtin did not have to register as a Megan's Law sex offender until after completing his stayed sentence. Opposing this, Rakaczewski filed a motion to have Curtin register immediately.

    Curtin appealed all the way to state Supreme Court, but could not get the conviction overturned. So, the case was sent back to Monroe County Court for sentencing.

    About 20 relatives and friends attended Monday's hearing and addressed the court in support of Curtin, asking for leniency.

    Since being convicted, Curtin, who has no prior criminal record, had attended alcohol counseling, registered as a Megan's Law sex offender, stayed out of trouble, graduated college with honors and gotten a job, all while speaking to minors about the dangers of underage and irresponsible drinking, supporters said.

    Finding employment was challenging with a convicted sex offender label hanging over his head, but Curtin never gave up and kept pushing forward, they said.

    "It's really been hard on the entire family with the constant media attention," said his mother, Shari Curtin. "John has struggled greatly."

    Brother Josh Curtin said, "John is one of the hardest working, most diligent people I've ever known. He would do anything for you. These allegations aren't who he is."

    Justin Searle, a friend, said, "John has become like a brother to me. He's been there to give me advice, comfort me and pick me up when I've fallen. He's strong in a storm. He's always able to share his love and his light, no matter what."

    Co-worker Justino Hernandez said, "He's on time every day and he's never taken a day off. He's always cheerful, very open and willing to help the next person out. I've been to his house and cooked for him and his family. It's refreshing to meet someone like him."

    Curtin has remained an inspiring, productive member of society who is always willing to help others and would better serve the community if given probation instead of jail time, supporters said.

    "He's not a threat to society or a flight risk," Shari Curtin said.

    Linda Terrell, who had worked with Curtin on political campaigns, said, "John is a good person with a lot to offer the community. He has a productive job he will no longer have and likely won't be able to get again if given a jail term."

    SPEAKING ON HIS own behalf, Curtin said he regrets the mistake of renting the hotel room and providing alcohol to minors, but denied committing any sexual offenses against anyone.

    "What I've done with my life since being convicted is the best I can do," he said. "I apologize to my family and the families of those who were underage and drinking in the hotel room that night."

    Curtin said he is ready to put the experience behind him and thanked the court for letting him go through the appeal process prior to his sentence commencing.

    "My attitude has changed," he said. "I have so much more empathy now for anyone who feels pain. I wake up every day with a renewed determination to live a better life for my family, my God and myself. I'm able to live life today without a drink.

    "Life sometimes isn't fair, but I've learned from it and become a better, more fruitful person," he said.

    Defense attorney James Swetz addressed the court, saying Curtin registering as a Megan's Law sex offender, staying out of trouble and living a productive lifestyle are mitigating factors warranting a probationary sentence rather than jail time.

    Rakaczewski disagreed, citing the fact that Curtin was convicted of two felony offenses warranting three to six years in state prison or two to four years that at the court's discretion could be served in state prison or county jail. Those are more appropriate sentences under state guidelines, he said.

    "Mr. Curtin living a law-abiding, productive life and registering under Megan's Law aren't mitigating factors," Rakaczewski said. "That's all to be expected of any convicted defendant as part of the requirement of the sentencing, which in this case was stayed."

    Rakaczewski asked Judge Cheslock to give Curtin consecutive sentences on the two felony charges — sexual assault and contacting or communicating with a minor to commit a sexual offense.

    In the end, the judge imposed concurrent sentences of six to 18 months each on the felonies, to be followed by a year's probation on the merged misdemeanors.

    "We're disappointed," Rakaczewski said afterward. "What was imposed is less than the standard sentence called for under state guidelines for the crimes on which Mr. Curtin has been convicted. It's a 400 percent departure from those guidelines. It's a slap on the wrist.

    "We'll take under advisement whether we want to file any motions appealing the sentence," he said.

    Swetz said he is pleased with the sentence, which is the same as Cheslock imposed in 2007.

    "But, the real question is what we gain by incarcerating John Curtin," he said. "The answer is 'nothing.' We don't plan on appealing the sentence. Mr. Curtin just wants to put this whole thing behind him."

    Curtin and his supporters declined to comment afterward.
     

    Electronic Mon. of SOs Proposed & Opposed in WA
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 17.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00240]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00240 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm. I will send them to the RSOL person who sent this in, as well as the WA RSOL contact. SEE STRONG COMMENT OPPOSED TO THIS ITEM BELOW
    ----------------------
    HB 1142 - 2009-10
    Washington State Legislature
    WA LEGISLATIVE BULLETIN
    April 17 2010
    URL:
    http://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary.aspx?bill=1142

    Calling for a study using radio frequency identification or other similar technology to electronically monitor sex offenders.

    History of Bill as of Saturday, April 17, 2010 3:22 PM
    Sponsors: Representatives O'Brien, Sells, Chase, Hurst, Springer, Kelley, Simpson, Maxwell
    2009 REGULAR SESSION
    Jan 14 First reading, referred to Public Safety & Emergency Preparedness.
    2010 REGULAR SESSION
    Jan 11 By resolution, reintroduced and retained in present status.
    2010 1ST SPECIAL SESSION
    Mar 15 By resolution, reintroduced and retained in present status.

    ----------------------------
    COMMENT OPPOSING THE BILL FROM RSOL WA ORGANIZER:

    Dear Representatives of the People of the State of Washington-

    After searching this years new Legislation against Sex Offenders, I came upon HB 1142.

    After reading HB 1142, and seeing that it is the desire to implant RFID chips into human beings, brings to mind a glimpse at the future. A future where people are "tracked" in all of their movements. That is a direct violation of the Constitution, as well as our Rights as defined in the Bill of Rights. Also, this is a punitive act that was not part of the original sentence of all registered sex offenders at the time of their conviction.

    That would be an Ex Post Facto law. Which is Unconstitutional both in State and Federal Constitutions.

    Also, Jones v. City of Opelika, 319 U.S. 105 (1943) says that: "A state may not impose a charge for the enjoyment of a right granted by the federal constitution."

    And "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" are fundamental Rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution of the United States of America.

    "Statutes that violate the plain and obvious principles of common right and common reason are null and void." --Bennett v. Boggs, 1 Baldw 60

    "Where rights secured by the Constitution are involved, there can be no rule making or legislation which would abrogate them." --Miranda v. Arizona, 384 US 436, 491.

    "There can be no sanction or penalty imposed upon one because of this exercise of constitutional rights." --Sherer v. Cullen, 481 F 946

    Need I remind the Authors of this Bill that you swore an Oath: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution and laws of the state of Washington, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of (name of office) to the best of my ability."

    If you are passing Laws that go against the nature of the Constitution, you are violating your Oath of Office. This is provided for in Section 7311 of the US Code as well as Section 1918.

    John Locke, quoted many time by the Founding Fathers had this to say about Acts of War:

    "And hence it is, that he who attempts to get another man into his absolute power, does thereby
    put himself into a state of war with him; it being to be understood as a declaration of a design upon his
    life: for I have reason to conclude, that he who would get me into his power without my consent, would
    use me as he pleased when he had got me there, and destroy me too when he had a fancy to it; for no
    body can desire to have me in his absolute power, unless it be to compel me by force to that which is
    against the right of my freedom, i.e. make me a slave."

    Legislation such as what was written in HB 1142 is a targeted Legislation. Targeted Legislation was ruled Unconstitutional many times over. But just in case you need a Supreme Court Decision, US v. Brown, 381 U.S. 437 (1965).

    Please think carefully before passing further laws that target individuals or groups of individuals as those are Bills of Attainder.

    If you are passing Legislation that is outside of your Authority, then you are outside of your Immunity!

    "To preserve legislative independence, we have concluded that "legislators engaged 'in the sphere of legitimate legislative activity,' @ 341 U. S. 376 (1951), should be protected not only from the consequences of litigation's results but also from the burden of defending themselves."" --Supreme Court of Virginia v. Consumers Unioin, 446 U.S. 719 (1980)

    Bills of Attainder are NOT legitimate legislative activity.

    "Legislatures may not of course acquire power by an unwarranted extension of privilege." --Tenney v. Brandhove, 341 U.S. 367 (1951)

    I apologize for the harshness of my message, but it is a message that needs to be spoken.

     

    Murder Victim was RSO
    By e-advocate <eadvocate@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 17.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00239]
     
    Refer in comments to news item 00239 and send to eadvocate@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm .
    THANKS to e-advocate for this (e-advocate is one of the BEST in sending out these stories, which we don't always get to!) - the article itself is copyrighted, but you can find it at url
    http://www.kplctv.com/Global/story.asp?S=12309898
    -----------------------------------


    Murder victim was registered sex offender
    4-14-2010 Louisiana

    LAKE CHARLES, LA. (KPLC) - Richard Dean Davis, the man brutally stabbed in a trailer in Jeff Davis Parish early yesterday morning, was a registered sex offender. In September 2000, Davis had been convicted of carnal knowledge of a juvenile. However, since September 25, 2003, he had no longer been on probation or parole supervision.

    Davis died in a mobile home at Treasurewood Trailer Park early yesterday morning after an unknown assailant came inside and stabbed him and Mary Katherine Rasmussen. Sheriff's deputies say Rasmussen's daughter called 911 and said her mother and her mother's boyfriend had been stabbed.

    Davis was stabbed multiple times. Jeff Davis Sheriff's Deputies have not yet released any update on the case. No word of any arrests so far. by Theresa Schmidt, 7KPLC.com
     

    Murder Arrest Highlights S.O. Myth
    By posted by mary <rsolvirginia@comcast.net>
    Posted on 17.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00238]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00238 and send to rsolvirginia@comcast.net, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    See also Action Item No. 0089.
    --------------
    Arrest in Girl’s Murder Highlights Sex Offender Myth
    Analysis by Benjamin Radford
    Discovery News (see URL below) |
    Mar 26, 2010

    It was a horrible crime against a young child that made headlines around the world: A seven-year-old girl named Somer Thompson vanished while walking home from school one day in October 2009.

    Her parents suspected the worst—partly because of high-profile news stories about other missing kids. Indeed, only a few years earlier in the same state, a convicted sex offender named John Couey abducted, raped, and killed a girl named Jessica Lunsford. The Thompsons hoped their daughter’s disappearance would end differently, but tragically few days later Somer’s body was found in a Georgia landfill.

    Police immediately questioned registered sex offenders living in the area. According to Florida’s sex offender registry, about 80 offenders live within three miles of the Thompson home, and over 160 live within five miles. The public expected a child molester to be arrested any day; one ABC News headline read, “Dense Population of Sex Offenders in Fla. Case is Alarmingly Typical.”

    Today a man named Jarred Harrell was charged with the abduction, rape, and murder of Somer Thompson.

    Predictably, Harrell is not a convicted sex offender.

    Why “predictably”? Because most people who abduct, molest, and kill children have no previous criminal records for crimes against children.

    According to Department of Justice studies and professor David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, sex offenders have a lower recidivism (re-offense) rate than people convicted of other crimes (the idea that sex offenders can’t be cured, or often commit further sex offenses, is a common myth).

    Jarred Harrell is a far more typical perpetrator than John Couey. It may seem counterintuitive, but the fact is that a convicted sex offender is far less likely to assault a child than a person who has never been convicted of a sex crime. The vast majority of crimes against children are committed by the child’s parents, family, or friends—not a stranger. (Though Harrell had been arrested for unrelated sex crimes, he had not been convicted and therefore did not appear on any sex offender registries.)

    When looking for a suspect in a child abduction or molestation, it’s natural for the police and public to focus first on convicted sex offenders. But more often than not the concern about sex offenders only distracts from the more likely suspects. Children need to be protected, and that means understanding where the real dangers lie.



    URL:
    http://news.discovery.com/human/arrest-in-girls-murder-highlights-sex-offender-myth.html
     

    Pedophilia Pendulum Swings Too Far
    By posted by Alex <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 15.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00237]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00237, Pedophilia Pendulum Swings Too Far and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm. I will send the comments along to the RSOL activist who submitted this article.
    Finally, even people like the popular talk show, conservative host, Allen Hunt, are seening what is wrong with sex offender laws.
    Maybe the pendulum can begin to swing back!
    alex

    ----------------------------------------------------------------
    The Polanski Pedophilia Pendulum
    by Allen Hunt
    Town Hall. Com
    April 13, 2010
    URL:
    http://townhall.com/columnists/AllenHunt/2010/04/12/the_polanski_pedophilia_pendulum?page=1

    Like all graduates of Lakeland (FL) High School, I am a Dreadnaught. We surely are the only school in America with that odd, but powerful, mascot. The experience of two current Dreadnaughts this week illustrates that America's understanding of sexual conduct involving minors has swung from one end of a pendulum to another. From a 1970's laissez-faire Polanski approach to a fully repressed Victorian renaissance in the 2000's. As a result, in our effort to protect children, we are not only targeting predators, we are targeting almost anyone.

    The two Dreadnaughts made news when they participated in an activity known to every high schooler since Socrates. Eric Arce and Kyle Wohlfarth-Simmons, two seniors at Lakeland High, went on a double-date with two girls. The girls' parents knew of the date and gave their permission. Later in the evening, the four students went “parking” in a rural area of orange groves to, uh, enjoy one another's company. All parties agree that a good time was had by all. Until the police arrived.

    Sean Hannity FREE

    Upon shining a spotlight into the vehicle, a sheriff's deputy discovered the four in various states of nudity. And the two young men were placed under arrest. Their dates were freshmen or sophomores. One girl was 15 years old, the other 14. Fellow high school students. And minors under Florida state law where the age of consent is 16.

    Both young men now face second degree felony charges of lewd battery for sexual contact with someone under the age of 18. Arce also was charged with felony lewd molestation. If convicted, both men could face incarceration for as many as fifteen years. Of course, they will also be registered, likely for life, as sex offenders. Because of the girls' ages, their consent cannot be used as a defense by the young men. In other words, because of their participation in the American tradition of “parking,” two high school seniors now may be planning for prison rather than for college or careers.

    Contrast the Dreadnaughts of 2010 with the case of Roman Polanski in 1977. Then 43, Polanski plied a 13-year old girl with champagne and quaaludes, forced himself upon her in various anatomical fashions, and then pled guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse. Without rehearsing the details of the case, suffice it to say that the punishment for such behavior in California was expected to be a sentence of 90 days. Polanski found even that sentence to be extreme and fled the country to avoid serving more time. Now that he is back in custody in Switzerland, this week will mark the 200th day of his “captivity” as he awaits extradition to America some 33 years after the crime.

    What does Polanski have to do with the case of two Dreadnaughts? A lot for illustrative purposes. In 1977, a middle-aged man could forcibly rape a 13-year old girl and face barely a slap on the wrist. In 2010, two high school seniors face years in prison and a lifetime wearing the scarlet letter of the sex offender for heavy petting in a parked car with willing participants whose parents knew they were out on a date with seniors. A lifetime of taint for one evening of common high school behavior.

    We have come a long way, baby. And one has to ask how, why and whether we might have come too far. Perhaps we have allowed the pendulum of our defense of children to have swung too far. In some cases, we are targeting the wrong people.

    In “How Pedophilia Lost Its Cool,” Mary Eberstadt has ably demonstrated one of the few unintended positive by-products of the Catholic molestation scandal. Revulsion from both conservatives and liberals at the sexual misbehavior of priests has provoked serious response in many ways. First, schools, churches and youth organizations all take far more seriously now their sacred trust to care for the well-being of children. Second, in contrast to Europe, whose attitudes toward adult-child sex can best be described as indifferent, Americans of all categories have rallied around the cause of the young and the innocent in a remarkable way. Finally, over the past decade or so, legislators have passed stringent laws regarding sexual crimes and activity, particularly in the area of sexual activity with minors.

    In some cases, one must ask if the legislators have not acted too swiftly, too broadly and too severely without carefully considering some of the nuances of their sweeping new laws. Some of these laws have been written in the heat of the moment and their lack of accounting for some of the details reveals legislators blinded by emotion in reaction to our previous existence where we were too lax about sexual activity with minors. In some states, draconian residency requirements have driven sexual offenders underground for lack of ability to find a legal place to live. Studies demonstrate that a stable home is one of the greatest aids in preventing recidivism, but severe laws have unintentionally made a stable home nearly impossible for sexual offenders of all kinds.

    In other cases, hasty attempts by many state legislatures to go back and add “Romeo and Juliet” provisions to sexual offender laws to recognize that adolescents will be adolescents reveal that law-makers may have acted before having thoroughly thought through the ramifications of their new laws. Often, many of these laws have been written and enacted more out of political chest-thumping about being tough on sex criminals than out of careful moral and legal reasoning. More rabid hysteria than thoughtful law-making.

    To be sure, with very few exceptions (outside Hollywood), nearly all Americans agree that a more rigorous protection of children is healthy and good. Almost all Americans support the strong prosecution of violent sex offenders and heinous molesters.

    The problem arises when the laws have been written with such broad strokes that they lump all sex offenders into the category of the heinous and the violent. A serial pedophile is very different from a high school student parked in a car with his girlfriend with the full knowledge of her parents. The former can be described as statistically unusual while the latter can be described as commonplace.

    In every American generation, parents have discussed and debated the merits of allowing seniors to date freshmen or sophomores. Some parents see no problem; others impose limits on the age differential in dating their child. In every generation, mothers and fathers have sat with their teenage children to impart wisdom on boundaries, good behavior and morals.

    Now those same conversations must include coaching on the legal statutes of the home state. “Son, be careful on your date tonight with your fellow high school student. If you hold hands, you should be in good shape. But if you touch here or kiss there, our next conversation may be held in the county jail.” Parental coaching conversations have risen to the level of providing legal counsel. A new era for high school dating to say the least.

    This most recent case in Lakeland illustrates the point. With the charges facing Arce and Wohlfarth-Simmons, it is clear that, in our well-intentioned effort to protect children, we have not taken enough care to consider that sexual activity occurs in a variety of circumstances. Some of those circumstances may be wrong but are certainly not criminal. The pendulum has swung too far.
     

    America's Obcession with Tracking S.O.s
    By posted by dave <dbradford404@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 11.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00236]
     
    Refer in comments to news item 00236, America's Obcession with tracking sex offenders, and send to dbradford404@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm .
    ---------------------
    University of Houston Law Center, Online Review
    Houston, Tx.
    April 2010
    URL - http://www.law.uh.edu/news/spring2010/0409cji.html

    CJI Speaker Outlines America's Obcession with Tracking Sex Offenders

    A generation ago, few Americans would have supported registration and “marking” of sex offenders who had served their time and paid their debt to society. In today’s world, however, the tracking of sex offenders is no longer seen as un-American or neo-Nazi, according to Prof. Wayne A. Logan of Florida State University College.

    Logan visited the Law Center as part of the “Criminal Law at the Cutting Edge” lecture series sponsored by the Criminal Justice Institute. He outlined how every state now operates a system of mandatory registration and notification, and noted how the nationwide obsession with tracking sex offenders represents “a really remarkable public policy story.” The story is made all the more remarkable because there is no empirical evidence that the system does any good. “We live in a very scared society,” he said, “and a very unforgiving society.”

    Some 700,000 sex offenders are registered in the United States, but the actual number is much higher as many sex crimes are never reported and offenders find easy ways to skirt the registration law, Logan said. While listing names and addresses of offenders on the Internet may make the neighborhood more alert to the convicted sex offender down the street, Logan noted how the system focuses on “strangers” – and does nothing to protect loved ones from relatives or trusted family acquaintances who commit most of the offenses. As the father of two young daughters, Logan admits he frequently scans the offenders list on the Internet. At the same time, he said he is “very aware that potential abusers could be someone I know and trust.”

    The history of registering criminal offenders and alerting the community to their whereabouts is not new, according to Logan. The practice traces back at least to France, Germany and England in the 19th Century and, he said, “derives from a human desire to know what’s going on around us.” In the United States, a registry of freed slaves was kept in the 19th Century, and in the 1930s, California kept a registry of known gangsters who were migrating from the East Coast. Other states followed suit – and the move toward public registries gained impetus in the 1980s after a number of child abductions, including the kidnapping and death of Adam Walsh whose father, John, became a television crime crusader. In 1994, the federal government waded in with the so-called Megan’s Law, which requires states to adopt a registration system. To ensure compliance with the registration requirements, the government employed a “carrot and stick” approach of awarding and withholding federal criminal justice funds from states. In 2006, President Bush mandated certain additional requirements, including adding juveniles to the registry and making it retroactive, when he signed into law the Adam Walsh Act. The law is seen in some quarters as a states’ rights issue, Logan said, and 18 states have refused to adopt the measure. He predicted legislatures will be debating the matter as the act comes up again in July.

    Logan raised the question: What accounts for the remarkable turnaround from 1986, when just a handful of states had a registration system? Logan conjectured that a “notion of moral panic” swept the country in the 1980s and 1990s as a rash of high-profile child disappearances refocused debate on the issue. Missing children’s pictures began appearing on milk cartons; several child protection bills made their way through Congress; and Walsh launched America’s Most Wanted on television. “Shame sanctions” became popular in the courts, gaining a national reputation for Harris County judge (now Congressman) Ted Poe, who employed unique attention-getting sentences. Harsher terms, chain gangs and civil commitments for sex offenders “provided fertile ground for registration and community notification to take root,” Logan said. The politics of criminal justice also witnessed a trend toward personalization and demonization. The previously unusual practice of naming laws after victims – Megan’s Law and Jessica’s Law, for example – made it much more personal and compelling, Logan said. If a legislator opposed a bill, he or she appeared anti-victim or “anti-law-and-order.” Defendants were demonized in legislative halls, courts and the press as “monsters,” “animals,” and “predators.” The public developed “a sense of information entitlement on sex offenders,” Logan said, “with any concerns of privacy or other rights trumped by the right to know.” In recent times, courts have shown little concern for the offenders who are governed by these laws; in fact, Logan noted how the net has been cast wider as more and more categories of offenders are being added. “If everyone is classified, then classifications are meaningless,” he said, adding that it raises the risk of the public becoming inured to the threat. “It is corrections on the cheap,” he said. The government puts everything on the Internet and says, “It’s up to you to self-protect.”

    Logan said the effort to narrow the scope of registries could gather steam in the years ahead. But he predicts the system will remain and may actually strengthen. “We’re not going to see an unwinding of these laws,” he declared. Reaction to sex offenders is psychologically very visceral – “much more so than any other crime, even murder,” Logan noted. It may take a horrible act perpetrated by “community vigilantes” to prompt a change, he added. “Tragically, what’s on the line is our own personal safety, and that of our loved ones.”



     

    Queer Radio forum on sex offenders
    By Adrienne Lauby <adrienne@sonic.net>
    Posted on 10.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00235]
     
    Refer in comments to news item no. 00235 and send to adrienne@sonic.net, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    NOTE - RSOL is proud to have Adrienne as well as Jasmin Nairy and Bill Andriette, two of the panelists, as RSOL participants!
    ------------------------------------
    Friday, May 15, 2009, 6:30 pm, KPFA, 94.1FM or
    http://queerradio.blogspot.com

    A LONG AND DANGEROUS ROAD:
    Gay Men, other Queers (and One Straight Guy)
    Talk about Sex Offenses
    Beyond Pope-Gate: Stories of Sex Offenses

    Joey Piscitelli tells the story of his abuse by a Catholic
    priest and his fight for legal justice. Then, stories from
    those who question the sex offender label and much of
    what comes with it. With analysis from the queer community
    on the state of sexual repression and expression in the U.S.

    "Radio Chronicles"
    KPFA 94.1 fm
    6:30 - 7:30 pm
    What is going on here? How did we get here?
    What can we do it about it?

    Guests:
    Joey Piscitelli, volunteer director of the Northwest Region of SNAP, the Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests.
    Larry Phillips, sex offender incarcerated in Florida Civil Commitment
    Center.
    Yasmin Nair, Chicago-based lesbian writer, activist.
    Bill Andriette, writer, former features editor for a gay magazine, The Guide.
    Laura Levin, LCSW, working with both survivors and perpetrators of sexual abuse.
    "Aziz," gay man from Bangladesh.
    Jake Goldenflame, former sex offender, author, "Overcoming Sexual
    Terrorism."
    Hosted and produced by Adrienne Lauby

    To listen to an archive of this program and other gay radical radio
    shows: http://queerradio.blogspot.com .
    ------------------------------------------

    Over the last four decades sexual repression and sexual violence have intertwined to produce a bizarre U.S. reality called the crime of sex offense. In this sixty-minute program we look at the slice of this reality that pertains to gay men. We’ll hear from many people --from a gay man who remains in jail although he has already served out his sentence to a therapist who works with men who have had sex with underage boys. Their stories will shock, surprise and leave you thinking.

    You’ll hear from experts who believe current sex offender laws threaten our civil liberties. A man from Bangladesh fondly remembers his first sexual experience with an older man when he was nine. Another man sees his former activities with young boys as an addiction that can and should be conquered.

    In the U.S. today, someone can be busted for consensual sex with a slightly younger man and be forbidden to enter neighborhood parks for the rest of his life. And, these we hope to protect, children, are rarely able to wander freely through their neighborhoods for fear of stranger abduction.


    “…sex offender registration, community notification, and residency restriction laws are ill-considered, poorly crafted, and may cause more harm than good.” --Human Rights Watch, ReadReport: No Easy Answers

    We turn away from information and discussion about these issues to our peril. Have draconian sex offender laws made children safer? Families less sexually abusive? Are gay men, lesbians and bi-sexuals being caught up in legal nets created for sex offenders? What role should feminists play?
     

    DAs Unite in MA on GPS for S.O.s
    By dave <dbradford404@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 09.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00234]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00234, DAs Unite in MA on GPS for SO's, and send to dbradford404@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    At least in MA, the courts have had some sense on this, and many offenders have had these draconian devices removed!!!
    Alex
    ------------------------------------------------

    DAs unite to use GPS on sex offenders
    By Laura Crimaldi
    THE BOSTON HERALD
    Boston, MA
    Thursday, April 8, 2010
    URL
    http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1245590

    Allowing sex offenders to roam free without GPS monitoring has district attorneys joining forces to appeal to have judges granted the authority to slap the fiends with ankle bracelets.

    The state Supreme Judicial Court yesterday heard both sides of the controversy in a case about a convicted Middlesex County child rapist who objected to wearing a GPS-monitoring device during his 10-year probation term.

    “These are people who by their very nature cannot control their sexual impulses and are likely to reoffend,” said Middlesex County District Attorney Gerard Leone, whose office prosecuted Ralph Goodwin, the sex offender at the center of the legal battle. “It’s paramount we have some means of significant monitoring.”

    After he finished jail and civil sentences last summer, the Probation Department requested GPS monitoring for Goodwin.

    Superior Court Judge Kathe M. Tuttman, however, ruled she did not have the authority to impose the monitoring. In her ruling, Tuttman cited a 2009 SJC decision that decided a 2006 law mandating GPS devices on all sex offenders placed on probation cannot apply retroactively.

    Goodwin’s attorney, Beth L. Eisenberg, also said Tuttman’s ruling found imposing GPS tracking amounted to impermissable punishment because he was in compliance with all the terms of his probation.

    “She says, ‘I’ve looked at this case and in this case the circumstances are not warranted,’ ” Eisenberg said.

    Since the summer, about 234 sex offenders have been allowed to remove their ankle bracelets as a result of the SJC ruling.

    Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe said it makes sense to give judges the right to decide whether GPS monitoring is appropriate.

    “I believe that judges should have the option to make that finding,” he said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean it would be done in every case.”

    Essex County District Attorney Jonathan W. Blodgett agreed.

    “It’s just another probationary tool to help keep the public safe,” he said. “We have an obligation to speak up about this and ask the court to make a decision.”
     

    Naked in Own Home Not Indecent!
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 09.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00233]
     
    Refer in comments to News item 00233, Naked in Own Home, and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm . As in other AP stories, we may not reprint in full, due to copyright laws, but do look at this. I'll send the comments to those several who sent this in!
    Alex
    ---------------------
    By Mattew Barakat
    Associated Press Writer
    on MSNBC Site
    April 7, 2010
    URL
    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36239042/ns/us_news-weird_news/


    FAIRFAX, Va. - A man charged with indecent exposure after two women said they saw him naked inside his own home was acquitted Wednesday by a Virginia jury.
    SEE THE WHOLE STORY AT THE URL ABOVE and send comments!

     

    Should Teens be on Sex Registry
    By posted by dave <dbradford404@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 07.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00232]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00232, Should Teens be on sex registry, and send to dbradford404@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm .
    THIS IS A TERRIFIC EDITORIAL IN TENNESEE! Spread the word. This shows we are making progress in the mainstream press.
    alex
    -----------
    Should teens be on sex registry?
    Adding young offenders does more harm than good
    April 7, 2010
    THE TENNESSEAN
    Nashville, TN
    Editorial
    URL -
    http://www.tennessean.com/article/20100407/OPINION01/4070340/Editorial

    Link:
    History does not back up that attitude. While no civilized person condones rape, a society fails if it turns an offender into a pariah while hoping the problem goes away. This registry would put a target on these teens and their families. We should not fan the flames of retribution.
    " class=red>Should+t%20eens+be+on+sex+registry

    Except for taking a life, sexual assault of a child is the most heinous of crimes and rightly provokes the greatest degree of outrage and punishment from society.

    But how should offenders be dealt with when they, too, are children?
    A bill working its way through the Tennessee General Assembly would put the names and addresses of those ages 14-18 who commit violent sex crimes in a public, online registry. And while the primary goal of this bill — helping parents keep their kids safe from predators — is understandable, there is reason to believe the unintended consequences would outweigh the good it could do.
    The juvenile sex registry that would be established under House Bill 2789 would function in a way similar to adult sex-offender registries, except that the offender could ask a judge to remove them from the registry within a year of their 19th birthday and every five years after that. If they committed no other sex crime, their name would come off the registry after 25 years.

    Never mind that Tennessee law already allows juvenile judges to hand over violent teen sex offenders to adult courts and the adult sex-offender registry. The proposed juvenile registry would effectively put youthful offenders on a par with adult counterparts. This, despite the fact that the same good reasons for separate justice systems for adults and juveniles who commit other types of crimes apply here, as well.

    Adolescents' judgment skills are not fully developed; if they were, there would not be laws prohibiting them from driving, drinking alcohol or buying tobacco. They are still under the supervision of others, whether their parents or other adults. Until they are individuals completely under their own recognizance, the impact of identifying them as a criminal to the public would be excessive.

    There is a reason that the records of juveniles who commit other crimes are kept sealed or expunged if they commit no other offenses by the time they reach adulthood — because the potential for turning their lives around is much greater than if they had committed the offenses as adults. And that potential is jeopardized when a juvenile is branded for all to see.

    A registry would end a teen's chance to become a productive part of society, because society would feel compelled to shun them even if they are taking the right steps, such as getting treatment for their behavior.

    National statistics indicate that only about 6 percent of underage sex offenders who undergo treatment re-offend, compared to 35 to 50 percent of adult sex offenders. Mental health experts say this is because most youths who commit sex crimes do it for a different reason than adults: They were acting out against abuse they had themselves suffered at the hands of adults.

    Since juvenile courts in Tennessee already do a good job of getting teen sex offenders into treatment programs, a registry will do nothing to help them recover — not that it is intended to. According to bill co-sponsor Rep. Debra Maggart, "If you have raped a child, you don't deserve another chance.''

    History does not back up that attitude. While no civilized person condones rape, a society fails if it turns an offender into a pariah while hoping the problem goes away. This registry would put a target on these teens and their families. We should not fan the flames of retribution.

     

    COMPUTER BAN STRUCK DOWN IN DC
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 06.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00231]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00231 - Computer Ban struck down in DC, and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm and a copy to rsolvirginia@comcast.net .
    Also see comment at the end by thomas Rydnewski, the RSOL Md contact person
    alex
    -----------------------
    April 02, 2010
    Appeals Court Rejects 30-Year Computer Ban for Sex Offender
    Legal Times Blog
    The National Law Review
    April 2, 2010

    A federal appeals court in Washington today struck down a 30-year ban on any computer use by a convicted sex offender, sending the case back to the trial court to refine the restriction in a way that opens it up to modification for work purposes.

    The defendant, Mark Russell, had pleaded guilty in federal district court to one count of traveling to engage in unlawful sexual conduct. He was sentenced to 46 months in prison and 30 years of supervised release. During his release, Russell is forbidden from possessing or using a computer for any reason.

    A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said on Friday the outright ban on computer use is unreasonable. The court, however, affirmed Russell’s 30-year term of supervision.

    Russell, a former applied systems engineer at Johns Hopkins University, chatted with a 13-year-old girl—in reality the “girl” was a D.C. cop—in an Internet chat room in June 2006. Russell, who lived in Columbia, Md., drove to the girl’s house, parked and e-mailed her to announce his arrival. He waited for a bit before driving away. The police arrested him as he was leaving.

    Assistant Public Defender Tony Axam Jr. argued for Russell in January at the D.C. Circuit. Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Smith represented the government. Smith conceded the 30-year outright ban on computer use should be revised.

    “[T]he question is not the appropriateness of an internet restriction but its form and severity,” wrote Senior Judge Stephen Williams in the majority opinion. Williams was joined by Judge David Tatel.

    Williams said it’s difficult to imagine white collar work not requiring access to computers “just as white collar work 100 years ago would almost invariably have required the use of pens and pencils. In fact Russell’s training and experience mark him not only as a white collar worker but as one at the most technically sophisticated end of the white collar distribution.”

    The judge noted that even some blue collar work requires a computer: Russell “has evidently found that computer use is required for filling out most job applications, including those at McDonald’s, as well as discharging the duties of even low tech occupations, such as keeping inventory at PETCO, and producing frames at A.C. Moore.”

    A “minimum change” on remand, the court said, would allow a probation officer to modify the outright ban to adjust to developments in technology and “to secure a reasonable balance between the statute’s rehabilitative and deterrence goals.”

    Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson agreed with remanding the ban to the trial court for further review. But she rejected the notion, reflected in the majority opinion, that a ban on computer use is a “substantial burden” on a person’s liberty interest.

    “We can judicially note that millions of Americans every day perform jobs without using (or even seeing) a computer,” Henderson wrote in a concurrence. “If Russell cannot find a job, it is more likely because of his criminal record than the computer ban.”
    --------------------
    COMMENT by Thomas Rydnewski, RSOL MD Contact person
    There really is a mindset developing of judges, politicians and the general public that people can do whatever they want to a person once (s)he is labeled a "Sex Offender". I know this is a victory, and I suppose I should be happy; but the fact that a judge even considered such an inane and far-out-of-the-arena-of-reality condition just pisses me off all the more.

    I hate to be pessimistic, but it seems like the only way people are going to learn is when one of their own family members or their own children are arrested, charged and labeled a non-person (i.e. Sex Offender). The way things are moving that may not take long. Perhaps that's why we're all here? We know the reality as opposed to the propoganda, and we are sick of the lies, accusations and assumptions about people we care about.

    Thanks for sending along the story. I just don't know whether to be happy that justice prevailed or enraged because judges still think this way.

    Tom
    RSOL Maryland
    thomasrydzewski@yahoo.com
     

    LOOK TO RESEARCH, NOT FEAR!
    By Dave <dbradford404@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 06.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00230]
     
    Refer in comments to news item 00230, LOOK TO RESEARCH NOT FEAR, and send to dbradford404@yahoo.com with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    Alex
    ---------------
    All Sex Offenders Are Not Equal
    State Must Look To Research, Not Fear Or Politics
    EDITORIAL
    By the Editors,
    Hartford Courant
    Hartford, CT
    April 4, 2010
    URL:
    http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/editorials/hc-sex-offender-laws.artapr04,0,5127212.story


    When the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, a federal law aimed at sex offenders, was being debated in 2005, Florida Attorney General Charlie Christ said, "The experts tell us that someone who has molested a child will do it again and again." Others made the same point.

    The law was passed and signed by President George W. Bush in 2006. The law attempts to expand the scope of sex offender registries at the state level as well as create a national sex offender registry. States were told to sign on or risk losing a small amount of grant money.

    Last week, a bill that would have brought Connecticut in line with the Walsh Act was — wisely — allowed to die in committee.

    The Walsh Act has been widely criticized on many fronts, for everything from including adolescents as young as 14 on the list to violating several provisions of the Constitution. Only one state, Ohio, has adopted it.

    Laws such as the Walsh Act, often named for victims of crimes the law is trying to prevent, are of course well-intentioned. But they tend not to be based on research, and so do not achieve an optimal level of public safety. Indeed, they can unintentionally make things worse.

    For example, if Connecticut officials followed the research, they would not expand the state's sex offender registry, but reduce it.

    All states have sex offender registries to which residents have online access. Some states put offenders on their registries based on their risk to the community. Connecticut is one of the states that place people on the registry because they are convicted of a sex offense.

    Many people assume everyone on the registry is either a rapist or pedophile. If that were so, the list would be much smaller. But it also includes an array of porn possessors, voyeurs and people who as older teenagers had consensual sex with an underage girlfriend or boyfriend. As a result, the state now has more than 5,000 people on the sex-offender registry, an increasingly unwieldy group for hard-pressed police departments to monitor.

    Some on the list are dangerous and must be watched, but many are not. As the list is now presented, it's difficult to tell one from the other. They are listed by the crime they were convicted of committing, but it's not clear whether a conviction for "risk of injury" or "second-degree sexual assault" means the person is a danger to others. (The registry also misses people who pleaded to a lesser offense to stay off it.)

    Why does the state list so many offenders? In part, as the Florida attorney general's testimony suggests, from the widespread belief that sex offenders are likely to re-offend, along with the notions that all sex offenders are alike and that they are not amenable to treatment.

    The research contradicts all of these premises.


    The Myth Of Incorrigibility
    Sex offenders represent a cross-section, ranging from psychotics to a lot of seemingly normal people who have made a serious mistake. "They've all done something bad, but they don't all present the same level of risk," said David D'Amora, who directs the state's post-prison sex offender treatment programs for The Connection, a Middletown-based nonprofit.

    Treatment works: It can reduce recidivism by as much as 40 percent, according to recent studies. "We have the lowest recidivism with the people we get through treatment, no question," said William Carbone, director of the Judicial Branch's Court Support Services Division.

    Perhaps the most surprising research finding is that sex offenders as a group have among the lowest rates of recidivism of any category of criminal.

    A major U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics study of nearly 10,000 sex offenders released in 1994 found that only 5.3 percent had been arrested for a new sex crime in the ensuing three years. Other studies put the sex offender recidivism rate between 14 and 20 percent.

    The major implication to be drawn from this data is that the great majority of sex crimes are committed by new criminals, people who have never been arrested for such an offense before. That strongly suggests that more resources should be shifted upstream, to education and prevention programs in date and dorm rape, domestic violence and similar behaviors. Just focusing on convicted sex offenders ignores the prevalence of sexual violence in the broader culture, which in part is producing sex offenders.


    Shrink The Sex-Offender Registry
    One way to capture resources would be to shrink the sex-offender registry so that it only lists former violent offenders who may still pose an appreciable risk to the public.

    If the list is there to protect the public, it's not clear why nonviolent offenders should have to register at all. But if they do, they should not be on a list available to the public.

    For low-risk offenders who have served their sentences, the additional burden of public humiliation can be devastatingly cruel. They need a home and a job, but when their presence on the sex offender registry becomes known, they not infrequently lose the house and job.

    Sometimes they and their families suffer threats, harassment or physical harm, according to several studies. Some experts say the shame, isolation and depression that accompanies the public pillorying can trigger relapse.

    Vermont limits public notification to individuals who pose a high risk to the community, as does Minnesota. New Jersey divides offenders into three tiers of risk, and the names on the low-risk tier are shared only with law enforcement agencies. That is the direction Connecticut should head.

    In dealing with sex offenders, Connecticut officials are clearly doing some things right. There is treatment available in prison as well as close supervision, treatment and individualized case management, with appropriate restrictions, for those on parole and probation. This works. Of about 1,800 former sex offenders who have come off parole in the past six years, only a handful — fewer then 10 — have been rearrested for a sex crime, a state Department of Correction spokesman said.


    Residency Restrictions
    But the good work is often challenged by fear or flawed thinking.

    Another bill proposed this year, and wisely allowed to die in committee, would have prohibited a registered sex offender from living within 2,000 feet of a school or day care center. Although residency restrictions may make sense in individual cases — and are sometimes imposed as conditions of probation — blanket residency restrictions do not.

    They are fueled in part by the notion of "stranger danger," another myth that most child molesters are strangers, sinister perverts in trench coats lurking around the school playground. The research belies that stereotype and says the vast majority of child sexual abuse victims identify their abusers as family members or acquaintances. A Justice Department study in 2000 of police reports from 12 states found that only 7 percent of sexual assaults on children were perpetrated by strangers.

    The data is similar for adult women victims: More than 70 percent of rapes and 85 percent of sexual assaults are carried out by people known to the victim.

    This year, thanks to thoughtful leadership on the Judiciary Committee, the legislature resisted some laws that would have been easy "get-tough" targets, but not good policy. Next year, they have the chance to make things better
     

    Fargo: Do S.O. Boundaries Work?
    By Dave <dbradford404@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 06.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00229]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00229, Fargo, Do sex offender boundaries work, and send to dbradford404@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    Do sex offender boundary laws work?

    Piepkorn says yes, but those who’ve studied issue disagree
    There’s no doubt that a ban on sex offenders living within 1,200 feet of Fargo’s schools or parks would be popular. Dave Piep­korn, the city commissioner backing that idea, said the reaction he’s had from Fargo residents has been “overwhelmingly positive,” and in a nonscientific online Forum poll last week, 86 percent of the 2,188 votes were in favor.

    By: Dave Roepke, INFORUM
    Fargo-Morehead Internet Forum
    Fargo ND, April 5, 2010

    There’s no doubt that a ban on sex offenders living within 1,200 feet of Fargo’s schools or parks would be popular.

    Dave Piep­korn, the city commissioner backing that idea, said the reaction he’s had from Fargo residents has been “overwhelmingly positive,” and in a nonscientific online Forum poll last week, 86 percent of the 2,188 votes were in favor.

    “The majority of people have said it makes sense,” Piepkorn said.

    The enthusiasm explains why sex offender residency laws have grown quickly in the decade or so since they were first enacted. A report by the Center for Sex Offender Management, a project of the Department of Justice, states that from 2000 to 2008, the number of states with restrictions for sex offender housing went from five to nearly 30.

    Yet Fargo’s police chief and the head of an area nonprofit that works with victims of sexual violence are both dubious about the effectiveness of such laws. And they’re not alone.

    Studies of sex offender residency laws in areas they’ve been tried haven’t found any positive effect on recidivism rates. Authorities who deal with sex offenders – police, prosecutors and probation and parole agents – often end up opposing the buffer-zone restrictions.

    “It’s almost totally driven by emotion,” said Richard Tewksbury, a University of Louisville professor of justice administration who studies sex offender laws. “Without exception, all the research shows there is no impact.”

    Pushed to margins

    Gary Davis is a Level III sex offender, a 65-year-old who must register for life because of two indecent exposure convictions in North Dakota, the latest in Cass County in 2007. Level III is the designation for sex offenders who are deemed the highest risk to re-offend.

    He had difficulty finding a place to live at first, being turned down by a handful of landlords before ending up at 1122 2nd Ave. S. in Fargo – one of four Level III offenders in the apartment building.

    Davis has no complaints about the small apartment, though he said his hopes for rehabilitation would be better if he were elsewhere.

    “You’re in the place you are trying to get out of,” he said.

    It doesn’t appear the building Davis lives in would be affected by the 1,200-foot law. City planners are still working on a map plotting the restricted areas, but a similar map produced by The Forum indicates the largest swaths of area left open to sex offenders would be downtown and in the industrial parts of the city straddling Main Avenue between Interstate 29 and 25th Street. Much of the city would be off-limits.

    That’s one of the troubles with broad bans on where sex offenders can live, said Tewksbury. If they can find a place at all, it’s in “the poorest, most disorganized, least desirable areas of the city,” he said, where it is more common for children to be unsupervised.

    It also tends to make it harder for sex offenders to access treatment, find jobs and have a support system – all keys to crime-free life.

    “We simply make life more difficult in the important ways,” Tewksbury said.

    Davis agreed, saying that isolation makes his recovery much harder.

    “The only way to be back in society is to be around people,” he said.

    If the law pushes offenders away, Piepkorn said, that’s fine with him. That’s partially the point, he said.

    “I think we’d be sending a message that convicted sex offenders aren’t welcome in Fargo. That’s the bottom line, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying that.”

    Police Chief Keith Ternes said that sort of take on sex criminals is overhyped.

    “We’ve put a scarlet letter on those people,” he said. “It’s not the only offender out there to be concerned about.”

    Hardship without upside

    Ternes is worried the 1,200-foot ordinance could lead more offenders to stop registering, as they must do under state law, which would in turn take up more of the police’s time.

    That’s what happened in Iowa, one of the first places where offenders were barred from living by schools or parks. The state repealed the law upon the urging of law enforcement officials. It’s a case Ternes has pointed out publicly.

    Tewksbury said he has conducted a study of re-offending rates in Iowa during the time the law was in place, though it hasn’t yet been published. Recidivism was unchanged, though the law put a greater burden on both the offenders and the authorities responsible for keeping tabs on them.

    “It poses many hardships, with no real possibility of benefits,” he said.

    The chief is also skeptical that a geographical separation between places kids go and offenders’ homes does much to keep children safe.

    Piepkorn said the law’s main purpose is to protect the most vulnerable people in society – children.

    Yet a sex offender who’s looking to strike again can simply travel to those same areas, Ternes said. Also, a study in Minnesota showed that’s a rare occurrence.

    That study of 224 repeat sex offenders from 1990 to 2005 found that 16 of them made contact with a juvenile victim within a mile of their home, but none of the contacts happened near a school, park or playground.

    Piepkorn said he thinks some researchers “have an agenda” to support rights for sex offenders and said he’s been getting most of his negative feedback from out-of-state groups.

    As for Ternes’ opposition to the residency ordinance, Piepkorn said: “He just has a different perspective. I have no problem with disagreement.”

    Greg Diehl, the executive director of the local Rape and Abuse Crisis Center, said though he can see the rationale of Piepkorn’s proposal, he doesn’t think much of the 1,200-foot law, either. He’d rather see new approaches implemented.

    “I’m not sure that this would solve a whole lot of anything,” Diehl said. “The biggest issue is there are no easy answers.”

    “At least it’s being talked about,” Diehl added.

    ‘A positive effect’

    Davis said he doesn’t understand why he would be barred from living near the places children go since he has no record of abusing minors.

    “Sex offender: That’s just a word,” he said. “It should be based on the charge.”

    That’s also what Tewksbury suggested: reserving residency limits to those who’ve abused children. Otherwise, buffer laws rely on the assumption that all sex offenders target kids.

    Piepkorn said he wants to fashion the law based on how it had worked in other places. “You want it to have a positive effect,” he said.

    He said he’s leaning toward proposing the city law only apply to the Level III and medium-risk Level II offenders – roughly 25 percent of Fargo’s 155 registered sex offenders.

    Piepkorn said he would potentially consider having the law only apply to those convicted of crimes against children.

    City Attorney Erik Johnson is researching the laws enacted in other areas and working on a draft ordinance, Piepkorn said. A small group working on the proposal – which includes Ternes – plans to meet next week to take up the issue.

    The proposal wouldn’t be in front of the commission until after that, Piepkorn said. He expects the debate about it to be robust.

    “I will guarantee that will happen,” he said.
    --------------------------------------

    Readers can reach Forum reporter Dave Roepke at (701) 241-5535
     

    Cure Gays? No, Fix the Law!
    By posted by Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 04.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00228]
     
    Refer in comments to news article no. 0228, CURE GAYS?, and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm. I'll send it along to the rsol activist who sent it in.
    ----------

    'Cure' gays? No, fix the law
    Buried in California law is a provision requiring the state to seek a 'cure' for homosexuality.
    By Bonnie Lowenthal
    Los Angeles TIMES
    April 4, 2010

    Believe it or not, California law requires health experts to find a cure for homosexuality. No joke: Welfare and Institutions Code Section 8050.

    We can delete this code. We will. But first, we should know how it got there.

    This 60-year-old relic was not some gay-baiting prelude to the McCarthy era. It came, rather, in response to public outcry over sex crimes in California, specifically the molestation-murder of a 6-year-old Los Angeles girl. The murderer was not a gay man. There was no connection between the crime and homosexuality at all.

    Even so, before the dust had settled, well-meaning California legislators passed a law that not only required health officials to seek "the causes and cures of homosexuality" but likened people who are gay to child molesters. Amazingly, it's still on the books. You might call it "Linda's Law."

    Linda Joyce Glucoft went out to play after dinner on Nov. 14, 1949, and never came home. She was raped and murdered by the grandfather of one of her playmates, a repeat sex offender who offered no resistance when arrested in a downtown bar. He admitted to the gruesome slaying, to wrapping her body in a colorful blanket and hiding it near an incinerator. He told police he was acting on an indescribable compulsion and that he hadn't made her suffer long. He was the personification of what was then called a sexual psychopath.

    The rape and murder struck a nerve. There had been nine such slayings in Los Angeles in the 2 1/2 decades before Linda's murder. But in the following week, police fielded 25 reports of molestation. Public outcry grew. It took just days to gather 10,000 signatures on a petition demanding action from Sacramento.

    Sacramento was ready to oblige. Even before the killer had been sentenced to death, Gov. Earl Warren called a special session of the Legislature to deal with the issue of sexual predators. Experts flocked to the state capital with explanations and solutions.

    Judge A.A. Scott, presiding judge of the Juvenile Court in Los Angeles, complained that the state lacked tools to address the problem. "The weakness," he said, "lies in the Department of Mental Hygiene. There is no program under which to treat these sexual psychopaths."

    Scott would soon get his program. Aside from beefed-up enforcement policies, lawmakers sought an academic approach. They would order the state's mental hospitals and its universities to solve the problem.

    It was at this step, as the Legislature defined the role of science in solving the "sexual psychopath" problem, that gay people -- simply because they vexed the psychiatric profession -- were swept up in the net.

    In 1950, homosexuality remained, officially, a mental disorder. So when the Legislature promised funding for a study into the causes and cures of sexual deviance, it was, tragically, natural to add homosexuality to the list.

    So, in April of that year, almost exactly 60 years ago, one of the bills Warren signed to combat the scourge of child molestation included a command that the "Department of Mental Hygiene plan, conduct and cause to be conducted scientific research into the causes and cures of sexual deviation, including deviations conducive to sex crimes against children, and the causes and cures of homosexuality, and methods of identifying potential sex offenders."

    You don't need a law degree to see that homosexuality was shoe-horned into a sentence otherwise focused on the task at hand.

    Over the decades, a huge volume of sex-offender law has replaced this old statute. But the call for a cure to homosexuality, and the suggestion that it is somehow linked to child molestation and murder, has survived many rounds of revision. As recently as 1977, the code was moved rather than deleted, and the language tweaked to add a "shall" here and a "to" there. It lives now as Section 8050 of the Welfare and Institutions Code.

    That code is like the old race restrictions on property deeds. The fact that it came more from ignorance than hate might excuse its enactment, but it doesn't relieve us of the duty of blotting it out.

    Assembly Bill 2199, which faces its first hearing Tuesday before the Public Safety Committee, would undo 60 years of libel and give California a set of law books that reflects science and values that were sadly absent in 1950.

    Bonnie Lowenthal, author of AB 2199, represents Long Beach, San Pedro, Signal Hill, the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Catalina Island in the Assembly.
     

    S.O. Library Ban in N.M. Struck Down
    By posted by Lloyd <rs2477@cybermesa.com>
    Posted on 02.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00227]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No 00227, Library S.O. Ban Struck Down in New Mexico, and send to rs2477@cybermesa.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    GOOD WORK IN NEW MEXICO!
    Alex
    ------------


    Court rules sex offender library ban unconstitutional

    By Matthew Reichbach 4/1/10
    New Mexico Independent
    Albuquerque, New Mexico

    A Second District Court Judge ruled today that Albuquerque’s regulation banning sex offenders from libraries is unconstitutional. The law would create “an unacceptable risk of the suppression of ideas” and infringe upon the First Amendment rights of the sex offenders.

    The ACLU of New Mexico (ACLU-NM) challenged the law and praised the decision by Judge Christina Armijo.

    “No one questions the City’s purpose of ensuring public safety, but this regulation sacrificed library access for too many people who present no threat to library goers,” said ACLU-NM Executive Director Peter Simonson in a statement following the ruling. “A regulation like this must be narrowly tailored if it is going to infringe on a right as fundamental as the public’s ability to receive information. For many people, public libraries are, as one court put it, ‘the quintessential locus of the receipt of information.’”

    The ruling enjoins, or prohibits, the city of Albuquerque from enforcing the regulation.

    The ACLU highlighted a part of Trujillo’s decision:

    “This Court has struggled in this case to strike the proper legal balance between competing interests… On one side of the equation here is the City, which no reasonable person could or would contend does not have a legitimate and compelling interest in…protecting children from harm, danger and crime, especially crimes of a sexual nature. On the other side of the equation is a group of individuals that, no matter how reviled, nevertheless possesses certain constitutional rights. When those rights are burdened or, in this case, wholly extinguished by an action of government, this Court has an obligation to scrutinize the facts and the law closely, carefully, and objectively to ensure that, whatever the end result, it is just. In this case, having done just this, the Court concludes that the City’s regulation, as currently written and in its present form, cannot stand.”
     

    ABC NIGHTLINE PROGRAM ON SEXTING
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 01.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00226]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00226, ABC NIGHTLINE PROGRAM ON SEXTING, and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm . I will send along to the person who sent this in. See also Monthly Message for April l.
    ----------------
    URL:
    http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/phillip-alpert-sexting-teen-child-porn/story?id=10252790

    APRIL 1, ABC NIGHTLINE PROGRAM
    SEXTING - Should Child Pornography Laws Apply?

    Two years ago, following a fight with his 16-year-old girlfriend, Phillip Alpert, then 18, did something really stupid.

    Twenty percent of teens admit to engaging in x-rated text messaging."It was 3:28 in the morning, I think it was, and I got up and I went to my computer, and I sent a couple of pictures that she had sent to me to her contact list," Alpert told ABC News. "And I went back to sleep."

    Because of that single action, Alpert, now 20, is a registered sex offender, Florida Department of Corrections No. x61836. For sending the images, Alpert was arrested on charges of child pornography.

    "I forgot I did it," Alpert said. "I was barely awake when I did it and I didn't even remember and ... then a few days later, my mother called and says, 'Why are there police officers at the house?' I went -- 'Oh no!' And it came back the same way a dream does."

    "When I got home, the police were waiting for me," Alpert continued. "They were going through everything that was electronic in my house. My computer, my discs, my MP3 player, just everything. Looking for any other kind of nude photographs, evidence, whatever.

    "I was charged with everything. I was charged with lewd and lascivious battery. They charged me with child pornography, they charged me with distributing child pornography, I mean just an incredible amount of charging."

    Alpert faced 72 charges in all.

    Note that Alpert didn't take the pictures, but he was in possession of them, he distributed them -- and he had just turned 18. He pleaded guilty... and that began Alpert's nightmare.

    "I was forced to register as a sex offender, and that is wherein lies the big problems," Alpert said. "Being a registered sex offender means ... I can't live like near a school or a playground or a park. There's a whole lot of stuff I can't live near -- bus stops, stuff like that ... so basically, I just can't live in a city. It means every six months I have to register as a sex offender."

    Sexting: 'Technically It Is Child Pornography'

    NYU law professor Amy Adler says "sexting" -- teens sending and receiving pictures of themselves in sexually suggestive poses -- wasn't even on the Supreme Court's radar when justices made their pornography ruling 28 years ago.

    "Technically, it is child pornography," said Adler. "But I don't think it's the kind of case where child pornography law is the right legal framework to use to judge it."

    "It's a particularly bad kind of sexting, because it really is a malicious embarrassment of another person," Adler continued, referring to Alpert's case. "So while there may be some sort of criminal sanction that's appropriate in this scenario, to me child pornography law is simply inappropriate here. Again, because it's not the case of a pedophile exploiting a child and sexually abusing that child in order to take a picture. It's more of an invasion of privacy."

    A recent survey said one in five U.S. teens had participated in sexting. Forty-four percent of teens surveyed said they knew risque messages or pictures get shared, and a whopping 75 percent said they know sexting was a bad idea with "serious negative consequences."

    Florida attorney Lawrence Walters took Alpert's case pro bono -- not just for Alpert, he said, but for other teens.

    Walters acknowledged that Alpert had distributed images of an underage girl.

    "Phillip did something that about 20 or 30 percent of high school students do, and it is a mistake, it is something that shouldn't be done, nobody condones," said Walters. "On the other hand, we have a legal system that treats this behavior as something horrendous, on par with child molestation -- and it simply isn't ... the law simply hasn't recognized this unique phenomenon of children texting, or sexting each other, in high school."

    Vanessa Hudgens of "High School Musical" fame and "Hannah Montana"'s Miley Cyrus apologized a couple of years ago for sexy pictures of them that came out. It's the kind of thing that may enhance a star's career -- or at least not impede it -- but can land everyday ordinary teens in trouble with the law.

    "One thing is I think we may be sending mixed messages to teens right now, because mainstream culture is showing teens in all sorts of sexual scenarios," said Adler. "Mainstream television with "Gossip Girl," showing teens hooking up, Miley Cyrus engaging in what many people thought was pole dancing at the "Teen Choice Awards." So on the one hand we have mainstream sexual depiction of teens, and on the other hand we're telling teens that if they do that themselves, they can go to jail."

    Sexting: 'It's an Odd Situation'

    Plenty of teens are finding that out. In Iowa, Jorge Canal had to register as a sex offender, like Alpert, for sending a nude picture of himself to a 15-year-old girl. He was 18 at the time. In separate cases in Pennsylvania and Ohio, kids who've sent or received and distributed sexy photos have agreed to curfew, community service, or no cell phone or Internet usage for a few months.

    "Child pornography law was crafted to protect children from pedophiles, that's the idea behind it," said Adler. "But now what we have is the law applying to situations where the child himself or herself is making the pornography. So it's this odd situation where suddenly the pornographer and the victim are one in the same person. And in my view that's not the kind of scenario that child pornography law should cover."

    "We have a House bill, 1335, that is -- has been proposed," said Walters. "It would treat sexting as a non-criminal offense. In other words, a child or a teenager who sent these pictures or created the pictures would get a $25 fine and be forced to do community service. That would wake them up to the fact that this is an illegal activity and they shouldn't be doing this, this is wrong. And then if they do this a second or a third time, the punishments go up. That, in my view, is an appropriate way to approach this."

    Adler talked about how the cases might be tried.

    "Depending on the facts of the case, I would say a lot of these cases shouldn't be heard in court at all," Adler said. "These are cases where teens are engaging in bad judgment, which teens have always done, and suddenly finding themselves caught in the web of the criminal law because, whereas previously they may have engaged in inappropriate sexual banter on the telephone, now there's a photographic record of that sexual banter, and that is what triggers the scrutiny of child pornography law."

    For Alpert, it means he's on a sex offender registry until the age of 43.

    "This will follow me around for the rest of my life," said Alpert. "My probation is up, that'll be three years. I then have 20 years on the sex registry, and then I can petition to be taken off of it, and then can be approved or denied. When I am a 20-year-old kid and I explain that I am a sex offender, it's bad. When I am a 40-year-old man and I explain that I am a sex offender, it's going to look a lot worse."

    Sexting: Charge Girlfriend, Too?

    Technically, Alpert's ex-girlfriend also could have been charged for taking the pictures and sending them to Alpert, but she wasn't. And he's glad.

    "I always say that I can't say it to my ex-girlfriend specifically, but I want to reiterate that I am sorry," said Alpert. "I really am, and it's not because I'm a sex offender, because I got kicked out of school, because I'm on probation, I can't go to the beach, whatever. It's because what I did and I'm sorry for it. And I mean, I said it. I can't do anything else besides say I'm sorry over and over and over, and I don't think it's enough, but it's all I've got right now."

    "It was a 16-year-old girl who sent me pictures when I was 17," said Alpert. "What I did was stupid, and it was mean and it was angry and it was deviant. But it was not sexual in my mind. I wasn't thinking clearly. Well, the argument could be made, 'if he wasn't thinking clearly once, he could not be thinking clearly again.' But I have certainly matured enough and I have worked hard trying to understand why I did what I did."

    He and his lawyer hope the change in law -- if passed -- will be retroactive for Alpert. But until that time, he will be the face, at 20 years old, of a sex offender.


    The Florida prosecutor's office didn't feel the same way. In a statement to "Nightline," the prosecutors defended their position, saying "in the criminal prosecution of defendant Phillip Alpert, we were bound to follow legislative intent of the law. That means Phillip Alpert remains a registered sex offender until he's 43 years old."








     

    Maryland S.O. Law Changes Strike Right Balance
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 01.04.2010
    Link to this news item: [00225]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 00225 and be sent to alexm60@fastmail.fm. I will send them along to the person who sent in this news item.

    FROM ALEX - This shows the good work of Md. RSOL and its allies at the Md. Assembly last month - the best change is the abolition of a public juvenile registry. Obviously, not all the changes are good, and RSOL disagrees with the conclusion of the Baltimore Sun's editorial.
    ------------------------------------

    URL:
    http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/2010/04/sex_offender_legislation_strik.html

    Second Opinion
    Baltimore SUN Web Editorial
    April 1, 2010

    Sex offender legislation strikes the right balance

    The kidnapping and killing in December of 11-year-old Eastern Shore girl Sarah Foxwell was horrible enough by itself to spur Maryland’s lawmakers to action — the man accused of the crime had been convicted of a series of sex crimes against girls and young women but had always eluded serious jail time. Throw in the fact that the crime occurred just before the General Assembly returned to Annapolis for an election-year session, and it’s no surprise that more than 75 bills to crack down on sex offenders were introduced this year. With few people willing to stick up for sex offenders, the risk appeared to be not that the legislature would fail to act but that it might go too far.

    But a curious thing happened in Annapolis this year. For the first time in the several years that the legislature has been working to tighten sex offender laws, a vocal group of people — often family and friends of people who have been caught up in sex offender registries — began to push back. They said that people who are listed as sex offenders are not all created equal and that many regret their crimes and have gone on to law-abiding lives but live in fear that neighbors or employers will find out about their past. In particular, the legislature faced resistance to the idea that new reporting requirements for sex offenders would be applied retroactively and stigmatize people who pose no threat to the community. Sex offender laws should be more narrowly crafted, they argued, to target the most serious, violent, repeat offenders, not those who committed relatively minor offenses many years ago.

    To a remarkable degree, the package of legislation approved by the House of Delegates accomplishes that.

    Combining bills offered by Gov. Martin O’Malley with others sponsored by lawmakers from both parties, the legislation would expand registration to include some non-violent offenses, but it changes the state’s registry to make it easier for citizens to get a true picture of the risk posed by those who are listed. It would adopt a new federal standard to list offenders in three tiers depending on the severity of their offenses and would include a plain-language description of the crimes. The amount of information the state would collect would expand, but it would be easier for citizens to make sense of it.

    The package of legislation, some of which is still pending in the Senate, also calls for the creation of a juvenile sex offender registry, which would be available only to law enforcement officials.

    What’s particularly important about the proposed system is that it is a first step toward national standardization of how sex offenders are tracked. In the case of Sarah Foxwell, the most serious offenses committed by Thomas J. Leggs Jr., the man charged in her murder, were committed in Delaware. Mr. Leggs was listed as a sex offender in Maryland, but in Delaware, where he had pleaded guilty to raping a minor in 2001, he was deemed "high risk." If this new law is enacted and other states follow the federal guidelines, offenders won’t be able to shop around for the least restrictive states, and if an offender moves, his new state will know immediately how to classify him.

    Other legislation might also have led to more restrictions for Mr. Leggs. One bill would expand the circumstances in which evidence of past sex crimes could be brought up as evidence at trial. In Mr. Leggs’ case, they were not, which might help explain why he was frequently able to plead to lesser offenses and avoid serious jail time.

    Another O’Malley administration bill calls for lifetime supervision of serious repeat sexual offenders. They would be required to accept measures such as GPS monitoring and polygraph tests, measures that have proven effective in all but eliminating recidivism. In addition, legislation approved by the House would eliminate good behavior credits for serious sex offenders; require a judge, instead of a district court commissioner, to decide whether a sex offender should be eligible for pre-trial release; and increase the mandatory minimum penalty for second-degree rape or second-degree sexual offense against a child younger than 13 from 5 years to 15 years. A Senate version of the legislation would increase the minimum to 20 years.

    The cautionary note about all this legislation is that it is only as good as the administration’s execution of it. Tougher sex offender laws passed during a special legislative session in 2006 was essentially forgotten. A sex offense advisory panel never met, and legislation requiring extended supervision of some offenders was never used. The O’Malley administration says both bills were flawed, and new legislation moving through the General Assembly fixes and expands those laws. But if those laws were unworkable or potentially unconstitutional, it should not have taken four years for the administration to do something about it. Our leaders need to be held accountable to make sure they don’t just pass laws to look tough on sex offenders but that they actually do something about it.
     

    SEX OFFENDER SUSPECT IN MURDER-RAPE CASE
    By Kelly Piercy <semperfidelas@gmail.com>
    Posted on 31.03.2010
    Link to this news item: [00224]
     
    Refer in comments to News story no. 00224, Sex Offender Suspect in Rape-Murder Case, and send to Kelly, semperfidelas@gmail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    SEE ALSO BLOG NO 0219 - for Kelly and his comments.
    Alex
    --------------------------------------------


    URL -
    http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/TheLaw/chelsea-king-disappearance-suspect-linked-cases/story?id=9975272


    GOOD MORNING AMERICA
    ABC NEWS
    March 1, 2010

    Police believe a convicted sex offender arrested in the disappearance of San Diego high school student Chelsea King raped and murdered the girl, prosecutors said today.

    Police arrest sex offender in connection with the missing honors student.

    Arrested on suspicion of first degree murder and forcible rape, John Albert Gardner III, 30, was taken into custody Sunday after police found physical evidence linking him to King, a 17-year-old high school senior who vanished Feb. 25 while jogging in a park north of San Diego.

    Police have yet to find King or her body and San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore said Gardner was not cooperating with the investigation.

    No bail has been set for Gardner, but he is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday when he could formally be charged with murder even if King's body has not been discovered.

    "There are murder cases that get tried without a body. There is one going on now," said Paul Levikow, spokesman for the San Diego County District Attorney.

    "We don't know what the charges are going to be. Police arrest on suspicion, but charges are based on probable cause. [Gardner] has been arrested on suspicion of rape and murder, but only the D.A. can actually file charges," he said.


    Police said arresting Gardner was the first step in finding the missing girl.

    "So far we do not know where Chelsea is," Gore told "Good Morning America" today. "It is a step in the right direction. We're confident we have the right man in custody. Now we've just got to find Chelsea."

    Police believe Gardner, who was arrested in 2000 for committing lewd and lascivious acts on a child under 14, may also be connected to the disappearance of Amber DuBois, a 14-year-old who disappeared near San Diego on her way to school in February 2009.

    DuBois' father said he and his family have not been contacted by police, but he has been in regular contact with King's parents and have helped organize the search for King.

    "It's very emotional," said Maurice DuBois who has been briefing search teams and offering support to the King family. "It brings us right back to the first week Amber went missing, all the chaos and fear."

    At the time of Amber's disappearance, DuBois said police never mentioned Gardner by name, but he was told "that law enforcement had checked all the sex offenders living in the proximity."

    He said he hadn't met with law enforcement yet to discuss if Gardner had been questioned last year or if he might be connected to both cases.

    Police said Gardner may also be connected to an attack on a young woman along the park's same jogging path where King went missing. That jogger was able to fend off her assailant by hitting him in the face with her elbow and escaping.
     

    ANTI SEX OFFENDER MAG PUBLISHED IN INDIANA
    By posted by Kimberly <rwsmom@verizon.net>
    Posted on 31.03.2010
    Link to this news item: [00223]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00223, ANTI SEX OFFENDER MAGAZINE PUBLISHED IN INDIANA, and send to Kimberly, the RSOL Indiana contact, at rwsmom@verizon.net. with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    --------------------------------


    Posted on The Indychannel.com
    TV Channel 6
    Indianpolis, Indiana
    March 28, 2010

    URL
    http://www.theindychannel.com/news/22982920/detail.html

    INDIANAPOLIS -- A monthly magazine that features Indiana sex offenders is part of a personal mission for a man who was a victim of abuse.

    The magazine, now offered in 55 Speedway stores in the Indianapolis area, is already getting mostly positive feedback, its publisher says.

    The publisher, who only wants to be identified as Ryan, designed the magazine and pays for all the printing costs, 6News' Tanya Spencer reported.

    "I don't think the registry (online) is in your face enough," said Ryan, who runs Critical Review Publications. "A lot of people want to turn a blind eye to this."

    The magazine has pictures of convicted sex offenders and outlines the charges against them. With more than 2,000 sexual predators in Indianapolis and new offenders being released from jail frequently, the featured pictures will change each month.

    The magazine also offers general safety tips, victims' stories and resources.

    "I'd be interested to see who's on the list," said one resident. "Hopefully, they're not living upstairs or down the street."

    The magazine costs $1.25 an issue, covering publishing costs. Ryan hopes to eventually get enough advertisers on board to make the cost to consumers free.

    If the magazine makes a profit, a portion of the proceeds will go to Stop Child Abuse and Neglect, or SCAN, which provides counseling to victims.

    Ryan insisted that publishing the information is fair game because it's already online and public domain anyway. He argued that the high recidivism rate of sexual abuse warrants the scrutiny and that his endeavor will be a success if it prevents one child from going through what he did.

    "I have post-traumatic stress disorder because of it," Ryan said. "It was very difficult for me to get to a point where I wasn't blaming myself and had all those guilty feelings."

    The magazine is currently only offered in Indianapolis and Fort Wayne, but Ryan hopes to expand to other cities.
     

    Louisiana App. Ct. Overturns S.0. Laws
    By posted by Tonia <toniat@sbcglobal.net>
    Posted on 31.03.2010
    Link to this news item: [00222]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00222, Louisiana Appeals Court Overturns S.O. Laws. Send comments to toniat@sbcglobal.net, and copies to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    This is a VERY important and favorable decision for sex offender law reform advocates! See also the intro to the decision below.
    Alex

    URL - http://www.theadvertiser.com/article/20100331/NEWS01/100331007

    BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — An appellate court has ruled that the state cannot require a man to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life or carry a special driver's license and identification card.

    The ruling by a three-judge panel of Louisiana's 1st Circuit Court of Appeal overturns a state judge's ruling against Jimmy L. Smith. Smith was convicted of indecent behavior with a juvenile and carnal knowledge of a juvenile when he was 19.

    Smith's attorney said he served his sentence for the 1995 convictions, completed his probation and complied with post-release registration requirements for a 10-year period after he was released from prison.

    The opinion issued Friday says Smith fulfilled his duty to register as a sex offender for the period of time that was applicable when he was convicted
    -----------
    INTRO TO THE LA DECISION
    "Jimmy L Smith appeals a judgment of the trial court that ordered
    him to register as a lifetime sex offender pursuant to the provisions of LaSR51450 et seq., commonly referred to as Louisiana Megan's Law. Additionally, a supervisory writ application seeking review of the same judgment was referred to this appeal. Because the record in this matter establishes that Mr. Smith has already fulfilled his duty to register as a sex offender for the requisite period of time under the statutes applicable to his case we reverse the judgment of the trial
    court and render judgment declaring that Mr. Smith is not required to
    register as a sex offender for the duration of his lifetime is not required to have the restriction code for a sex offender on his driver's license and is not required to carry the special identification card declaring him to be a sex offender We also deny the supervisory writ application as moot."
     

    Fargo Would Expel All Sex Offenders
    By Fima <estrinyefim@gmail.com>
    Posted on 31.03.2010
    Link to this news item: [00221]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00221, Fargo Would Expel All Sex Offenders, and send to Fima, estrinyefim@gmail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm. Also, see action item no. 81, with a helpful comment from Fima Estrin, the Mn. contact person, urging people to write in to protest this idiocy! You can reach Commissioner Piepkorn by e-mail at dpiepkorn@cityoffargo.com or by phone at (701) 730-1718.
    alex
    -----------------------
    The URL is
    http://www.kxnet.com/getArticle.asp?ArticleId=547920

    Mar 31 2010
    KXNewsTeam
    Fargo, ND
    Fargo official wants sex offender ordinance Eds: APNewsNow.

    FARGO, N.D. (AP) A Fargo commissioner wants an ordinance prohibiting sex offenders from living within 1,200 feet of a school or a park district playground or pool. The distance is about three city blocks.

    Commissioner Dave Piepkorn (PEP'-korn) says he plans to meet with the city attorney and police chief on Wednesday.

    The idea stems from a recent failed effort to start a group home for sex offenders in a downtown Fargo neighborhood. Piepkorn says supporters are correct when they say city laws do not prohibit them from buying any apartment complex and renting to sex offenders, and he wants to change that.

    Police Chief Keith Ternes (TURN'-us) says he's not convinced residency restrictions will ensure public safety. He says offenders might not report where they live to authorities as required. And he says sex offenders could still go into neighborhoods where they're not allowed to live.
     

    KIDS AMONG THOSE CHARGED IN TORONTO CP BUST
    By Alex <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 23.03.2010
    Link to this news item: [00220]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00220, KIDS AMONG THOSE CHARGED, and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm. I will send them to the author, James Dubro.
    -------------------------------------

    URL:
    http://www.xtra.ca/public/Ottawa/Fantino_crusade_continues-8372.aspx

    Fantino crusade continues
    XTRA - Pink Triangle Press
    James Dubro
    Thursday, March 18, 2010

    Julian Fantino has struck again. On March 10, in a massive press conference from OPP headquarters broadcast live on many local TV stations, the OPP commissioner, now in his fourth year as Ontario’s top cop, sat amongst dozens of police brass to announce a province-wide kiddie porn bust.

    It was “a massive, coordinated” police operation involving many police forces across the province and resulting in 122 charges against 35 men and teens.

    The language echoed a similar Fantino-chaired OPP press conference 13 months earlier, when 31 men were arrested in what Fantino then called the “largest bust for child porn in Ontario history.”

    And it was very similar to the press conference of February 2008, when 22 men and one woman were charged with child porn offences. After three high-profile busts over the last two years, very few cases have actually gone to court. When they have, they have received scant media attention. It is the difference between individual cases heard in court and highly orchestrated, scripted, televised police press conferences after charging a large group. Why does the media cover these charges so prominently, naming names, without any analysis or follow-up?

    Mark Bourrie, an Ottawa historian and an expert on media and censorship issues, says this is typical of the Fantino machine.

    “Fantino is a tireless self-promoter,” he says. “He always leaves the impression these charges involve seven-year-old kids exploited by Mafialike porn-makers.

    “Of course, no one in the media says, ‘boo.’ They don’t want to be tagged as defenders of child molesters, and Fantino’s version of reality makes for another great menace storyline.”

    Rob Teixeira, a doctoral student researching sexual regulation, agrees. “It’s interesting that many [in the public] are taken in as soon as they read ‘kiddie porn’ in the press. Critical thinking is shut down, and the media report the police perspective almost exclusively.”

    Fantino dramatically announced on March 10 — as he did a year earlier — that he would “not rest” until he had “hunted down all the child predators” out there. This personal pledge has been picked up by many TV stations and some newspapers as “news” several times over the years.

    In the current bust, the accused men are mostly accused of internet child porn possession or distribution. Police call this charge “make available,” but the police promotion machine sees no difference between creating kiddie porn and having it on your computer.

    The men were from 16 cities across the province, including Ottawa, where five were arrested. All 35 men were charged with what Fantino apocalyptically called “one of the most heinous crimes that human beings can inflict on each other.”

    Curiously, charges of “sexual assault” appear in much of the press coverage but not in the OPP official list of charges to date. And pointedly, Fantino and the other police brass present gave no specific details of the alleged crimes, the ages or even the sexes of the “victims,” or how the police became aware of those charged, or anything else upon which an independent analysis or assessment could be made. One has to take it on faith, as the mainstream media did, that the cops had broken up a huge kiddie porn operation and that the accused were all child abusers.

    Surprisingly, most of the 32 formally charged were young people themselves. Nine are teenagers aged 15 to 19 (five are 17 or under); 10 are in their 20s (five of these between 21 and 23). Just six of the men were 36 or older.

    This may be because the younger generation live much of their lives online, and many casually exchange photos all the time, Teixeira notes.

    “Child porn offences can be incurred by anyone as easily as clicking on the wrong link. That is considered ‘possessing.’ Teens can be charged with these offences just for taking images of themselves and sending them to other teens. In that case, they can be charged with making, possessing and distributing. Teens are indeed being arrested under this law.”

    This has been Fantino’s modus operandi since his days as the London, Ontario, police chief from 1991 to 1998. There he targeted gay men in “Project Guardian” for involvement in what he called — in highly publicized press conferences — a province-wide “kiddie porn ring.”

    It was later shown to involve people who mostly didn’t know each other, teenaged hustlers and their older johns.

    Only two were eventually convicted of pornography offences. But by 1994, Fantino had persuaded the then-NDP provincial government to provide London police with funding for a province-wide police program attacking the perceived growing threat of kiddie porn rings. Richard Hudler, a longtime gay activist who closely watched Fantino’s anti-child-porn crusade in the ‘90s, sees reason for hope this time around, as Fantino did not target any particular group — like gay men.

    “I’m a little encouraged to see that they don’t appear to be creating as much moral panic as previously. My hope is that the public is starting to realize that the hype attached to these massive numbers of charges is exaggerated,” says Hudler.

    Of course, Fantino isn’t the only one in the OPP prone to overstatement. Fred Goldschmidt, the officer in charge of the special child porn section of the OPP, said that one computer seized had six million child porn images on it. This amazing number was particularly hard to believe — who would look at, let alone count, six million photos? And if they haven’t looked at all the images, how can they tell they are porn, let alone child porn?

    As the individual cases work their way through the courts, a more measured picture is likely to emerge. Following the last three mega-sweeps, there is usually no media exposure when charges are dropped, plea-bargained or prosecuted in the courts. And in the meantime, more than two dozen men have been named and shamed in their local newspapers.

    James Dubro is an award-winning true-crime writer and past-president of the Crime Writers of Canada.
     

    Utah Legislator Confesses `sex offense`
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 13.03.2010
    Link to this news item: [00219]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00219 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm. THIS IS BIG NEWS!!!!! When enough legislators are honest in this way, maybe we'll have a break-through.
    alex
    ------------------



    GOP leader's skinny-dip confession stuns Utah By BROCK VERGAKIS (AP)
    SALT LAKE CITY — A late-night confession by Utah's House majority leader about sitting nude in a hot tub with a minor 25 years ago has shocked this conservative state's political establishment but has not prompted calls from party leaders for him to resign.

    Rep. Kevin Garn, 55, acknowledged the indiscretion late Thursday immediately after the Legislature adjourned for the session. He said he paid the woman, Cheryl Maher, now 40, $150,000 to keep quiet about the episode when he unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2002.

    "Although we did not have any sexual contact, it was still clearly inappropriate — and it was my fault," said Garn, of Layton.

    Garn owns KSG Distributing Inc., which sells books on tape, CDs, DVDs and VHS tapes to retailers such as truck stops, grocery stores and convenience stores. Maher worked in his warehouse at the time.

    Scandals of this nature are rare in Utah politics, where there's a heavy Mormon influence, so the fallout Friday was pronounced.

    "If you have those kinds of incidents in your background, I think you'd be less inclined to want to run for public office, in part, because of the risk of exposure and what that would do to your career," said University of Utah political scientist Matthew Burbank. "For the most part, it would end your career. There's a fairly strong moral sense in Utah."

    Garn said Friday that he wouldn't resign, but it wasn't clear whether he would seek re-election this year.

    "Anytime you are involved with an underage girl, that really raises the ante quite a bit. There's just a taboo there — big time," said Garn's Republican colleague, Rep. Mike Noel. "It's shocking to me. It puts a damper on the whole session. When that happened, I just put my head down and put my hands over my eyes and said 'Man oh Man,' it's like watching a man break down."

    Garn said Friday that reliving the decades-old episode and trying to absorb the massive amount of public scrutiny has been painful.

    "I'm dying. I'm just dying," he said.

    The story unfolded because Maher, who now lives in Derry, N.H., began calling Salt Lake City news media in recent days to tell them about being naked with Garn when she was 15 years old. Maher said Thursday night he was 28 at the time but Friday said he couldn't really remember.

    Garn said Maher's statements violated a confidentiality agreement they had but he's tired of living in fear.

    "This is something I should have done back in 2002. But I was scared. I did not want to be publicly judged by one of my life's worst decisions," said Garn, who was married at the time.

    Garn said he felt like the payment amounted to extortion but he doesn't plan to press charges.

    Maher said in an e-mail and text message to The Associated Press Friday that she was not taking phone calls — and questions about whether there was any sexual contact were inappropriate.

    "I will NOT go into detail," she wrote in a text message.

    "I have done things I am not proud of in my past and this is complete freedom for me. I can now move on to my new adventures," Maher wrote earlier Friday in an e-mail.

    Garn's confession was the second blow to Republican leadership in the state since January, when GOP Senate Majority Leader Sheldon Killpack was arrested for driving under the influence. He resigned a few days later.

    In recent years, Republicans have also been accused of bribery.

    A major focal point of this session was to pass ethics reform that would restore the public's faith in the Legislature.

    As majority leader, Garn helped shepherd much of the ethics legislation. While in office, he has avoided sponsoring many morality bills but did co-sponsor a bill in 2009 that made it illegal for teens to send nude pictures of themselves to others.

    Utah Republican Party Chairman Dave Hansen said he was stunned to read about Garn's confession Friday morning on news Web sites.

    "I've always known Kevin to be a very bright and very good person. It's just one of those things I wouldn't have expected, but let's not forget this was 25 years ago. It's not like it happened the last week in the legislative session, but that does not mitigate it," Hansen said.

    He said Garn's behavior certainly won't help Republicans' image but any blowback probably won't extend to other candidates.

    Davis County GOP chairwoman Shirley Bouwhuis, a longtime personal friend of Garn's, said it's too early to comment about Garn's behavior because she doesn't know the legal ramifications.

    "The Republican Party always supports the law and wants people to obey it, and until I know different, that there's been (something illegal) I am supportive of what Kevin chooses to do."

    Chris Crowder, a music pastor, said he would seek the GOP nomination for Garn's seat, but that he had been considering a challenge for months.

    Filing for office began Friday.


    
    #2 Garn's bombshell blows away lawmakers Woman says there is more to story, but she won't say what. By Robert Gehrke The Salt Lake Tribune



    It was June of 2002, just five days before the Republican primary for Utah's 1st Congressional District, and Kevin and Tanya Garn were frantically trying to reach Cheryl Maher.

    "Please, please call me," read an e-mail from Tanya Garn's "supermommie" account. "I know the most healing thing you can do is talk to me."

    Maher had been talking to reporters, alleging a 1985 encounter with Garn, her boss at the time, when she was 15 and he was 30 and married. Garn had resigned as Utah House majority leader a day before the flurry of e-mails began.

    On Thursday, a quarter-century after the encounter, Garn, who returned to the House as majority leader in 2008, acknowledged to The Salt Lake Tribune that he had been naked in a hot tub with the teenage Maher and paid her $150,000 as part of an agreement to conceal the story.


    "I cannot allow one foolish mistake to continue to shadow my life," Garn said later in an emotional statement delivered on the floor of the Utah House to his stunned colleagues. "At this point, I would rather be open and honest about this than continue to live in fear."

    Maher claims more happened that night in 1985, but refuses to provide details. She also alleges there have been other women. Garn insists there was no sexual contact with Maher and denies having affairs.

    The revelation was a gut-punch on the normally festive closing night of the session, which opened under a cloud after the sudden resignation of Garn's counterpart, Senate Majority Leader Sheldon Killpack, R-Syracuse, after he was arrested for drunken driving weeks before the Legislature convened.


    "To basically have it bookend the legislative session is really quite striking," said University of Utah political science professor Matthew Burbank.

    The nondisclosure deal between Maher and Garn -- which Garn says she has clearly violated -- took months to finalize, according to documents provided to The Tribune by Maher.

    After an initial meeting with Garn and his wife in Maher's LDS bishop's office, Garn sent her a check from his personal account for $20,000, which she rejected. Maher said her husband at the time wanted more.

    "I will be happy to pay $150,000 to Cheryl and hope that will bring some degree of peace in her life," Garn wrote in a Jan. 21, 2003, e-mail --- months after the wealthy business owner, who has interests in everything from banks to hotels, had lost the congressional primary.

    In a handwritten note dated Jan. 29, 2003, he apologized for injecting "all this legal stuff in this process of healing and restitution." But he asked the Mahers to review some legal documents and let him know if they were acceptable. "As soon as I receive the document, I will send you a check. Thanks, Kev."

    There was periodic contact afterward. They met in Boston in 2006 and Garn paid for her to travel from New Hampshire to attend her high school reunion in Utah in 2007. In 2008, Maher sent a letter to LDS President Thomas S. Monson, laying out her allegations against Garn. She later contacted Garn's son via e-mail, saying she had sought the church's help "with getting restitution from him."

    "In 2002, when he 'paid me off,' that's what it was, a 'pay off,' as I spoke with him over the last couple of years I have enough information to go to the press and expose him," she wrote.

    On Sunday, the story started to become public after Maher sent an e-mail to Democratic House leaders.

    "[I] couldn't even put into words my reaction," said Rep. David Litvack, D-Salt Lake City, who turned the e-mail over to House Speaker David Clark, R-Santa Clara, Monday morning.

    Clark said he met with Garn on Tuesday morning. "Kevin shared what I would perceive is his side of the story, and it became evident that it was going to become public," Clark said. The discussion included Garn sharing a series of e-mails. Those exchanges, obtained by The Tribune , call into question Maher's motives in coming forward with her story and, Garn supporters say, her mental health.

    On Wednesday, Maher sent a copy of the e-mail earlier provided to lawmakers to The Tribune . In two lengthy interviews Thursday, Garn did not deny Maher's basic narrative and ultimately decided to make his public announcement on the floor of the House Thursday night.

    Before Gov. Gary Herbert entered the chamber to address the House, he embraced Garn, put his hands on his shoulders and appeared to offer consolation to the leader.

    As Garn stood slightly hunched reading his confession, the House was silent and shocked representatives exchanged stunned looks. Some were in tears as he admitted his indiscretion and apologized to his family and the body.

    Clark spoke from the dais, offering his support, saying "I know not of the man you speak, but I know the man I consider a friend, a leader and an asset to the State of Utah. ... We hope you would remain with us."

    The speaker's comments drew a loud ovation from representatives -- a show of support that some observers thought was distasteful.

    Conservative blogger Holly Richardson was on hand for the bombshell and said she understands that, while Garn's colleagues may have been paying respect for his service, "I still thought it was outrageous."

    "He just admitted to paying $150,000 to a woman who he had had an inappropriate encounter with when he was twice her age," she said. "He was married. He was in the hot tub naked with this young girl and to have any kind of applause or anything was just stunning."

    "I think there was a tremendous sense of shock," Litvack said of Garn's surprise announcement Thursday. "Obviously, I'm struggling -- a lot of people are struggling -- right now with making sense of all this."

    Litvack said it is an issue to be handled between Garn and his family and his constituents, and he hoped it would not be used as a political cudgel.

    Going forward, Garn will have to decide his own future, although he said in his statement that he hopes to continue to serve his constituents.

    "The decision is his whether he's going to continue his service," said Clark. "Right now he's contemplating that. ... I don't know the answer to that. I guess we will in a week."

    If he chooses to stay in the Legislature, Garn has to file his candidacy by Friday. One Republican opponent, Chris Crowder, filed to run against him Friday, but said it was unrelated to his recent disclosure.

    "This is not the kind of attention you want to have drawn to yourself," said Burbank. "On the other hand, he's a guy who's got a strong track record. He's obviously worked his way up to majority leader in the House. He's got a lot of benefits going for him. The question really will be: 'How do others in the Republican Party take this?' "

    Garn could not be reached Friday. Davis County Republican Chairwoman Shirley Bowhuis said she has not spoken with the representative but expects he will share his decision when he makes up his mind.

    "My thoughts and prayers are with Kevin and his family and, unfortunately, the young lady, too," Bowhuis said.

    gehrke@sltrib.Com
     

    Sex Offenders Revisited - Allen Hunt Show
    By posted by Kelly <semperfidelas@gmail.com>
    Posted on 25.02.2010
    Link to this news item: [00218]
     
    RSOL FOLKS!!!! HEADS UP ON VERY IMPORTANT PROGRAM on WSB 750 and other stations.

    Go to the Allen Hunt Show
    URL is
    http://www.allenhuntshow.com/Listen/1033-sex-offenders-revisited

    This is a terrific, positive review of the awful restrictions on sex offenders by a major talk show host. Hear his program, and RESPOND! RSOL Participants are urged to call in and congratulate Hunt for his courage.

    Respond in comments to News Item 00218, ¨Sex Offenders Revisited,¨ and send to semperfidelas@gmail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
     

    Punishing S.O.s for Crimes Long Ago
    By posted by Thomas <thomasrydzewski@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 25.02.2010
    Link to this news item: [00217]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No 00217, ¨Punishing SOs for Crimes Long Ago,¨ and send to thomasrydzewski@yahoo.com. with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm. This is an important story favorable to a sex offender for retroactive requirements to register for crimes long ago. (alex)
    -----------------
    WILL SEX OFFENDER HAVE TO PAY FOR OLD CRIMES
    Dan Rodricks
    The Baltimore (Maryland) SUN
    Feb. 25, 2010

    Fifteen years have come and gone since he was arrested, pleaded guilty and received five years' probation for the third-degree sexual offense of trying to solicit sex from a prostitute who was 13 years old. Larry -- a name I've given him for the purposes of this column -- served his probation and took part in weekly group therapy sessions at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Records indicate that he has not committed such a crime -- or any crime -- since then. "In fact," he adds, "I would say I've lived an exemplary life since then."

    There aren't many sex offenders going public these days. Larry, who told his story provided I did not use his name, says he "came out of the woodwork" only because of what he (and others) see as election-year hysteria in Annapolis to toughen laws and regulations on sexual offenders, particularly those who victimize children. One of the dozens of measures in the legislature would expand Maryland's sex offender registry to cover cases from 15 to 25 years ago.

    That means Larry's face and his record would appear where it doesn't now: on the Internet, for the entire world to see. "I hadn't really been paying attention to all this nutty, knee-jerk sex offender legislation," he says. "But I am now."

    When he was arrested in 1995, he had been a consultant on several government-funded projects. He lost his security clearance, lost his job. He had a difficult time finding another. "Categorically turned down by many, many employers," he says.

    So he took a lot of lousy jobs that didn't last. Finally, he found a good job commensurate with his education and training, but he's sure he would lose it if the General Assembly expands the offender registry.

    Larry wrote an anonymous letter to the House Judicial Proceedings Committee. He had a friend deliver it for him. He gave me a copy. I told him I'd let him have his say in this space because an anonymous letter to an Annapolis committee probably never gets much attention.

    "Over the past 15 years," he wrote the committee, "I have been continuously employed. I completed an advanced degree; and I have provided time tutoring and guiding adult students in my field. I am involved in an international program to improve technology in third-world countries. I have made valuable contributions using my artistic and creative side.

    "I do not seek contact with children, and I usually go out of my way to avoid it. I do have several nieces whose lives I've been invited into with welcome arms. Friends have knowingly welcomed me into their homes.

    "Rehabilitation has not been easy. I've worked extremely hard at it and succeeded at it. Were I to detect potential triggers, I know how to employ avoidance strategies involving family, friends and therapists."

    Larry credits the group therapy sessions at UMMC with having the most effect on his thinking and behavior, and he thinks the state should spend its money on such programs instead of the costly expansion of its online offender registry.

    "I attribute a certain amount of ease in rehabilitation to the fact that I was not subject to any post-probation placement on Internet sex offender lists or unsolicited neighborhood notifications. For example, my current employer, who I hope to be my long-term employer, would not have hired me, according to their policy, had I been on the state's sex offender list. If I get on such a list, who knows whether I'll keep my job? It's open season on you once you're on that list."

    Larry believes he made a contract with the state 15 years ago -- a guilty plea in return for five years' probation, the court-ordered therapy and nothing more. "I have lived in a contract with the state of Maryland," he wrote. "Now the state of Maryland wants to impose stringent, retroactive reporting requirements on me and put my picture on the Internet, parading me like a circus freak. The state wants to humiliate me and set me back. The state wants to open me up to potential violence. The state is about to punish me for having done everything right for over 15 years."

     

    S,O.s Where You Shop: Hateful Commentary
    By posted by Justice Now <nowjustice4all@gmail.com>
    Posted on 21.02.2010
    Link to this news item: [00216]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00216 and send to
    with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm .

    THIS IS UTTER HATRED! ALL RSOL PARTICIPANTS URGED TO WRITE THIS HATEFUL COLUMNIST AND TELL HIM SOME FACTS!
    Alex

    AMAZING NOTE - They seem to have taken this awful article down! Mabye it was OUR work!!!!!!
    --------------------------------
    Sex offenders where you shop?
    Morning Call
    Lehigh Valley, Pa.
    Paul Carpenter
    (MAY NO LONGER BE ON THEIR WEBSITE)


    February 21, 2010


    W hitehall Township represents shopping heaven, or hell, depending on how you look at it. Either way, there must be a heavier concentration of retail outlets in this municipality than anywhere.

    They run from the Lehigh Valley Mall juggernaut to detached toy stores, from upscale restaurants to every fast-food joint imaginable. You can't spit without hitting a shop that deals in video games or gadgets. And all that is on or just off one street.

    This is a mercantile mecca, but it also may represent an evil happy hunting ground for certain types of people.

    I hate shopping, unless I'm at a motorcycle shop, which is just about the only kind of retail establishment Whitehall lacks.

    However, I am not exactly the type of shopper Police Chief Ted Kohuth and Lt. Rob Bertoni had in mind when they became concerned about who works where.

    Bertoni contacted me first, after he got his dander up by recent news stories about a New York woman accused of grifting slot machine players after they used ATMs at the Sands Casino in Bethlehem. Authorities, including state gaming officials, pounced on the woman and headlines blared as if she were Osama bin Laden.

    ''What struck me was how quick they were to protect the gambling interests. It's ironic,'' Bertoni said. ''But they [state officials] are hesitant to protect kids.'' He said I ought to talk to Kohuth, who, if anything, was even more passionate.

    ''I would like to heighten the awareness of the public,'' Kohuth said, ''with regard to what information is available on sex offenders. It's all public information, but you cannot see where they work.''

    By that, he meant anyone can get many details on convicted sex offenders who live or work in any given municipality -- their offense, their address, even their height, weight and photo.

    But if the offenders work in a place that caters to children or other potential targets of convicted sex offenders, that information is not available under the state's Megan's Law program.

    Kohuth turned to a PC at his desk and clickety-clacked the name of a Web site -- http://www.pameganslaw.state.pa.us -- and up popped the Megan's Law Web site. He showed how any citizen can get detailed information simply by typing in the name of a municipality or the name of an individual the citizen has in mind.

    He entered 18052 (Whitehall's ZIP code) and clicked ''find offenders.'' Sixteen names popped up, meaning they either lived or worked in the township, and only five of them lived in the township.

    Kohuth said law enforcement officials know where they work, but are not allowed to disseminate that information. He showed me the Web site's file on one person, a Macungie woman convicted of ''aggravated child molestation.'' ''We cannot tell you where she works in Whitehall,'' he said. ''I know where she works, though.''

    Without specifying individuals, Kohuth said some of places the offenders work ''include stores that sell items that might attract children.'' Others deal in home improvements or work on private property.

    ''There's a vulnerability to our community,'' he said. Some people on the list work in specific retail outlets, Kohuth said, ''and some of the products the retailers sell are the type of products that draw in the victims of sex offenders, such as women or children.'' They include toy stores and fast-food outlets.

    I am not mentioning his list's names, partly because of fairness concerns. It is not practical to repeat all the names and addresses of Lehigh Valley area people on the Megan's Law Web site, while only 16 of them have ties to Whitehall Township.

    Anyone with access to the Internet, however, can call up any or all of those names and addresses with just a mouse click or two at http://www.pameganslaw.state.pa.us .

    I can tell you the list includes people convicted of ''interstate travel to engage sex w/minor,'' ''involuntary deviate sexual intercourse,'' and other serious crimes.

    Kohuth and I disagreed on one point. He feels the state law should be changed so that the employers of these people can be precisely identified and accessible to the public, along with the other information.

    If that is done, I see both practical and philosophical problems. If Megan's Law makes the job site of every offender public, there is no way people convicted of sex crimes will ever be able to find jobs after they've paid for their crime under the law. Even if they work in a foundry or other business that does not attract potential victims, they'll be hounded out of town. The criminal justice system sometimes needs to have a light at the end of its tunnel.

    It would be just as effective to hold employers accountable, using the current system. Any employer about to hire somebody can find out in a matter of seconds whether that person is a convicted sex offender. If it's a business that caters to children or other potential victims, the onus should be on the employer to protect them.

    On that point, our agreement was total.

    paul.carpenter@mcall.com 610-820-6176
     

    KKK Rally Against S.O.s in Georgia
    By posted by Kelly <semperfidelas@gmail.com>
    Posted on 21.02.2010
    Link to this news item: [00215]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00215, KKK Rally, and send to semperfidelas@gmail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    Advance Comments:
    Walsh and Opray have a new ally! (Kelly)
    With enemies like these, we must be right! (Alex)
    ----------------------
    KKK plans rally in Nahunta, Ga.ShareThisPrint E-mail .By Associated Press


    For the Atlanta Journal Constitution
    Feb. 15, 2010

    NAHUNTA, Ga. — A Ku Klux Klan rally is planned for this small southeast Georgia city, and the mayor is urging people to go about their business.

    The Knight Riders of the Ku Klux Klan has a permit for a rally in Nahunta, in Brantley County, from noon to 2 p.m. on Saturday.

    City officials say the Klan group says it will focus its rally on illegal immigration and sex offenders.

    City clerk Angela Wirth told the Associated Press that the Klan organization's grand dragon says he's expecting a turnout of about 100. She says she's expecting the Klan to make its presentation and leave.

    Wirth says that until now there has never been a Klan rally in the city, which is about 275 miles from Atlanta.
     

    ¨Sex Offender City¨ in Florida
    By posted by Joe <owensv@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 20.02.2010
    Link to this news item: [00214]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 0214 and send to owensjv@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm .
    NOTE FROM ALEX: This article drips with the usual bias, hatred and loathing about sex offenders. We urge RSOL participants to write Atlantic Magazine and give educated responses.
    ----------------------------------------------

    Florida’s sex criminals are crowding into a handful of neighborhoods.
    THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE
    February 2010
    by Irina Aleksander

    Sex-Offender City
    URL for this article:
    http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/sex-offender-residences

    Driving through Broadview Park, a square-mile neighborhood west of Fort Lauderdale, Randy Young splits his attention between the single-level stucco homes outside his window and the laptop affixed to the dashboard of his Toyota pickup. The laptop is equipped with a specially programmed GPS system that displays what looks like a Venn diagram: overlapping, color-coded circles—purple for schools, yellow for day-care centers, and green for parks—marking areas where sex offenders cannot live. In recent months, those circles have been expanding, as the small community, an unincorporated area of Broward County bordered by State Road 7, Interstate 595, and the Florida Turnpike, tries to expel new and unwanted residents.

    “See this house here? That’s where we put 24 sex offenders,” says Young, tapping his finger against the glass at a house on SW 22nd Street. “Now there’s only five.”

    Young is 53 years old, tan and heavyset, with receding hair and rectangular glasses. He is a registered sex offender, convicted in 2003 of a lewd or lascivious act with a minor—“a 19-year-old girl performed oral sex on a 15-year-old boy in my presence”—and runs a for-profit business called Habitat for Sex Offenders, finding housing for people who have been convicted of sex crimes ranging from child pornography to kidnapping and rape. He operates about 20 houses and 30 apartments in seven counties across South and Central Florida.

    Since 2005—when 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and murdered by a registered sex offender who lived next door—many local governments in Florida have increased the buffer zones that separate sex-offender residences from places where children congregate, and the question of what to do with paroled sex criminals has reverberated from county to county. No one wants to live near them, but no one, especially law enforcement, knows where to put them.

    “Everybody says put them on an island,” says Young. “Every sex offender I know would say, ‘Where’s the island? I’ll go! Just tell me where it is.’”

    Young made such an island out of Broadview Park. The neighborhood feels forgotten, with derelict vehicles parked on patchy lawns, and rusted wire fences surrounding recently repossessed homes. By early 2008, when Young discovered the area using his GPS system, it was one of the last places in the county with a buffer zone of 1,000 feet, the minimum state requirement, while nearby counties had increased theirs to 2,500 feet. Young leased four houses from landlords desperate enough not to be selective about their tenants, and took in sex offenders who had been living in a tent city under Miami’s Julia Tuttle Causeway. He also bought a three-bedroom foreclosed home for $150,000 and rented it out to nine sex offenders, charging them each $600 a month.

    “Randy said, ‘Pay what you can, I’ll work with you,’” said Eddie Pruna, who lived in the house of 24 and kept losing work when his employers found out he had molested his 10-year-old niece. “He helped me when I was on my last nerve.”

    Pruna and his roommate, Robert Taylor (12 years for molesting his daughters), paid Young by doing construction work on his other properties. “It’s awful hard, being what we are, to find a place to live,” Taylor said. “We’re supposed to go to therapy and reintegrate into society, but society doesn’t want to see us.”

    In 2007, according to the Broadview Park Civic Association, there were four registered sex offenders in the neighborhood; by April 2009, there were 106. Graciela Ortiz, a resident who had 14 sex offenders on her street, began to keep her grandchildren indoors.

    Though sex offenders were free to live in Broadview Park, unlicensed rooming houses were illegal, and code-enforcement officials threatened Young with fines unless residents vacated his overpopulated homes. Meanwhile, John Rodstrom, the commissioner of Broward County’s District 7, which includes Broadview, rushed to pass a temporary ordinance mandating a 2,500-foot buffer, which effectively made it impossible for new sex offenders to move in.

    “People are afraid of sex offenders, and maybe they have a right to be,” Rodstrom told me. “They certainly have a right to be concerned about their property values, because if it’s a sex-offender haven, people aren’t going to buy in that area.”

    The 2,500-foot ordinance was made permanent in September, but it allowed sex criminals who already listed Broadview Park as their permanent address to stay.

    Things have since quieted down in the neighborhood. After repeated warnings from code enforcement, many men have moved on, including Taylor and Pruna, whom Young placed in a home in Fort Myers. Some have gone back to living under the causeway. Eighty sex offenders now live in Broadview Park.

    Despite their differences, Young and Rodstrom agree that a better solution would be to establish housing in industrial areas—for instance, Young suggested that a major orange-juice company could hire sex offenders to pick its oranges on the condition that they live in corporate housing.

    “A good law would be figuring out where they could live,” rather than where they can’t, said Rodstrom. “But no politician would ever do that, because that’s the death of your career.”

    As Young crosses State Road 7 into Fort Lauderdale, where the buffer is set at a more friendly 1,400 feet, he glances back at his GPS system. “These used to be million-dollar homes. Last I checked, they were half a million, and now they are probably somewhere around $200,000. So guess what? They’re for rent,” he says. “Two years ago, before the economy collapsed, none of this would have been possible.”

    We pass a brick home with large glass windows and a red foreclosure sign on its lawn. Young gets excited. “Oh yeah, another foreclosure,” he says. “They keep pushing and pushing, so I’ll keep moving. All the zoning restrictions did was push us into the rich area.”

    The dot on the map representing Young’s truck enters a tiny patch of gray between the spheres of purple, green, and yellow, and Young declares that we are safe here.

     

    Bill Protects S.O. Employers
    By posted by Mary <rsolvirginia@comcast.net>
    Posted on 15.02.2010
    Link to this news item: [00213]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00213, and send to rsolvirginia@comcast.net, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    We congratulate Mary Devoy of the independent RSOL of Virginia for this good work! Alex
    ------------------------------------------------------------

    Bill protects employers of sex offenders

    By Veronica Garabelli
    Virginia Gazette
    Williamsburg, VA
    Monday, February 15, 2010

    RICHMOND – A bill making headway in the General Assembly seeks to protect employers of sex offenders by not listing the name of the offender’s workplace on Virginia’s Sex Offender Registry.

    Senate Bill 635, sponsored by Sen. Dave Marsden (D-Burke), would still list a sex offender’s work address. The bill passed the Senate unanimously this month and now will be considered by the House of Delegates.

    Marsden said the bill is meant to help sex offenders integrate back into society.

    Currently, the Virginia Sex Offender Registry’s displays a photograph and description of each offender; lists the offender’s crime; and shows the offender’s home address and the name and location of the offender’s employer.

    As a result, some sex offenders lose their jobs, because a customer complains or because the employer fears the stigma of being associated with the sex offender registry.

    “It’s the address and the location that is still important, not the name of the business,” Marsden said. “We don’t want businesses to be harmed, and we don’t want the offender, if they’re doing everything they’re supposed to do, being harmed.”

    A group called Reform Sex Offender Laws of Virginia approached the senator about filing the bill.

    Mary Devoy, organizer for the group, said employers who are willing to give sex offenders a second chance despite the negative publicity should not be punished. Devoy said that when sex offenders are unemployed, they can’t meet their parole requirements.

    “We want the folks on the registry to be able to survive,” Devoy said. “Let them live their lives, have a job and raise their children. This bill is one step toward that.”

    Several people have posted comments about the bill on the Richmond Sunlight Web site. One said that by listing the employer’s name, the sex offender registry has “effectively applied the ‘social pariah’ label to responsible businesses.”

    More --Track SB635 at www.richmondsunlight.com/bill/2010/sb635.

    Veronica Garabelli is a journalism student at Virginia Commonwealth University and writes for the Capital News Service.
     

    Should S.O. Be Invited: Yes, says NYT Columnist
    By joe <owensjv@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 08.02.2010
    Link to this news item: [00212]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 0212, ¨Should S.O. Be Invited,¨ and send to owensjv@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.´
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    The Ethicist
    ethicist@NYTimes.com
    URL:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/magazine/07FOB-ethicist-t.html?scp=2&sq=randy%20cohen&st=cse

    Should the Sex Offender Be Invited?
    By RANDY COHEN
    NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
    Feb. 7, 2010

    ¨I am thinking about organizing a 30th reunion for my elementary-school “graduating” class. One classmate is a registered sex offender whose presence may discourage other people from attending, especially with their kids. Should I invite him? Make the event adults only? Inform others of his offense? Public records show that his misdeed was committed 13 years ago. He received probation, and there’s no indication of any subsequent crime. I would regret excluding him or violating his privacy, but I’d feel bad withholding information that other classmates might want. What to do?¨
    NAME WITHHELD, TEXAS

    Do nothing. It’s often the best thing. Some parents might be uneasy about this fellow, but to respond to that anxiety would be catering to prejudice, not forestalling danger. There’s information about my former classmates I want — their infidelities, their plastic surgeries, their P.I.N.’s — but it doesn’t follow that I’m ethically entitled to it.

    If the classmate constituted a threat to anyone, you might have to act. But data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicate that the recidivism rate for sex offenders, contrary to widespread misconceptions, is far lower than for many other criminals. Nor need you fear that having committed one sort of crime, he is apt to commit another. The bureau reports, “Sex offenders were less likely than non-sex offenders to be rearrested for any offense.”

    Given these facts, your vague knowledge of his long-ago crime, the light sentence he received and the many years he has gone apparently without being rearrested, you should leave him in peace rather than subject him to the scrutiny and scorn of his classmates. He has paid his debt to society; you ought not extract a further toll by exiling him from ordinary social interactions. (Nor should you hang him, even in Texas.)
     

    The Love We Lost - Doesn´t Matter Who´s Guilty!
    By posted by Joe <owensjv@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 05.02.2010
    Link to this news item: [00211]
     
    Refer in comments to news item 0211, THE LOVE WE LOST, and send to owensjv@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    From Alex: Joanne Wypijewski has it just right - it doesn´t matter if Jackson was aquitted, or if sex offenders were falsely accused. It´s the accusation that matters.

    ------------------------------
    The Love We Lost
    Carnal Knowledge
    By JoAnn Wypijewski
    This article appeared in the February 8, 2010 edition of The Nation.


    A lot happens in a year, events ripe for exploration but athwart the deadline of a column scheduled to appear only six out of fifty-two weeks. Such was the case in 2009, and I had planned on reviewing The Year in Sex, plumbing the meaning of some of the bigger stories that slipped past, when fresh events intervened: Vanity Fair plastered its February cover with a portrait of Tiger Woods that blends classic beefcake with the essence of a police artist's perp drawing; and death came calling.



    I'll get to death in a moment, but first the really morbid subject. That picture of Tiger, grim-faced and naked except for a ski cap, sums up the major sexual theme not just of the past year but of our time, the sexual being as offender. Tiger coerced no child, copped no plea, jumped no bail, whacked no white woman. It doesn't matter. He had merely to bust up the prison of his own image, and the black Escalade became the white Bronco, Tiger became "the new O.J.," with the difference that this time some people cheered domestic violence, wishing out loud that the club-wielding Elin had given her bloodied husband more of a beating.
    When mere horn dogs can so easily acquire the tincture of criminality and whet the taste for punishment, it's clear that ordinary rules of judgment have been suspended. And so, plucking just a few headlines from the recent past, it cannot matter that Michael Jackson was acquitted of child molestation, since he was frequently remembered in death as a pedophile. It cannot matter what happened all those years ago between Roman Polanski and Samantha Geimer in a mansion on Mulholland Drive, just as it cannot matter whether others who plead guilty to a sex charge really did it, or whether evidence to convict was nonsense, or whether the guilty serve their time. They can never "pay their debt to society." Guilt is the presumption, forever. One who pleads on the promise of a deal can no more realistically retract that plea than the ex-cons and wrongly accused can shed the label "sex offender." Martha Coakley says she still believes the Amiraults--whom she helped put away on preposterous charges of daycare horror and who were later vindicated--are guilty. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court suggests it may not let other convictions stand on repressed memory alone but it has no problem doing so in the case of defrocked priest Paul Shanley (another prosecution initiated by Coakley), ignoring the reams of scientific research offered by the defense. And dozens of people who have done their time are still living under a bridge in Miami, quaking in the unwonted cold, because the city's residency requirements for sex offenders afford no other place for them. Perhaps the Supreme Court will feel the tug of constitutional duty and rule this year in US v. Comstock that the federal government may not authorize indefinite civil commitment of "sexually dangerous" persons beyond their prison term, as provided in the odious Adam Walsh Child Protection Act. But the definition of sexual danger has become endlessly elastic. Like the terrorist, the sex offender is a new category of human being. Fear will probably stick around a while.

    Into this gloom, death comes as a rescuing angel, bearing memories of an erotic world that now seems a different dimension entirely. Teddy Pendergrass, a symbol of '70s soul who helped to shape that world, died January 13. He was only 59, not all that much older than kids like me in the 1970s, picking our way toward consciousness with little more than the culture as our guide. The newspaper obituaries all remembered him as a sexual icon, and for the women who attended his Ladies Only concerts, licking chocolate Teddy Bear lollipops and throwing panties onto the stage, he may have been mainly that. To me, he was a groove master and soul stirrer, a sexual educator when that was something I wouldn't have even recognized. "Wake up everybody," he sang with Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, a song as much about living in your skin as in political time. Music was Teddy's text, and with it he taught us how to come into our nature, to feel not only the fire but also the texture of sensual things--the need in his voice, the lushness of Philadelphia sound, the mix of power and vulnerability that defined the sexual being as lover.

    Teddy said his calling to secular music came at a Jackie Wilson concert in Philadelphia when a female fan straddled the singer, then on his back, and ground her hips to the rhythm of his song. The adolescent Teddy was bug-eyed. He harnessed that excitement in a mature voice that was deep and emotionally bare, and that carried up from radios on the street in spring through the windows of the city bus I took home from high school--I miss you... If you don't know me by now... It jousted with the sounds of Motown; with "TSOP" and the other hits from Gamble and Huff out of Philadelphia International; with Barry White and Earth, Wind and Fire, and the more liquidy tones of Al Green in songs produced out of Memphis at Hi Records by Willie Mitchell, the old soul genius who left this world a few days before Teddy.

    Who knew then, feeling the groove riding through the black and Polish neighborhoods of Buffalo, that the antisex, antiblack, antigay, anti-loveandpeace backlash that would forge so much that is harsh and ugly today, were all in the works at that moment? Not a young white girl who understood only in the broadest strokes that the beat carrying from soul to funk and R&B to disco, the beat that made one dance, made one sigh, was a precarious beat of freedom.

    In 1982 Teddy Pendergrass broke his neck when his Rolls Royce spun out of control and crashed. By then he had recorded five consecutive multiplatinum albums, the first black male singer to do so, and it was an easy thing to make a program of music following the full arc of love from first seduction ("Come Go With Me") to final heartbreak ("Another Love T.K.O.") just from his songs. His passenger, a transsexual M-F who'd worked as a prostitute, was treated for cuts and bruises. Teddy, 31, was paralyzed from the chest down. Every obituary I read said that the accident transformed him from sex symbol to figure of sympathy or, at best, inspiration. I thought something similar at the time. But I was stupid and the obit writers still are, because anyone who followed the music and the man should have learned a few more sexual lessons from him.

    He had fashioned himself from the start as an object of erotic interest because he sang as if he understood a few things about love, about making love and giving love, sometimes begging for it; about the sexiness of a brain and human transactions more intricate than the missionary position. Paralysis forced him to discover a new voice--less powerful, more supple, still seductive. It forced him to discover new ways to make love, because he believed in singing from experience. He reinsinuated himself into women's sexual fantasies because he didn't stop embodying his sexuality. At his last concerts, about eight years ago, they still threw panties onto the stage. Watching him sing "Close the Door" from a wheelchair after Al Green stomps and shouts a version of "Let's Stay Together" on a 1993 video from the Apollo Theater, I know whose lap I would crawl up into. And maybe somewhere right now some kid is screwing a blue or red light bulb into a lamp socket, waiting for a lover, pulling Teddy from the old-school pile and, nervously, hoping to get lucky.

    About JoAnn Wypijewski
    JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer in New York. Contact her at jwyp at earthlink.net. more...
     

    Freed Inmate: Back Under the Bridge
    By posted by Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 04.02.2010
    Link to this news item: [00210]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No 00210.
    Alex´s comment: The hell goes on and on in Miami! When can we stop it! WRITE LETTERS TO THE MIAMI HERALD PROTESTING THIS OUTRAGE!
    ---------------
    Freed inmate must go back to Tuttle hell
    By FRED GRIMM
    fgrimm@MiamiHerald.com
    Vindication gets Eduardo Galego out of prison and back into the netherworld where Miami-Dade sequesters sex offenders.

    The Third District Court of Appeal reversed Galego's 2008 probation revocation last week. The three-judge panel decided that a sick diabetic checking himself into a hospital emergency room was not the same as a convict willfully jumping probation.

    The decision saved Galego from 18 more years of hard time. He figures to be released Thursday morning.

    But out of prison into what?

    ``It's a peculiar feeling,'' admitted Valerie Jonas, the assistant Miami-Dade public defender who convinced the appeal court to undo the 2008 revocation. The appeal court victory essentially forces Galego back into the bowels of the Julia Tuttle Causeway, back into the same conditions -- without electricity, water or toilets -- that Jonas had argued were ``deleterious to diabetics' health.''

    NO ALTERNATIVE

    Jonas said Wednesday that Galego, desite his prescribed regime of medicines, including insulin that requires refrigeration, has no money for rent, no relatives outside the restricted areas and no legal alternative to the squalid camp under the Tuttle.

    What Jonas called her ``Pyrrhic victory'' came just as Miami-Dade County's new sex offender ordinance took effect on Monday, preempting the Draconian residency restrictions passed by many Miami-Dade cities that essentially banned sex offenders from most of the county's affordable housing. But it is unclear that a new ordinance maintaining a 2,500-foot residency restriction around schools will provide enough affordable housing to fix what has become an international embarrassment along the Tuttle Causeway.

    The Miami-Dade Housing Trust has found housing for a number of Tuttle residents, but other offenders just out of prison are still finding their way to the bridge settlement.

    Gretl Plessinger of the Florida Department of Corrections said Wednesday that the agency's probation officers no longer direct sex offenders to the Tuttle. ``We don't tell them to go there, but if they tell us that's where they want to go, that's what we do,'' she said. ``It really should be a last resort.''

    PLEA DEAL

    For Galego, it's the only resort. Galego, 43, had spent five years in prison awaiting trial on charges he had sexually assaulted a 17-year-old. In 2006, he took a plea deal -- time served with seven years probation.

    But probation meant he was consigned to the Tuttle, one of the few areas in urban Miami-Dade County outside the sex-offender restriction zones.

    On Jan. 24, 2008, Galego missed his 10 p.m. curfew. He claimed to have been in the throes of a diabetic episode.

    ``Substantial uncontroverted lay, medical and documentary evidence established that he missed curfew because he had become sick that day with acute complications of diabetes mellitus, leading to emergency intervention at the hospital,'' Jonas argued in an appeal that included supporting testimony from Dr. Joe Greer, chief of gastroenterology at Mercy Hospital and assistant dean of academic affairs at the College of Medicine at Florida International University.

    His probation officer, however, acted on the assumption that Galego was drunk and partying, not sick.

    With no more evidence than the officer's claim that he had heard music in the background when Galego had called in earlier that afternoon, the probation was revoked.

    Such tough treatment did nothing to disprove allegations around the courthouse that prosecutors offer lenient sentences attached to long probationary periods to accused sex offenders with difficult-to-try cases -- with the tacit understanding that probation officers will use any excuse to bounce the defendants back to prison.

    But in this case, the appeal panel insisted that ``it is the state's burden to prove, by the greater weight of the evidence, that a probation violation is a willful and substantial one. However, rather than provide substantial and competent evidence to prove its case, here the state relied on sheer conjecture.''

    The decision gave Galego, a Cuban immigrant with no money, no job, no work permit, no home, an improbable legal victory.

    And his ticket back to the Tuttle.


     

    ZINN OBITUARY by RSOL´s PAUL SHANNON
    By Paul Shannon <pshannon@afsc.org>
    Posted on 03.02.2010
    Link to this news item: [00209]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00209 and send to pshannon@afsc.org with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    This is RSOL´s OWN Paul Shannon writing about our beloved Howard Zinn! We can be proud of who we are and who we have been.
    alex
    ----------------
    Remembering Howard Zinn
    by Paul Shannon
    I've been dreading this day for several years now. We all hoped that somehow Howard Zinn would live forever. We needed Howard Zinn to live forever. He was a true friend, for some of us a dear friend, who gave voice to our deepest feelings as our lives intersected with his, sometimes often, sometime occasionally, as the months, the years and the decades gathered steam and rolled by.
    Long before Howard wrote A People's History of the United States he had already accomplished more in the decade of the Vietnam anti-war movement than anyone could hope for in a full life. There have been many great social movements in the Boston area. But there was nothing like the energy and power and commitment to each other we experienced during the Vietnam movement. Imagine over 100,000 people, not in Washington DC, but on the Boston Common. (I think you can guess who was one of the speakers). Imagine 8,000 people in 1971 and 3,000 more again in 1972 completely surrounding the JFK building and shutting it down in an act of mass civil disobedience. These kinds of things as well as all kinds of other exciting, courageous, painful and sometimes crazy things happened all the time.

    Howard Zinn, then in his mid and late forties, was the heart and soul of that movement. He nourished that movement for us. He interpreted that movement for us. He encouraged us. Like he would do much later with his Peoples History, he gave us the information we needed to sustain and expand that movement. He made it possible for thousands, just starting to break with the propaganda machine of cold war America, to take their first steps into a whole new way of looking at themselves and their possibilities as human beings. In 1966, he did the unthinkable in those days of American triumphalism and anti-communist hysteria. He wrote the book, Vietnam: the Logic of Withdrawal (published in 1967 and dedicated "To the People of Vietnam"). Unlike most anti-war critics of the day, he called for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and backed up that bold demand with the historical record. And mountains began to move. Zinn, Gordon Zahn, Noam Chomsky and George Wald. In those pre-feminism days, these were the 4 intellectual pillars of the Boston area antiwar movement. Tens of thousands flocked to hear them as they spoke and opposed the war everywhere, encouraging mass mobilization in their wake.

    As in more recent years, Howard stood out as the one who offered us the most hope and optimism and humor as he assured us that what we were doing was not only right, but that by doing it we could very well change the world.

    When the Afghanistan and Iraq wars started, Howard brought all his experience and commitment to peace into our movement. He moved us and inspired us to carry on in dark times until we had helped turn the country against the criminal Iraq war. Until his dying breath he urged us on to stop the war in Afghanistan and bring our troops home where they belong.

    But I'd like to think that, of all his great accomplishments before and since, that the movement around Vietnam has a unique place in his heart. Howard himself gives one of the most moving accounts of those days in Chapter 18 of A Peoples' History, "The Impossible Victory: Vietnam": "....In the course of that war, there developed in the United States the greatest antiwar movement the nation had ever experienced, a movement that played a critical part in bringing the war to and end. It was another startling fact of the sixties."

    Yes, many of us have been dreading this day. And now it's here. And now it's up to us to make sure that Howard stays with us and that the twinkle in his eye and his love for all of us that lay behind it cannot be extinguished.

    [Following is an article on Howard Zinn's life by Hillel Italie, Associated Press - Ed.]

    Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose leftist A People's History of the United States became a million-selling alternative to mainstream texts and a favorite of such celebrities as Bruce Springsteen and Ben Affleck, died Wednesday. He was 87.

    Zinn died of a heart attack in Santa Monica, Calif., daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn said. The historian was a resident of Auburndale, Mass.

    Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, A People's History was — fittingly — a people's best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although Zinn was writing for a general readership, his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country, and numerous companion editions were published, including Voices of a People's History, a volume for young people and a graphic novel.

    At a time when few politicians dared even call themselves liberal, A People's History told an openly left-wing story. Zinn charged Christopher Columbus and other explorers with genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters.

    Even liberal historians were uneasy with Zinn. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once said: "I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don't take him very seriously. He's a polemicist, not a historian."

    In a 1998 interview with The Associated Press, Zinn acknowledged he was not trying to write an objective history, or a complete one. He called his book a response to traditional works, the first chapter — not the last — of a new kind of history.

    "There's no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete," Zinn said. "My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times."

    "A People's History" had some famous admirers, including Matt Damon and Affleck. The two grew up near Zinn, were family friends and gave the book a plug in their Academy Award-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting. When Affleck nearly married Jennifer Lopez, Zinn was on the guest list.

    Oliver Stone was a fan, as well as Springsteen, whose bleak Nebraska album was inspired in part by A People's History. The book was the basis of a 2007 documentary, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, and even showed up on The Sopranos, in the hand of Tony's son, A.J.

    Zinn himself was an impressive-looking man, tall and rugged with wavy hair. An experienced public speaker, he was modest and engaging in person, more interested in persuasion than in confrontation.

    Born in New York in 1922, Zinn was the son of Jewish immigrants who as a child lived in a rundown area in Brooklyn and responded strongly to the novels of Charles Dickens. At age 17, urged on by some young Communists in his neighborhood, he attended a political rally in Times Square.

    "Suddenly, I heard the sirens sound, and I looked around and saw the policemen on horses galloping into the crowd and beating people. I couldn't believe that," he told the AP.

    "And then I was hit. I turned around and I was knocked unconscious. I woke up sometime later in a doorway, with Times Square quiet again, eerie, dreamlike, as if nothing had transpired. I was ferociously indignant. ... It was a very shocking lesson for me."

    War continued his education. Eager to help wipe out the Nazis, Zinn joined the Army Air Corps in 1943 and even persuaded the local draft board to let him mail his own induction notice. He flew missions throughout Europe, receiving an Air Medal, but he found himself questioning what it all meant. Back home, he gathered his medals and papers, put them in a folder and wrote on top: "Never again."

    He attended New York University and Columbia University, where he received a doctorate in history. In 1956, he was offered the chairmanship of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, an all-black women's school in then-segregated Atlanta.

    During the civil rights movement, Zinn encouraged his students to request books from the segregated public libraries and helped coordinate sit-ins at downtown cafeterias. Zinn also published several articles, including a then-rare attack on the Kennedy administration for being too slow to protect blacks.

    He was loved by students — among them a young Alice Walker, who later wrote The Color Purple — but not by administrators. In 1963, Spelman fired him for "insubordination." (Zinn was a critic of the school's non-participation in the civil rights movement.) His years at Boston University were marked by opposition to the Vietnam War and by feuds with the school's president, John Silber.

    Zinn retired in 1988, spending his last day of class on the picket line with students in support of an on-campus nurses' strike. Over the years, he continued to lecture at schools and to appear at rallies and on picket lines.

    Besides A People's History, Zinn wrote several books, including The Southern Mystique, LaGuardia in Congress and the memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn that Damon narrated. He also wrote three plays.

    One of Zinn's last public writings was a brief essay, published last week in The Nation, about the first year of the Obama administration.
    "I've been searching hard for a highlight," he wrote, adding that he wasn't disappointed because he never expected a lot from Obama.
    "I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president — which means, in our time, a dangerous president — unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction."
    Zinn's longtime wife and collaborator, Roslyn, died in 2008. They had two children, Myla and Jeff.

    Associated Press Writer Rodrique Ngowi contributed to this report from Boston.
     

    Minister Under Fire for Housing S.O.s
    By posted by Rod <letsgetreal50@gmail.com>
    Posted on 02.02.2010
    Link to this news item: [00208]
     
    Refer in comments to news item no. 00208, ¨Minister Under Fire for Housing Sex offenders,¨ and send them to letsgetreal50@gmail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    KOCO TV, Oklahoma City
    Feb. 2, 2010
    A story about a man who houses 7 sex offenders near a children´s camp, and who says he´s doing God´s work.
    The story itself cannot be reproduced. Please complain to news sources about this rule. Most sources do allow reproduction.
    Go to the URL below to read the story and see a video:

    http://www.koco.com/news/22407412/detail.html



    http://www.koco.com/news/22407412/detail.html
     

    Special Fl Law for S.O.s Under Bridge
    By posted by Margie <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 01.02.2010
    Link to this news item: [00207]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 0207, Special Florida Law, and send to thesnappy1@gmail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    -----------------------
    Trying to make sense of the nonsense in Florida!
    --------------------------
    A Law for the Sex Offenders Under a Miami Bridge
    By Caterine Skipp
    TIME.COM-CNN
    Miami Monday, Feb. 01, 2010


    Squatters live under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in Miami

    The Julia Tuttle Causeway is one of Miami's most beautiful bridge spans, connecting the city to Miami Beach through palm-tree-filled islands fringed with red mangroves. But beneath the tranquil expanse sits one of South Florida's most contentious social problems: a large colony of convicted sex offenders, thrown into homelessness in recent years by draconian residency restrictions that leave them scant available or affordable housing. They live in tents and shacks built from cast-off supplies, clinging to pylons and embankments, with no running water, electricity or bathrooms. Not even during a recent cold spell, when nighttime temperatures dropped into the 30s, could they move into temporary lodging.

    Miami is hardly the only place in the U.S. where registered sex offenders can't find shelter. In Georgia, a group living in tents in the woods near Atlanta was recently ordered out of even that refuge. But the Miami shantytown, with as many as 70 residents, is the largest of its kind, thanks to a frenzied wave of local laws passed in Florida after the grisly 2005 rape and murder of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford by a convicted sex offender. The state had already been the first to enact residency rules for convicted predators, barring them in 1995 from living within 1,000 feet of schools, playgrounds and other children's sites. Municipalities, with questionable authority, then adopted even tougher ordinances — there are 156 of them so far. Miami Beach, for example, bars offenders from living within 2,500 feet of all school-bus stops, effectively precluding them from living anywhere in the city.

    But with the disturbing bridge colony putting Miami under increased national scrutiny — it has managed the improbable feat of arousing sympathy for pedophiles — Miami-Dade County hopes to return some sanity to the issue. A new law takes effect on Monday that supersedes the county's 24 municipal ordinances, many of which make it all but impossible for offenders to find housing. It keeps the 2,500-feet restriction, but applies it only to schools. It also sets a 300-foot restriction to keep offenders from loitering near anyplace where children gather, which many experts call a more practical solution than harsh residency restrictions.

    County officials, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, hope the law will prod states and perhaps even the U.S. Congress to craft more-uniform laws to prevent the kind of residency-restriction arms race that Florida let local governments wage. "The safety of Floridians has suffered as local politicians have tried to one-up each other with policies that have resulted in colonies of homeless sex offenders left to roam our streets," says state senator Dave Aronberg, a Democrat running for state attorney general. The excessive rules, he adds, "have the effect of driving offenders underground and off law enforcement's radar." Aronberg is co-sponsoring a new bill that would establish uniform statewide residency rules fixed at 1,750 feet — studies show that in many cities, over 50% of available housing is within 2,500 feet of schools — and include the sweeping no-loitering zones.

    Theoretically, Florida's 1995 legislation should have pre-empted more-severe local ordinances. Yet most state politicians didn't want to be seen as coming to the rescue of sex offenders. Governor Charlie Crist, now a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate who is facing a more conservative opponent for the GOP nomination, has largely ignored the municipal laws as well as the Julia Tuttle eyesore, even as it has become a cautionary symbol of how restrictions can backfire.

    Ironically, it was one of residency restrictions' fiercest proponents who helped push the softer Miami-Dade law through the county commission. Ron Book, a powerful Florida lobbyist, began his crusade for tougher residency laws after discovering that his daughter was molested by a nanny for years. Now, realizing that homelessness makes offenders potentially more dangerous, Book has shifted his campaign to the kind of child-safety, no-loitering zones that are built into the Miami-Dade measure. "Child-safety zones [should] have been a critical component of what we did [before]," says Book. "We just didn't think of them." Book, who chairs Miami-Dade's Homeless Trust, which works to combat homelessness in the county, helped write the new state bill. Even so, because he was so involved in promoting the original residency restrictions, the offenders under the bridge still call their colony Bookville.

    Many of them, however, are skeptical about the new county ordinance. Kevin Morales, 42, has lived under the bridge since 2007, and he doubts that the colony's population, which has numbered more than 70 since he arrived, will thin out anytime soon. "Honestly, I don't think it is going to make any difference," says Morales, who sleeps in a van and works at his family's business by day. "And the loitering [rules] are just another way to punish us." Morales was convicted of lewd and lascivious conduct with a child under 16 as well as false imprisonment. Although he has been released from probation and has even received court permission to have contact with his victim (who has O.K.'d it as well), he says that under the no-loitering guidelines, "I don't know where I can go. Can I still take my grandchildren to the park?"

    Research by agencies like the Minnesota Department of Corrections has found that a stable home is the strongest guarantor of sound post-incarceration behavior among sex offenders. What's more, Jill Levenson, an expert on sex offenders, says the no-loitering zones are more effective than unreasonable residency restrictions aimed at keeping predators away from kids. "They provide an increased public-safety benefit," says Levenson, a professor of human services at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla. "One of the biggest flaws in the residency restrictions is that the offenders couldn't sleep near these places but could wander around them during the day. Loitering zones go a long way in managing risk and [preventing] predators from cultivating relationships with children."

    Florida Department of Corrections spokesperson Greti Plessinger agrees, saying, "We are glad that [Miami-Dade County] has taken the lead on this." But Miami-Dade is just one of Florida's 67 counties. Eventually the state, and maybe even Washington, will have to assume that lead. Keeping sex offenders under the bridge may be good short-term politics, but it may well threaten the long-term safety of kids.

    Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1957778,00.html?xid=rss-topstories#ixzz0eJlV73Ul
     

    RSOL Signatory Howard Zinn Dies
    By posted by Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 28.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00206]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00206, Howard Zinn Dies and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    Howard Zinn was the second person to sign the RSOL statement on our website, and he has spoken out for many years against the public sex offender registry and related laws. He was a champion - see the Monthly Message for a tribute!
    alex
    --------------------


    Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87
    January 27, 2010 08:20 PM
    THE BOSTON GLOBE
    By Mark Feeney and Bryan Marquard, Globe Staff

    Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and whose books, such as "A People's History of the United States," inspired young and old to rethink the way textbooks present the American experience, died today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. He was 87.

    His daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington, said he suffered a heart attack.

    "He's made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture," Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, said tonight. "He's changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can't think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect."

    Chomsky added that Dr. Zinn's writings "simply changed perspective and understanding for a whole generation. He opened up approaches to history that were novel and highly significant. Both by his actions, and his writings for 50 years, he played a powerful role in helping and in many ways inspiring the Civil rights movement and the anti-war movement."

    For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. "A People’s History of the United States" (1980), his best-known book, had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers -- many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out -- but rather the farmers of Shays' Rebellion and union organizers of the 1930s.

    As he wrote in his autobiography, "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train" (1994), "From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than 'objectivity'; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble."

    Certainly, it was a recipe for rancor between Dr. Zinn and John Silber, former president of Boston University. Dr. Zinn, a leading critic of Silber, twice helped lead faculty votes to oust the BU president, who in turn once accused Dr. Zinn of arson (a charge he quickly retracted) and cited him as a prime example of teachers "who poison the well of academe."

    Dr. Zinn was a cochairman of the strike committee when BU professors walked out in 1979. After the strike was settled, he and four colleagues were charged with violating their contract when they refused to cross a picket line of striking secretaries. The charges against "the BU Five" were soon dropped.

    In 1997, Dr. Zinn slipped into popular culture when his writing made a cameo appearance in the film "Good Will Hunting." The title character, played by Matt Damon, lauds "A People’s History" and urges Robin Williams’s character to read it. Damon, who co-wrote the script, was a neighbor of the Zinns growing up.

    "Howard had a great mind and was one of the great voices in the American political life," Ben Affleck, also a family friend growing up and Damon's co-star in "Good Will Hunting," said in a statement. "He taught me how valuable -- how necessary -- dissent was to democracy and to America itself. He taught that history was made by the everyman, not the elites. I was lucky enough to know him personally and I will carry with me what I learned from him -- and try to impart it to my own children -- in his memory."

    Damon was later involved in a television version of the book, "The People Speak," which ran on the History Channel in 2009, and he narrated a 2004 biographical documentary, "Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train."

    "Howard had a genius for the shape of public morality and for articulating the great alternative vision of peace as more than a dream," said James Carroll a columnist for the Globe's opinion pages whose friendship with Dr. Zinn dates to when Carroll was a Catholic chaplain at BU. "But above all, he had a genius for the practical meaning of love. That is what drew legions of the young to him and what made the wide circle of his friends so constantly amazed and grateful."

    Dr. Zinn was born in New York City on Aug. 24, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants, Edward Zinn, a waiter, and Jennie (Rabinowitz) Zinn, a housewife. He attended New York public schools and was working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard when he met Roslyn Shechter.

    "She was working as a secretary," Dr. Zinn said in an interview with the Globe nearly two years ago. "We were both working in the same neighborhood, but we didn't know each other. A mutual friend asked me to deliver something to her. She opened the door, I saw her, and that was it."

    He joined the Army Air Corps, and they courted through the mail before marrying in October 1944 while he was on his first furlough. She died in 2008.

    During World War II, he served as a bombardier, was awarded the Air Medal, and attained the rank of second lieutenant.

    After the war, Dr. Zinn worked at a series of menial jobs until entering New York University on the GI Bill as a 27-year-old freshman. He worked nights in a warehouse loading trucks to support his studies. He received his bachelor’s degree from NYU, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.

    Dr. Zinn was an instructor at Upsala College and lecturer at Brooklyn College before joining the faculty of Spelman College in Atlanta, in 1956. He served at the historically black women’s institution as chairman of the history department. Among his students were novelist Alice Walker, who called him "the best teacher I ever had," and Marian Wright Edelman, future head of the Children's Defense Fund.

    During this time, Dr. Zinn became active in the civil rights movement. He served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most aggressive civil rights organization of the time, and participated in numerous demonstrations.

    Dr. Zinn became an associate professor of political science at BU in 1964 and was named full professor in 1966.

    The focus of his activism became the Vietnam War. Dr. Zinn spoke at many rallies and teach-ins and drew national attention when he and the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, another leading antiwar activist, went to Hanoi in 1968 to receive three prisoners released by the North Vietnamese.

    Dr. Zinn’s involvement in the antiwar movement led to his publishing two books: "Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal" (1967) and "Disobedience and Democracy" (1968). He had previously published "LaGuardia in Congress" (1959), which had won the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Prize; "SNCC: The New Abolitionists" (1964); "The Southern Mystique" (1964); and "New Deal Thought" (1966).

    He also was the author of "The Politics of History" (1970); "Postwar America" (1973); "Justice in Everyday Life" (1974); and "Declarations of Independence" (1990).

    In 1988, Dr. Zinn took early retirement to concentrate on speaking and writing. The latter activity included writing for the stage. Dr. Zinn had two plays produced: "Emma," about the anarchist leader Emma Goldman, and "Daughter of Venus."

    On his last day at BU, Dr. Zinn ended class 30 minutes early so he could join a picket line and urged the 500 students attending his lecture to come along. A hundred did.

    "Howard was an old and very close friend," Chomsky said. "He was a person of real courage and integrity, warmth and humor. He was just a remarkable person."

    Carroll called Dr. Zinn "simply one of the greatest Americans of our time. He will not be replaced -- or soon forgotten. How we loved him back."

    In addition to his daughter, Dr. Zinn leaves a son, Jeff of Wellfleet; three granddaughters; and two grandsons.

     

    Youth Faces accused of 62 sex offenses at age ll
    By posted by Shelley <or4balancedlaws@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 24.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00205]
     
    Please refer in comments to News Item No. 0205, ¨Youth Accused of 62 Sex OFfenses when he was ll,¨ and send to or4balancedlaws@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    This case is especially outgrageous and we urge RSOL participants to write Fox 12 (KPTV, Portland). See also a January monthly message with contact info for the governor and others in Oregon.
    Alex
    -----------------
    Man Faces 62 Counts In Church Sex Abuse Case
    Prosecutors Say Abuse Began 11 Years Ago

    POSTED: 7:23 am PST January 22, 2010
    KVTV.Com
    Portland, Oregon

    CORVALLIS, Ore. -- A 22-year-old Monmouth man charged with 62 counts of sex abuse-related crimes will be tried as an adult despite the alleged crimes dating back to his pre-teen years.

    Prosecutors said Timothy Dyer knew the alleged victims from their association with the Trinity Missionary Church in Corvallis.

    The mother of two of the girls said Thursday the abuse occurred when her daughters were 7 and 8 years old and Dyer was 11 years old. She said the activity continued for eight years while all three were involved with the church's youth group.

    "(It happened) when they were in the van going to and from the programs and also to Friday night movies," the mother said.

    The alleged victims' mother said the church members downplayed her daughters' complaints. Representatives with Trinity Missionary Church could not be reached for comment Thursday.

    "My kids went to them and they said, 'Boys will be boys' and 'We don't go to the cops with this,'" she said.

    The alleged victims' mother eventually reported the incidents to police, who launched an investigation. Grand juries in Polk and Benton counties indicted Dyer on dozens of charges in September.

    Although Dyer was underage when many of the alleged crimes occurred, prosecutors said Oregon law allows suspects to be prosecuted as adults for crimes committed when they were minors.

    The mother of the alleged victims said the girls have since left the area and tried to start their lives anew. She said years of abuse have left a mark on the family.

    "Physically, (they) may be fine, but emotionally (they're) not," she said. "They're in counseling. The whole family is."

    Dyer will appear in a Polk County courtroom in February and a Benton County courtroom in April.
     

    Stunning Defeat of Coakley in Mass
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 21.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00204]
     
    Refer in comments to News Itm No. 00204, Stunning Defeat of Coakley, and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    None of the media has noticed another important issue in Mass. for many working class voters from the families of sex offenders - highlighted in the Wall Street Journal Article of Jan 19 - see RSOL news item no. 0200. Ms. Coakley was a vicious witch-hunter in a day care center case, the Amrault debacle.
    -------------------------------------------
    Huffington Post
    Jan. 19, 2010
    by Glenn Johnson and Liz Sidoti


    BOSTON — In an epic upset in liberal Massachusetts, Republican Scott Brown rode a wave of voter anger to win the U.S. Senate seat held by the late Edward M. Kennedy for nearly half a century, leaving President Barack Obama's health care overhaul in doubt and marring the end of his first year in office.

    Addressing an exuberant victory celebration Tuesday night, Brown declared he was "ready to go to Washington without delay" as the crowd chanted, "Seat him now." Democrats indicated they would, deflating a budding controversy over whether they would try to block Brown long enough to complete congressional passage of the health care plan he has promised to oppose.

    "The people of Massachusetts have spoken. We welcome Scott Brown to the Senate and will move to seat him as soon as the proper paperwork has been received," said Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin said he would notify the Senate on Wednesday that Brown had been elected.

    The loss by the once-favored Democrat Martha Coakley in the Democratic stronghold was a stunning embarrassment for the White House after Obama rushed to Boston on Sunday to try to save the foundering candidate. Her defeat on Tuesday signaled big political problems for the president's party this fall when House, Senate and gubernatorial candidates are on the ballot nationwide.

    Brown's victory was the third major loss for Democrats in statewide elections since Obama became president. Republicans won governors' seats in Virginia and New Jersey in November.

    "I have no interest in sugarcoating what happened in Massachusetts," said Sen. Robert Menendez, the head of the Senate Democrats' campaign committee. "There is a lot of anxiety in the country right now. Americans are understandably impatient."

    Brown will become the 41st Republican in the 100-member Senate, which could allow the GOP to block the president's health care legislation. Democrats needed Coakley to win for a 60th vote to thwart Republican filibusters. The trouble may go deeper: Democratic lawmakers could read the results as a vote against Obama's broader agenda, weakening their support for the president. And the results could scare some Democrats from seeking office this fall.

    The Republican will finish Kennedy's unexpired term, facing re-election in 2012.

    Brown led by 52 per cent to 47 percent with all but 3 percent of precincts counted. Turnout was exceptional for a special election in January, with light snow reported in parts of the state. More voters showed up at the polls Tuesday than in any non-presidential general election in Massachusetts since 1990.

    One day shy of the first anniversary of Obama's swearing-in, the election played out amid a backdrop of animosity and resentment from voters over persistently high unemployment, Wall Street bailouts, exploding federal budget deficits and partisan wrangling over health care.

    "I voted for Obama because I wanted change. ... I thought he'd bring it to us, but I just don't like the direction that he's heading," said John Triolo, 38, a registered independent who voted in Fitchburg.

    He said his frustrations, including what he considered the too-quick pace of health care legislation, led him to vote for Brown.

    For weeks considered a long shot, Brown seized on voter discontent to overtake Coakley in the campaign's final stretch. His candidacy energized Republicans, including backers of the "tea party" protest movement, while attracting disappointed Democrats and independents uneasy with where they felt the nation was heading.

    A cornerstone of Brown's campaign was his promise to vote against the health care plan.

    Though the president wasn't on the ballot, he was on many voters' minds.

    Coakley called Brown conceding the race, and Obama talked to both Brown and Coakley, congratulating them on the race.

    The Democrat said the president told her: "We can't win them all."

    Brown will be the first Republican senator from Massachusetts in 30 years.

    Even before the first results were announced, administration officials were privately accusing Coakley of a poorly run campaign and playing down the notion that Obama or a toxic political landscape had much to do with the outcome.

    Coakley's supporters, in turn, blamed that very environment, saying her lead dropped significantly after the Senate passed health care reform shortly before Christmas and after the Christmas Day attempted airliner bombing that Obama himself said showed a failure of his administration.

    Days before the polls closed, Democrats were fingerpointing and laying blame.

    Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, head of the House Democrats' campaign effort, said Coakley's loss won't deter his colleagues from continuing to blame the previous administration.

    "President George W. Bush and House Republicans drove our economy into a ditch and tried to run away from the accident," he said. "President Obama and congressional Democrats have been focused repairing the damage to our economy."

    At Boston's Park Plaza Hotel, giddy Republicans cheered, chanted "USA" and waved the "tea party" version of the American flag.

    Even before Brown won, the grass-roots network fueled by antiestablishment frustrations, sought credit for the victory, much like the liberal MoveOn.org did in the 2006 midterm elections when Democrats rose to power.

    GOP chairman Michael Steele said Brown's "message of lower taxes, smaller government and fiscal responsibility clearly resonated with independent-minded voters in Massachusetts who were looking for a solution to decades of failed Democrat leadership."

    Wall Street watched the election closely. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 116 points, and analysts attributed the increase to hopes the election would make it harder for Obama to make his changes to health care. That eased investor concerns that profits at companies such as insurers and drug makers would suffer.

    Across Massachusetts, voters who had been bombarded with phone calls and dizzied with nonstop campaign commercials for Coakley and Brown gave a fitting turnout despite intermittent snow and rain statewide.

    Galvin, who discounted sporadic reports of voter irregularities throughout the day, predicted turnout ranging from 1.6 million to 2.2 million, 40 percent to 55 percent of registered voters. The Dec. 8 primary had a scant turnout of about 20 percent.

    Voters considered national issues including health care and the federal budget deficits.

    Fears about spending drove Karla Bunch, 49, to vote for Brown. "It's time for the country, for the taxpayers, to take back their money," she said. And Elizabeth Reddin, 65, voted for Brown because she said she was turned off by the Democrat's negative advertisements, saying: "The Coakley stuff was disgusting."

    ___

    Liz Sidoti reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Beth Fouhy, Bob Salsberg, Steve LeBlanc, Karen Testa, Kevin Vineys and Stephanie Reitz also contributed to this report.

     

    Iowa: Rethink Life-time S.O. Suprervision!
    By posted by Margie <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 20.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00203]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 00203 and be sent to thesnappy1@gmail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    Thanks to Margie for sending in this excellent news from Iowa!

    Rethink lifetime supervision for sex offenders

    By LEE ROOD • lrood@dmreg.com •
    Des Moines Register
    Des Moines, Iowa
    January 20, 2010
    Lawmakers should revise state law to limit the number of sex offenders subject to lifetime supervision, focusing the state's scarce resources on the highest-risk offenders, a state panel recommended Tuesday.

    The move comes after a Des Moines Register probe in July showed Iowa's experiment with lifetime monitoring of sex offenders would cost at the very minimum about $168 million over the next 20 years.

    Iowa's Sex Offender Research Council also advocated greater prevention efforts and additional research on how best to monitor offenders.

    But state Rep. Clel Baudler, who has long served on the House public safety committee, said he has heard no proposals thus far aimed at recommendations from the panel.

    "We have to fix a couple things regarding the treatment of out-of-state sex offenders, but that's all for now as far as I know," said Baudler, R-Greenfield. "Whether they will want changes after seeing this report, I don't know."

    Steve Scott of Prevent Child Abuse Iowa said sex-abuse prevention groups like his will be lucky to keep what state funding they have this year.

    "If we get through without it getting cut, that will be a major success," he said.

    The council was assembled to gather research in the wake of several high-profile sex-abuse tragedies and subsequent changes to state law. It included representation from 16 state agencies, legislators and other groups involved with sex offenders.

    One law change that quietly went into effect in 2006 required most sex offenders to serve "special sentences" after completing their original prison or probation sentences. The law was intended to better protect Iowa children from sexual predators, who previously could walk out of prison after serving their time with few restrictions.

    But since then, the number of offenders under 10-year and lifetime monitoring has grown from six in 2007 to 113 by September last year. By 2019, the number under 10-year supervision is expected to grow to 962, while those under lifetime probation will grow to 954.

    The report also said lawmakers should reconsider the wisdom of subjecting juveniles to registration and residency requirements. The council said more juveniles are being adjudicated for sex offenses, but research shows only a small number commit new crimes as adults.

    Before revisions in Iowa's sex offender laws last summer, some 42 of the 5,041 offenders on the registry were juveniles. Prior to that, only 27 of 312 juveniles adjudicated for sex offenses from fiscal year 2006 to 2008 were placed on the registry.

    The law change took away juvenile court discretion in placing juveniles 14 or older on the sex-offender registry for certain offenses. More offenders ages 14 and 15 are winding up on the registry as a result.


     

    Alabama Bill to Seize S.O. Property!
    By Mary <rsolvirginia@comcast.net>
    Posted on 20.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00202]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00202 and send to the Independent VirginiaRSOL leader, Mary, at rsolvirginia@comcast.net.
    This is indeed another outrage - more like Nazi Germany or the former USSR than our beloved America - we have to stop it! Alex
    ----------------------
    Associated Press Story
    AL.Com
    Mobile, Alabama
    Jan. 19, 2010

    MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Adults using a computer to solicit a juvenile for sexual activity could find themselves without a home, car or computer.

    The Alabama House voted 95-0 to pass a bill by Democratic Rep. Ken Guin of Carbon Hill that allows authorities to confiscate the property of a person convicted of using a computer to lure a young person to meet for sexual reasons.

    An exception is the house, car or other property can't be confiscated if it is needed by a spouse or child who did not know the computer was being used to solicit a child.

    The bill was originally sponsored by Democratic Rep. Lea Fite of Jacksonville. Fite died of a heart attack in October. The bill was named the Lea Fite Child Protection Act.

     

    Soldier´s Family Say Pix Are Not Porn!
    By posted by James <ohiorsol@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 19.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00201]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00201 and send to ohiorsol@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    This is another travesty of justice - family snap shots in a soldier´s photo book in Afghanistan considered pornography!
    Write to the US Army and complain!
    alex
    SEE EXCELLENT COMMENT AFTER THE STORY!!!
    -------------------------
    soldier's family says pictures aren't porn

    DAVID MERCER, Associated Press Writer
    Daily Local News
    Chester County, Pennsylvania
    January 15, 2010

    Terri and Rodney Miller pose with a portrait of their son, Spc. Billy Miller, on Friday, Jan. 15, 2010, at their home in Galesburg, Ill. Miller, an Illinois National Guard soldier in Afghanistan, has been charged by the U.S. Army with possessing child pornography over pictures of a young relative his mother says she sent him. Terri said she sent the pictures to help him get over his homesickness. She says the pictures are innocent. (AP Photo/The Register-Mail, Bill Gaither) Terri and Rodney Miller pose with a portrait of their son, Spc. Billy Miller, on Friday, Jan. 15, 2010, at their home in Galesburg, Ill. Miller, an Illinois National Guard soldier in Afghanistan, has been charged by the U.S. Army with possessing child pornography over pictures of a young relative his mother says she sent him. Terri said she sent the pictures to help him get over his homesickness. She says the pictures are innocent. (AP Photo/The Register-Mail, Bill Gaither)
    Rodney Miller speaks about his son, Spc. Billy Miller, on Friday, Jan. 15, 2010, in Galesburg, Ill. Listening are Billy's mother, Terri, center, and girlfriend, Melissa Fox, right. Miller, an Illinois National Guard soldier in Afghanistan has been charged by the U.S. Army with possessing child pornography over pictures of a young relative his mother says she sent him. Terri said she sent the pictures to help him get over his homesickness. She says the pictures are innocent. (AP Photo/The Register-Mail, Bill Gaither)

    CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) — The family of an Illinois National Guard soldier said Friday that he's been charged with possession of child pornography in Afghanistan over innocent snapshots of a 4-year-old relative in a swimsuit.

    The U.S. Army has charged Spec. Billy Miller of Galesburg, Ill., with possession of child pornography and a related charge of failure to obey an order that troops in Afghanistan not possess pornography.

    Army spokesman Lt. Mary J. Pekas declined to discuss details of the case or evidence against Miller. She said the charge is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

    Miller's unit returned to Illinois in August, according to the National Guard, but the Army said he remains in Afghanistan, awaiting the end of his case and possible court martial.

    "Spec. Miller is currently on active duty and assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Co., 82nd Airborne Division, pending the conclusion of the investigation and any potential legal proceedings," the Army's media center in Bagram, Afghanistan, said in a brief, unsigned e-mail statement.

    Miller's father, Rodney, said the Army won't discuss the case with the family. But he said his son has told him the charges stem from a handful of photos of the girl that the soldier's mother e-mailed to ease his homesickness.

    "I can't believe that the Army's doing this to our son; it's unbelievable," Rodney Miller said from his home in Galesburg, about 55 miles south of Davenport, Iowa. "The Army and the government's telling us more or less that it's none of our business."

    The pictures show the girl in a swimsuit playing in a pool and sitting on Billy Miler's pickup truck, according to the family. A small portion of one of the girl's buttocks is visible in one, Rodney Miller said.

    Billy Miller, a mechanic in civilian life, was part of the Illinois Army National Guard's 33rd Infantry Brigade. About 3,000 members of the brigade went to Afghanistan in late 2008 and returned home last year.

    The Millers say their son became close to the little girl after she was diagnosed with a serious illness while her own father was away for military training. The pictures were taken by Terri Miller and the girl's mother at the girl's birthday party last summer, Rodney Miller said.

    The Army said any legal proceedings will happen in Afghanistan, but Rodney Miller hopes for some way to have his son tried in the United States if it comes to that. Anyone from his National Guard unit who can testify on his behalf isn't in Afghanistan, Miller said.

    "If they court martial him in Afghanistan, he will be absolutely on his own," he said.
    -------------------
    COMMENT
    I keep wanting to ask "Am I still living in the United States of America?" Maybe this sort of thing could actually be an open door to appeal to many Americans? We are only one small group being attacked and harrassed right now. If we are continually allowed to be harrassed and have our freedoms, rights and privacy compromised, then who is next? Who will be the next group to be considered, "dangerous" or "potentially harmful"?


    This person is not even a sex offender (yet), but if he is so listed, than there is almost no limit to the invasions of his privacy as well as the privation of his liberties and rights.

    I think we need someone in marketing to figure out how we can appeal to the American people and say, "If this happens to us now, what is to stop the government from tartgeting you next?"

    Tom R.
    RSOL Maryland
     

    Witchhunter Runs for Senate in Mass
    By posted by Ingrid <edh_advocates@live.net>
    Posted on 17.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00200]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 200 - Witchhunter Runs for Senate in Mass - and send to edh_advocates@live.net with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    -------------------
    How short are voters´ memories - let´s expose this ¨liberal¨ for what she is. It may be necessary, in the weird politics of America, to vote for this person as a better alternative than her opponent - but do it with eyes open!
    Alex
    -----------------
    Martha Coakley's Convictions
    The role played by the U.S. Senate candidate in a notorious sex case raises questions about her judgment...
    By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
    WALL STREET JOURNAL
    Jan. 14, 2009

    The story of the Amiraults of Massachusetts, and of the prosecution that had turned the lives of this thriving American family to dust, was well known to the world by the year 2001. It was well known, especially, to District Attorney Martha Coakley, who had by then arrived to take a final, conspicuous, role in a case so notorious as to assure that the Amiraults' name would be known around the globe.

    The Amiraults were a busy, confident trio, grateful in the way of people who have found success after a life of hardship. Violet had reared her son Gerald and daughter Cheryl with help from welfare, and then set out to educate herself. The result was the triumph of her life—the Fells Acres school—whose every detail Violet scrutinized relentlessly. Not for nothing was the pre-school deemed by far the best in the area, with a long waiting list for admission.

    All of it would end in 1984, with accusations of sexual assault and an ever-growing list of parents signing their children on to the case. Newspaper and television reports blared a sensational story about a female school principal, in her 60s, who had daily terrorized and sexually assaulted the pupils in her care, using sharp objects as her weapon. So too had Violet's daughter Cheryl, a 28-year old teacher at the school.

    But from the beginning, prosecutors cast Gerald as chief predator—his gender qualifying him, in their view, as the best choice for the role. It was that role, the man in the family, that would determine his sentence, his treatment, and, to the end, his prosecution-inspired image as a pervert too dangerous to go free.

    The accusations against the Amiraults might well rank as the most astounding ever to be credited in an American courtroom, but for the fact that roughly the same charges were brought by eager prosecutors chasing a similar headline—making cases all across the country in the 1980s. Those which the Amiraults' prosecutors brought had nevertheless, unforgettable features: so much testimony, so madly preposterous, and so solemnly put forth by the state. The testimony had been extracted from children, cajoled and led by tireless interrogators.

    Gerald, it was alleged, had plunged a wide-blade butcher knife into the rectum of a 4-year-old boy, which he then had trouble removing. When a teacher in the school saw him in action with the knife, she asked him what he was doing, and then told him not to do it again, a child said. On this testimony, Gerald was convicted of a rape which had, miraculously, left no mark or other injury. Violet had tied a boy to a tree in front of the school one bright afternoon, in full view of everyone, and had assaulted him anally with a stick, and then with "a magic wand." She would be convicted of these charges. Cheryl had cut the leg off a squirrel.

    Other than such testimony, the prosecutors had no shred of physical or other proof that could remotely pass as evidence of abuse. But they did have the power of their challenge to jurors: Convict the Amiraults to make sure the battle against child abuse went forward. Convict, so as not to reject the children who had bravely come forward with charges.

    Gerald was sent to prison for 30 to 40 years, his mother and sister sentenced to eight to 20 years. The prosecutors celebrated what they called, at the time "a model, multidisciplinary prosecution." Gerald's wife, Patricia, and their three children—the family unfailingly devoted to him—went on with their lives. They spoke to him nightly and cherished such hope as they could find, that he would be restored to them.

    Hope arrived in 1995, when Judge Robert Barton ordered a new trial for the women. Violet, now 72, and Cheryl had been imprisoned eight years. This toughest of judges, appalled as he came to know the facts of the case, ordered the women released at once. Judge Barton—known as Black Bart for the long sentences he gave criminals—did not thereafter trouble to conceal his contempt for the prosecutors. They would, he warned, do all in their power to hold on to Gerald, a prediction to prove altogether accurate.

    No less outraged, Superior Court Judge Isaac Borenstein presided over a widely publicized hearings into the case resulting in findings that all the children's testimony was tainted. He said that "Every trick in the book had been used to get the children to say what the investigators wanted." The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly—which had never in its 27 year history taken an editorial position on a case—published a scathing one directed at the prosecutors "who seemed unwilling to admit they might have sent innocent people to jail for crimes that had never occurred."

    It was clear, when Martha Coakley took over as the new Middlesex County district attorney in 1999, that public opinion was running sharply against the prosecutors in the case. Violet Amirault was now gone. Ill and penniless after her release, she had been hounded to the end by prosecutors who succeeded in getting the Supreme Judicial Court to void the women's reversals of conviction. She lay waiting all the last days of her life, suitcase packed, for the expected court order to send her back to prison. Violet would die of cancer before any order came in September 1997.

    That left Cheryl alone, facing rearrest. In the face of the increasing furor surrounding the case, Ms. Coakley agreed to revise and revoke her sentence to time served—but certain things had to be clear, she told the press. Cheryl's case, and that of Gerald, she explained, had nothing to do with one another—a startling proposition given the horrific abuse charges, identical in nature, of which all three of the Amiraults had been convicted.

    No matter: When women were involved in such cases, the district attorney explained, it was usually because of the presence of "a primary male offender." According to Ms. Coakley's scenario, it was Gerald who had dragged his mother and sister along. Every statement she made now about Gerald reflected the same view, and the determination that he never go free. No one better exemplified the mindset and will of the prosecutors who originally had brought this case.

    Before agreeing to revise Cheryl's sentence to time served, Ms. Coakley asked the Amiraults' attorney, James Sultan, to pledge—in exchange—that he would stop representing Gerald and undertake no further legal action on his behalf. She had evidently concluded that with Sultan gone—Sultan, whose mastery of the case was complete—any further effort by Gerald to win freedom would be doomed. Mr. Sultan, of course, refused.

    In 2000, the Massachusetts Governor's Board of Pardons and Paroles met to consider a commutation of Gerald's sentence. After nine months of investigation, the board, reputed to be the toughest in the country, voted 5-0, with one abstention, to commute his sentence. Still more newsworthy was an added statement, signed by a majority of the board, which pointed to the lack of evidence against the Amiraults, and the "extraordinary if not bizarre allegations" on which they had been convicted.

    Editorials in every major and minor paper in the state applauded the Board's findings. District Attorney Coakley was not idle either, and quickly set about organizing the parents and children in the case, bringing them to meetings with Acting Gov. Jane Swift, to persuade her to reject the board's ruling. Ms. Coakley also worked the press, setting up a special interview so that the now adult accusers could tell reporters, once more, of the tortures they had suffered at the hands of the Amiraults, and of their panic at the prospect of Gerald going free.

    On Feb. 20, 2002, six months after the Board of Pardons issued its findings, the governor denied Gerald's commutation.

    Gerald Amirault spent nearly two years more in prison before being granted parole in 2004. He would be released, with conditions not quite approximating that of a free man. He was declared a level three sex offender—among the consequences of his refusal, like that of his mother and sister, to "take responsibility" by confessing his crimes. He is required to wear, at all times, an electronic tracking device; to report, in a notebook, each time he leaves the house and returns; to obey a curfew confining him to his home between 11:30 p.m. and 6 a.m. He may not travel at all through certain areas (presumably those where his alleged victims live). He can, under these circumstances, find no regular employment.

    The Amirault family is nonetheless grateful that they are together again.

    Attorney General Martha Coakley—who had proven so dedicated a representative of the system that had brought the Amirault family to ruin, and who had fought so relentlessly to preserve their case—has recently expressed her view of this episode. Questioned about the Amiraults in the course of her current race for the U.S. Senate, she told reporters of her firm belief that the evidence against the Amiraults was "formidable" and that she was entirely convinced "those children were abused at day care center by the three defendants."

    What does this say about her candidacy? (Ms. Coakley declined to be interviewed.) If the current attorney general of Massachusetts actually believes, as no serious citizen does, the preposterous charges that caused the Amiraults to be thrown into prison—the butcher knife rape with no blood, the public tree-tying episode, the mutilated squirrel and the rest—that is powerful testimony to the mind and capacities of this aspirant to a Senate seat. It is little short of wonderful to hear now of Ms. Coakley's concern for the rights of terror suspects at Guantanamo—her urgent call for the protection of the right to the presumption of innocence.

    If the sound of ghostly laughter is heard in Massachusetts these days as this campaign rolls on, with Martha Coakley self-portrayed as the guardian of justice and civil liberties, there is good reason.

    Ms. Rabinowitz, a member of the Journal's editorial board, is the author of "No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusations, False Witness And Other Terrors Our Times" (Free Press, 2003).
     

    Way to Go, Texas Voices!
    By posted by tonia <toniat@sbcglobal.net>
    Posted on 17.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00199]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 0199, Way to go Texas Voices, and send to both toniat@sbcglobal.net and marysueintx@yahoo.com

    The article incorrectly states that Martin Ezell is head of Texas Voice - the group is Texas Voices, and the chair is Mary Sue Molnar. Ezell is a TV participant.
    -----------------------

    Group Seeking Reform of Texas Sex Offender Registration Requirements
    Jan. 16, 2010

    Article provided by CRAIN LEWIS LLP
    Visit us at http://criminal.dfwattorneys.com/

    Sex offender registration requirements have come under fire across the country as groups in opposition to sex offender registries question their effectiveness in protecting the public and children from the most dangerous offenders.

    In Texas one group is working hard to raise attention to the problem of having an over-inclusive registry that lumps together those with the highest risk of reoffending with those who pose little to no risk. Some state lawmakers who helped strengthen and expand the scope of Texas' sex offender registration requirements also are questioning the wisdom of the state's current registry laws.

    Texas Registration Requirements

    Texas law requires those who have been convicted of certain sex offenses and other crimes to register as a sex offender upon release from state supervision. Some of these offenses include:
    -Sexual assault and aggravated sexual assault
    -Indecency with a child
    -Prostitution
    -Possession or promotion of child pornography
    -On-line solicitation of a child
    -Indecent exposure
    -Kidnapping, aggravated kidnapping and unlawful restraint
    -Burglary

    The majority of offenders who have committed one of these crimes are required to register for life. Other offenders are required to register for a maximum of 10 years from the date of their release or discharge. Juvenile offenders also may be required to register, but this decision is left to the judge's discretion.

    The Texas registration laws require offenders to provide extensive information about themselves, including:
    - Biographical information, like name, address, date of birth, weight, eye color, hair color, shoe size
    - Identifying information, like Social Security number, driver's license number, full set of fingerprints and a recent color photograph
    - Information about their crime, including date of conviction, age of the victim, sentence and conditions of release
    - Licenses held, including professional, business and other occupational licenses
    - Work and school information, including the name and address of employers and location of any educational institution they may be attending

    Most of the information that convicted sex offenders are required to provide is made available to the public in the Sex Offender Database. This database is accessible on-line from the Texas Department of Public Safety's Web site. Only certain information, like the offender's social security and driver's license numbers and any information that could identify the victim, are kept confidential.

    Additionally, local law enforcement may contact schools, print notices in the local newspaper or send out postcard notifications to alert members of the community of the presence of certain high-risk offenders in their neighborhoods.

    Opposition to Sex Offender Registries

    Some groups in opposition to sex offender registries believe the registration laws need to be repealed altogether and replaced with tougher punishments for the most violent of sex crimes. Others believe the registries themselves are a good idea, but want to see greater limits placed on whom is required to register.

    The organization Texas Voice is in the latter group. The group is headed by Martin Ezell, who was convicted of statutory rape for having sex with a 16-year-old when he was 32. Ezell is now married to the woman he was convicted of raping and has three children with her. Regardless, he still is required to register as a sex offender.

    Through his group, Ezell wants to see other low-level, non-violent offenders like himself removed from the Texas sex offender database. He believes including these types of low risk offenders with high risk, violent offenders decreases the effectiveness of the registry. For example, by requiring the state to expend resources on prosecuting, incarcerating and monitoring low-level offenders, it is diverting these limited resources from efforts to prosecute, incarcerate and monitor those most likely to commit another sex crime.

    Some state lawmakers have begun supporting this position, including Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston) and Ray Allen, the former Texas House Corrections Chair. Both of these men have expressed concerns about the over-inclusiveness of the registry and its ability to adequately protect children and the public at large from the most dangerous sexual predators.

    Others in the state, however, are not sympathetic to those sharing a similar plight with Ezell. In general, it is difficult to drum up public support for any measures that propose to scale back the state's sex offender registration requirements -- even though the public perception of a convicted sex offender generally does not include those like Ezell.

    Conclusion

    Those who have been charged with a sex offense or another crime requiring registration as a sex offender should contact an experienced criminal defense attorney as soon as possible. The penalties for these crimes do not stop once you have completed your jail sentence. Sex offender registration may last for the rest of your lifetime. For more information, contact a knowledgeable defense attorney today.

    Article provided by CRAIN LEWIS LLP
    Visit us at http://criminal.dfwattorneys.com/
     

    TV Encourages S.O. Harrassment
    By posted by Mary Sue <marysueintx@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 17.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00198]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00198, and send to marysueintx@yahoo.com , with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    Note from Alex: Irresponsible media actually encourage people to go online to the registry, so they can go door to door and harrass former offenders living quietly in their neighborhoods! Awful! ALL RSOL participants in Texas should contact this TV station and protest!!!!
    alex
    ----------------------
    Erik Barajas
    BAY CITY, TX (KTRK TV, Houston)
    Jan. 15, 2010

    -- Sex offenders are a big worry for many parents, but one city here in southeast Texas doesn't have an ordinance restricting where they live. Now many people in Bay City are asking why.


    Related Content
    more: Find sex offenders now!

    Gripping a flyer with the photo of the man the molested her when she was 11, Diamond Good recently found out registered sex offender Donald Wayne Brown now lives just a few miles away.

    "He ran into my mom in HEB," said Diamond.

    Immediately she got on the DPS website and found Brown's page and his address, but she also learned that Bay City has no sex offender ordinance restricting where registered sex offenders live.

    "I don't understand why they haven't. They are just jeopardizing more people," Diamond said.

    So she printed copies of his DPS page and set out for his street.

    "We just went to all of his neighbors in the neighborhood and knocked on their door and let them know that there is a sex offender living in their neighborhood," said Diamond.

    When we asked her how neighbors reacted, Diamond said they were, "Very very surprised."

    Even more surprised was the director of a nearby Girl Scout annex. She had no idea.

    With Bay City having no ordinance regarding sex offenders, they are essentially allowed to live where they please. At that Girl Scouts of America building where meetings are held during the week, Donald Brown lives a block and a half away. The GPS says it's one-tenth of a mile.

    We walked to Brown's home to ask why he was living so close to a Girl Scouts annex, but he never answered.

    And no answers are coming from the mayor of Bay City either. Mayor Richard Knapik refused to go on camera only sending us an email that read, "The City of Bay City does not have any ordinances pertaining to sexual offenders living within the city limits, nor do we have ordinances regarding murder, theft and other heinous crimes. The laws of the State of Texas encompass all of these offenses."

    Bay City residents say right now sex offenders have free roam.

    "I don't understand why we don't have that ordinance here because there are several sex offenders that do live around the schools and the day cares," said resident Jean Burge.

    Others don't understand why Bay City has never drafted an ordinance to deal with their 47 sex offenders.

    "They are lazy, that is pretty much it. They don't want to put up with it. They are just letting them live where ever they want to live and it's not fair to us good citizens," said Ashley Benevides.

    As for Diamond, she plans to raise awareness and help Bay City reevaluate the dangers of not having a sex offender ordinance.

    "To get them away from the parks and schools and the Girls Scouts because they are sex offenders and there is so many of them that live in Bay City and they can live where ever they want," said Diamond.

    You can check if there are sex offenders in your neighborhood. We have a link to the state registry here.


    (Copyright ©2010 KTRK-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)
     

    Are Concentration Camps Here Already?
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 12.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00197]
     
    Refer in Comments to News Item 00197, Are Concentration Camps Here Already? - send to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    This ongoing use of extended ´civil commitment´ for sex offenders violates the most basic rights guaranteed in the Constituion. As this article rightly points out, this is a creeping fascism - the laws may be extended to other types of prisoners after they have completed their sentences. We must call and write NPR to congratulate them on this, and to add our voices to the cry for the civil commitment laws to be overturned! The North Carolina case is urgent for RSOL.

    From NPR radio.
    URL
    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122452485



    Federal Prisoners Kept Beyond Their Sentences
    by Nina Totenberg

    January 12, 2010

    Civil commitment is traditionally dealt with by the states, and more than 20 states do have laws that allow for indefinite civil commitment of sex offenders after they serve their time.

    Civil commitment is traditionally dealt with by the states, and more than 20 states do have laws that allow for indefinite civil commitment of sex offenders after they serve their time.
    Civil commitment is traditionally dealt with by the states, and more than 20 states do have laws that allow for indefinite civil commitment of sex offenders after they serve their time.

    Civil commitment is traditionally dealt with by the states, and more than 20 states do have laws that allow for indefinite civil commitment of sex offenders after they serve their time.
    The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday in a case that tests the federal government's power to keep convicted sex offenders behind bars after they have served out their prison terms.

    Currently, 84 such prisoners are indefinitely confined for treatment at a federal prison in North Carolina. Five of them are challenging the law under which they have been detained with no end in sight.

    Typical is the case of Graydon Comstock, who was sentenced to three years in prison for possession of child pornography. Six days short of completing his term, he was designated as "sexually dangerous," and the federal government moved to have him civilly committed for treatment. He has been kept in the North Carolina facility for two additional years, with little prospect of release.

    Congress authorized such indefinite civil commitments for the first time in 2006 for sexual offenders who have completed their prison terms.

    Two lower federal courts invalidated the law as unconstitutional, concluding that it overstepped the bounds of federal power under the Constitution, usurped powers reserved for the states and denied the due process of law to the individuals who are indefinitely committed.

    The federal government appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

    Beyond The Bounds Of The Constitution?

    Civil commitment is traditionally dealt with by the states, and more than 20 states do have laws that allow for indefinite civil commitment of sex offenders after they serve their time. Indeed, in 1997 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld one such law from Kansas.

    The Kansas statute, however, offers more protections for the individual. Under the federal law, the hearing to justify commitment is before a judge, but Kansas allows for a jury trial. Most important, the Kansas law requires the state to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the offender is still dangerous, while the federal law requires only the less demanding showing of "clear and convincing proof," meaning essentially, that guilt is more likely than not.

    Beyond the protections for the individual, there is the larger question of the limits of federal power. For a federal action to be constitutional, it has to be authorized by a specific enumerated provision of the Constitution, and the Constitution has no general civil commitment provision. So the Obama administration is defending the statute by linking civil commitment to the federal government's custody of the men in prison.

    Or, as Kansas Solicitor General Stephen McAllister puts it, in siding with the federal government: "These individuals are legitimately, lawfully in federal custody, and so the question is, is the federal government powerless when it has a dangerous, mentally abnormal individual in its custody? Is it powerless to do something with this individual in the realm of civil commitment?"

    Federal law does have a provision allowing for the transfer of dangerous prisoners to the states for civil commitment, but as McAllister concedes, "We don't want 'em."

    Treating these offenders in state prison systems, he says, is expensive, and the states don't want to bear the costs.

    Predicting Future Dangerousness

    McAllister concedes that once an offender is in a treatment program, he rarely gets out because there is no good treatment that has worked with large numbers of offenders. Underlining that, he notes, is the fact that some offenders who have been released have committed horrific crimes.


    But lawyer Jeff Green, who filed a brief on the opposite side of the case, points to statistics showing a relatively low recidivism rate. The headline cases, he says, prove a different point — that there is no way to predict future dangerousness.

    "These are hideous crimes," he says, "but they demonstrate that the experts, in terms of identifying which individuals are dangerous, are no better than astrologers."

    If someone is truly dangerous, Green argues, then the government should seek prison terms that are long enough to protect the public — not rely on an open-ended civil commitment system.

    Green maintains that the government's so-called treatment program is nothing more than a Catch-22. The offender is required to talk about his sexual fantasies and accept responsibility, but those conversations can be used against him if he seeks release. Because there is no way for the offender to prove he is not dangerous, Green argues, release for most of these men "is a practical impossibility."

    Or, as one lawyer who has visited the federal facility in North Carolina put it, "it is a pervert's cruise ship to nowhere."

    A Constitutional Ripple Effect

    McAllister, the Kansas solicitor general, concedes that few offenders get out once they are civilly committed in the states. That opens up more questions when considering a federal statute that provides fewer protections for the accused. If you can civilly commit someone as sexually dangerous, why not civilly commit people believed to be just dangerous in general? McAllister says civil commitment has to be linked to a mental abnormality or condition. But a lot of people in prison are deeply disturbed. There are drug addicts, kleptomaniacs, vicious sociopaths. So why not commit them too once they have completed their prison terms?

    "Constitutionally, it might be possible," to extend the rationale for civil commitment to other kinds of crimes, McAllister says. "I don't have a constitutionally limiting line for what kinds of mental disorders might be permissible and what [might] not. If they lead to danger to others, potentially, they could be covered under such a law."

    In other words, this is a case that could have a constitutional ripple effect.
     

    Mass. Sheriff Demands Inmates Pay ¨Rent¨
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 09.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00196]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00196, ¨Mass Sheriff Demands Inmates Pay Rent,¨ and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm. I will send them along to the angry Massachusetts rsol participant who sent this in. It seems that ¨liberal¨ Massachusetts if full of plenty of those who pander to fear and hatred. Let´s write some angry letters to the Herald!
    alex

    ---------------------------------------------------
    Sheriff to politicians: Make inmates pay daily ‘rent’
    By Dave Wedge
    Boston HERALD
    Wednesday, January 6, 2010

    The state’s high court handcuffed a New Bedford sheriff’s bid to charge jailbirds $5-a-day rent, but the lawman is calling on Beacon Hill lawmakers to pass a stalled bill that would send the court ruling to the gallows.

    Bristol Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, who says the nominal daily inmate fees could raise $10 million a year for the cash-strapped commonwealth, says the state Supreme Judicial Court erred by striking down his pay-to-stay program at the Dartmouth House of Correction. But, he says, the Legislature could make the ruling moot by moving legislation giving sheriffs the power to impose reasonable fees.

    “Hopefully the Legislature will do the right thing,” Hodgson told the Herald. “The state of Massachusetts is losing millions of dollars by not having this acted upon.”

    The SJC unanimously ruled yesterday that sheriffs, who oversee jailhouse budgets and manage facilities, do not have the authority to impose fees to offset the costs of housing inmates.

    “Had the Legislature intended to authorize the sheriff to impose the challenged fees, it would have said so expressly as it had done with other fees,” SJC Justice Roderick L. Ireland wrote in the decision.

    The ruling means Hodgson will have to pay back $750,000 in fees collected from inmates from 2002 to 2004 and held in escrow. Hodgson estimates that the state spends $35,000 a year per inmate.

    Hodgson, a no-nonsense ex-cop who brought back chain gangs, yanked TVs from cells and has been criticized for overcrowded jails, contended that colonial-era law gave him authority to impose the fees. He says the SJC decision hits taxpayers in the wallet while inmates blow their canteen cash on sneakers and snacks.

    “People are making cuts to their own personal budgets, and yet the people who victimize them continue to get higher-grade sneakers, candy and cookies,” he said. “It’s high time the people who are costing taxpayers the most and contributing the least paid their way.”

    He added that he’s sending letters today to Gov. Deval Patrick, Senate President Therese Murray and House Speaker Robert DeLeo asking them to make passing a law allowing sheriffs to charge fees “a high priority.”

    A Murray aide declined to comment while a DeLeo spokesman said the SJC decision is being reviewed. A Patrick aide said the governor will review Hodgson’s letter but has not taken a position. Officials from Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, the state-funded inmate advocacy agency that filed the suit, did not return calls.

    Sen. Richard Tisei (R-Wakefield) applauded Hodgson for “thinking outside the box.”

    “I think most of the public supports him. It’s too bad the court didn’t see it the same way because it does seem like . . . common sense,” said Tisei, who’s running for lieutenant governor. He added that he and the other four GOP senators who sponsored the bill plan to push it in coming weeks.

    Laurie Myers of the victim rights group Community VOICES said of the ruling: “It’s typical of the SJC. We coddle criminals in this state.”

     

    Michigan Jurist Slams Sex Offender Laws
    By posted by Mary Sue Molnar <marysueintx@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 08.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00195]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 0195 and be sent to marysueintx@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    Judge Buhl, who is unfortunately retiring from the Michigan courts, has really slammed the sex offender laws - and this could be said about at the laws of at least 40 other states. He has made case after case against parts of these laws. This is worth our reading in full! Thanks to those who sent this in.
    alex

    The URL for this article, to read it online:
    http://michiganmessenger.com/32878/an-ornery-judicial-view-of-mich-sex-offender-laws

    --------------------
    An ‘ornery’ judicial view of Mich. sex offender laws

    Retiring judge says 'root problem is that our registry includes so many more people than it needs to include'
    By David Alire Garcia 1/7/10
    Michigan Messenger
    Center for Independent Media
    Detroit, Michigan

    Retiring Van Buren County Circuit Judge William C. Buhl is a rarity among Michigan’s mostly reserved black robe set.

    “When things bother me, I get tired of people talking and saying this is horrible and not doing anything about it,” he said near the beginning of an in-depth interview covering his frustrations with the state’s sex offender laws.

    In his southwest Michigan county, after nine elections — and never even drawing an opponent in any of them — you might think Buhl is mostly immune to the political considerations of taking on an unpopular cause. And you’d be right. But that immunity to the raw political consequences of his views has also convinced him that he has no choice but to speak his mind.

    “I figure after all these years on the bench, people actually sometimes listen to you,” he mused. “I’ve got a voice and I can speak out when others can’t.”

    It’s not that his fellow jurists are mute, Buhl added, just that when it comes to criticizing how Michigan handles sex crimes and especially the state’s burgeoning sex offender registry, most other elected judges legitimately worry about losing their jobs if they do likewise.

    That same temerity goes for elected lawmakers, Buhl said. He cites an educational event for legislators in Lansing sponsored by the Coalition for a Useful Registry last spring. Buhl sits on the coalition’s professional advisory board. The March event featured several different information stations, each one aiming to give state senators, representatives and their staff a better understanding of how the current system works — and its shortcomings.

    “I heard repeatedly, ‘Oh, we’ve got to go slow on this. We can’t do very much. Oh, it’s poison. We just don’t dare,’” Buhl said in a mocking tone. “They’re all just scared to death of it.”

    Raw politics

    It’s that fear that has pushed lawmakers to include anyone convicted of any of the state’s criminal sexual conduct laws on the online registry, as well as many other enhancements since the registry was created in 1994. Today, the state’s registry stands as one of the country’s broadest and most inclusive.

    He said he’d like to narrow the scope of offenses that currently land individuals on the registry for a minimum of 25 years — and he said he’s not alone.

    “I think that I speak for a majority, the vast majority of the judiciary,” Buhl asserted.

    The reason Buhl speaks for a mostly silent majority of elected judges in Michigan — if you believe his assertion — can be summed up in one word: politics.

    “It’s just scary stuff when it comes to people going to the polls and opponents will happily exploit any position you take on it that can be twisted to look like you kinda like pedophiles,” he said.

    In fact, that’s what he says happened to former State Rep. Alexander Lipsey. In 2002, Lipsey, a Democrat, was defeated in an election for a Kalamazoo-based seat in the Michigan Senate by Republican Tom George, now a candidate for governor.

    “George’s supporters were beating up Lipsey because he voted against going public with the registry,” Buhl recalled, noting that George himself refrained from the attack. Buhl said Lipsey was right to vote against the catch-all registry, but that didn’t matter in the end. “They unfairly accused him of being on the side of child molesters and he was defeated.”

    Five years later, Lipsey was appointed to a vacant circuit judge position in Kalamazoo by Gov. Jennifer Granholm, but that Senate race became part of what Buhl calls his personal “growth process” on the flaws with the current law.

    A view from the bench

    The cases that regularly came to his courtroom were also part of that process. He describes one that he said made the biggest impression on him.

    “I had a 17-year-old who was socially immature with a 15-year-old girlfriend that was just in love with him. And she pursued him. And the parents on both sides didn’t want them together. But despite their wishes — and this girl was far more mature than he was — they got together, and then, of course, had sex,” Buhl said.

    The boy was given probation for violating the state’s criminal sexual conduct law, but was still required to be placed on the housing- and employment-denying online sex offender registry for a quarter century. “I thought, what a travesty. This kid can’t even get a job at McDonalds.”

    Since then, he’s seen many similar cases. “When we have people married to their victims, with children that are a product of their crime, and they have to worry about whether they can go watch their kids’ soccer games at school, it just struck me as just wrong,” he said. “And the more I saw it, the angrier I got about it.”

    Fast forward to a current case on the judge’s docket — one that also makes him angry but for a different reason.

    “I have a guy right now pending sentence on his seventh failure to register,” he said, noting that registered offenders must check-in quarterly with law enforcement or face further penalties. “I finally said, ‘I want to know what he did to get on the registry.’ Well, it turns out he was a 13-year-old sexually abused child that asked a six-year-old to touch his penis. And he went through the juvenile system, was treated and has never had a sex-related offense since.”

    He added that “there’s no indication that he’s a sexual predator or anybody to worry about but he is a blithering idiot that will fail to register again.”

    It’s cases that that one, Buhl said, that clutter his courtroom and many others across the state.

    Like other advocates for reform, Buhl said part of his efforts are geared toward playing defense, stopping what they consider to be bad legislation. He pointed to two examples from 2009.

    The first was a proposal to redefine “school safety zones” to include all bus stops. Registered sex offenders are currently barred from living or working within 1,000 feet of such a zone. “That would have been a nightmare first to figure out,” he said, “because they change every year.”

    The second example was a proposal to include all day cares as off-limits school safety zones to offenders.

    “The way they defined day care would include almost every church that I’ve ever known,” he said. “If they include churches, they would basically render most communities, most municipalities off-limits for the registered sex offender.”

    The current state-of-affairs gets worse, Buhl said, because “nobody goes back to the root problem here and the root problem is that our registry includes so many more people than it needs to include.”

    Reforming the system

    As for the judge’s wish-list of reforms, he pointed to three main ideas.

    The first would institute a new process for evaluating — and treating — underage sex offenders.

    “I think we ought to treat them like we do juvenile offenders,” he said. “Have them petition into a court that takes jurisdiction over them like we petition juveniles … and put them through an educational course as to the legal and the life affecting consequences of sex, of child rearing, of child support, of sexually transmitted diseases, and just force them to endure that. Then graduate them and that’s the end of it,” he said. “Because they’re gonna do it, they’re gonna be doing it.”

    The “it” Buel is referring to is, of course, underage sex.

    For other accused sex offenders, Buhl suggests a new screening process and “have people put on the registry only if they’re people we need to worry about” such as violent rapists or child predators. In other words, Buhl says, “narrow the sex offender registry to people who truly are people we fear.”

    Beyond a better process, Buhl said Michigan should junk the school safety zones altogether.

    “They’re silly little artificial rings that make it impossible to work with people,” he said. “We have all these people who can’t live here and they can’t work there.”

    He said the employment and housing restrictions that go along with the school safety zones often make near impossible to make offenders employable, paying taxes and restitution.

    Lastly, Buhl thinks lawmakers should reconsider the uncomfortable but legally significant differences between criminal sexual conduct and “penetration” — an automatic felony.

    “I would treat sexual penetration the same way we treat sexual contact, and that is we don’t make it a crime when two 15-year-olds fornicate, we don’t make it a crime two 15-year-olds are all over each other sexually except for penetration,” he said. “The minute there’s any kind of penetration whatsoever, finger, doesn’t matter, bang, you’re into a 15-year felony. Whether it’s contact or penetration, when they’re under 16 it ought not be criminalized.”

    Entering the last year of his judicial career, this self-described “ornery cuss” is crystal clear about the problems he sees, and the reforms he’d like to see. But that doesn’t mean he’s unaware of the long-shot odds reformers like him face.

    In fact, he almost seems resigned to losing.

    “We all know that it’s terrible and yet it won’t be changed,” he said with a sigh. “I figure, OK, I’m jousting with windmills. I know that the odds of getting anything done are so slim. But I can’t sit and do nothing,” he added. “I just can’t.”

     

    Zero Tolerance for S.O.s in Delaware?
    By posted by Alex <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 07.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00194]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00194, Zero Tolerance for Sex Offenders in Delaware?, and see also Action Item No. 0073. Send comments to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    This is actually referred to rsol participants by the independent Va. RSOL leader, Mary (rsolvirginia@comcast.net). Mary has sent an excellent letter to Atkins denouncing his bill. Join her in doing that! We will send her comments as well.
    SEE COMMENT AT THE END OF THIS NEWS ITEM
    -------------------------------------------


    Atkins plans to introduce zero-tolerance bill package for high-risk, repeat sex offenders

    By Patrick Varine/Sussex Countian
    Sussex Countian
    Georgetown, Delaware
    Wed Jan 06, 2010

    Rep. John Atkins (D-Millsboro) wants to make Delaware a very uncomfortable place for a high-risk, repeat sex offender.

    The most uncomfortable, in fact.

    “If we can set a trend and lead the nation, we can push ‘em out and push ‘em out,” said Atkins, who has proposed a legislative package that aims to do just that.

    Atkins’ proposal includes a “sex offender” stamp on drivers’ licenses, a special license plate that must be registered and displayed on an offenders’ vehicle, truth in sentencing for offenders and – potentially the most controversial – mandatory chemical castration for male offenders over the age of 21, who have targeted a child younger than 12.

    “It is my intent to make Delaware the toughest place for a repeat sex offender to live,” Atkins said. “We need zero-tolerance for child molesters and other sex offenders.”

    While his proposal has certainly been colored by the investigation into Dr. Earl Bradley, who is facing multiple sex-offense charges, Atkins was also the primary sponsor for the state’s Child Internet Protection Act in 2004, a bill which helps to regulate Internet content at public libraries to protect children against obscenity and child pornography.

    Atkins said state lawmakers must stand up for kids who are victims of sexual offenses.

    “We have the power to protect them,” he said.

    ATKINS' PROPOSAL
    • Truth in sentencing All high-risk, repeat sex offenders would serve out their full term of jail time
    • Motor vehicles Drivers’ licenses would be stamped with “sex offender” and easily-identifiable license plates would be designed by the DMV
    • Castration Any male sex offender older than 21, who targeted a victim younger than 12, would receive mandatory chemical castration
n Offenders would receive an additional penalty for providing a cell phone to his or her victim
    • Phones Offenders would receive an additional penalty for providing a cell phone to his or her victim
    --------------------------------
    COMMENT from anonymous person in Delaware:
    DE already requires their licenses be stamped with "Sex Offfender". This guy is just posturing like most polticians & doesn't understand the laws that are already in place. DE was one of the 1st states to enact the Adam Walsh Act. Not much more they can do to these boys now (register every 6 mos & pay $30, license stamped, jobs on the registry, my town has a 3000 ft distance which overrides, I believe, the federal law) besides castrate them which still wouldn't be enough punishment for these people. They do what they want & people are soooo...... stupid they just go along with it & really think this will "protect" their child. They truly believe that sex offenders are waiting in the dark to grab their child & put them in cars. Now people are calling for the heads of anybody labeled a sex offender. Sensational cases just give these politicians a chance to start running their mouths like they have the answer. They have not researched this at all & just have a knee jerk reaction to make people think they are doing something. There´s a reason they call it ¨lower, slower Delaware¨........
     

    Baltimore Sun Slams Sex Offenders in Story of Girl´s Death
    By posted by Bill D. <duchamp@mindspring.com>
    Posted on 06.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00193]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 0193 and send to duchamp@mindspring.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    RSOL FOLKS ARE URGED TO WRITE THE SUN AND DEMAND FAIRER COVERAGE OF SEX OFFENDER ISSUES!
    The URL for this article is
    http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-md.salisbury27dec27,0,6454986.story
    --------------
    SEE ALSO FANTASTIC COMMENT BY RSOL PARTICIPANT AT THE END OF THE STORY!
    ----------------------


    Girl's death spurs call for action
    Stricter laws are urged for child sex offenders

    By Jill Rosen
    BALTIMORE SUN
    December 27, 2009


    Not even a full day after police found the body of an 11-year-old girl who they say was kidnapped by a registered sex offender, Maryland activists were pointing to the Salisbury tragedy as evidence of the state's inadequate child protection laws.

    Jerry Norton, who heads Citizens for Jessica's Law in Maryland, a group that has fought for years to fortify laws against pedophiles, was angrily calling lawmakers Saturday, underscoring his position.

    "My heart goes out to the friends and family of this 11-year-old child," he said. "We need to make it clear to citizens of Maryland that we are not going to let these pedophiles molest our children with just a slap on the wrist. We're tired of these watered-down sentences - they come out and do it again."

    On Christmas Day, police found the body of Sarah Haley Foxwell, after a search by some 3,000 of her Wicomico County neighbors and others who gave up their holiday to comb the area's fields and forests.

    Police say the girl had been taken from her bedroom Tuesday night by a registered sex offender, Thomas James Leggs Jr., who has been held since Wednesday in the abduction. Leggs briefly dated the girl's aunt, who had custody of her and her two siblings.

    Though police have called the crime a murder, they haven't brought any additional charges against Leggs. He is being held without bail at the Wicomico County Detention Center.

    On Saturday, officers with the Wicomico sheriff's office, some of whom had not slept for days, continued the investigation, collecting and processing evidence.

    "We are following up on any leads that we get," said Sgt. Timothy F. Robinson. "We will continue to work through the weekend, and we'll regroup on Monday."

    Meanwhile, the family's pastor was setting up a fund to pay for Sarah's funeral and burial. People interested in donating should send checks to the Farmers Bank of Willards and note the Sarah Haley Foxwell Memorial Fund, said the Rev. William Warren of Allen Memorial Baptist Church.

    Funeral arrangements will be made once the body is returned from the coroner.

    Warren said the family wanted to thank the community for its outpouring of support. "They're grateful to the police and the law enforcement officers, the people who searched, the people who brought food and everybody who prayed," he said.

    The 30-year-old Leggs is listed as a child sex offender in the Maryland Sex Offender Registry because of a third-degree sex offense conviction in 1998.

    In Delaware, he is listed as a "high-risk" sex offender in connection with the rape of a minor in 2001.

    Norton wondered how a man who raped a minor could be free so soon and associating with children.

    "What in the hell is he doing back out on the street, and what is he doing having contact with this child?" he said. "I think the problem is with these guys going through a revolving door."

    State Sen. Nancy Jacobs, a Harford County Republican, co-sponsored Maryland's version of Jessica's Law, a bill passed in 2006 that set sentencing guidelines for child sex offenders. It's named for Jessica Lunsford, a 9-year-old Florida girl who was kidnapped, sexually abused and killed by a previously convicted child sex offender.

    At the urging of activists such as Norton, Jacobs and other lawmakers have since tried with no luck to tighten the law to prevent those offenders from getting parole. She thinks Sarah's case would "absolutely" inspire lawmakers to reinforce the law.

    "I've already had e-mails from people asking about it," Jacobs said. "It's about how far can we go, and I'm in favor of going as far as we can."

    Jacobs also believes the case exposes some weaknesses in how Maryland communicates with other states about child sex offenders. If Leggs was considered "high risk" in Delaware, she thinks he should have been in Maryland, too.

    Heading into the 2010 legislative session, Republican Del. Mike Smigiel of Cecil County, who has already pre-filed three bills that would tighten child sex offender laws, said he's been "seething" over the Salisbury case.

    He's considering everything from civil incarceration to cracking down on plea bargains to allowing wiretapping of suspected child sex offenders.

    "We have very strict laws in Maryland, but I think more has to be done," he said. "These child predators are incorrigible. We have to find ways to deal with this threat to our community."
    Copyright © 2010, The Baltimore Sun

    ---------------------
    COMMENT - Are we creating mob violence as in Frankenstein?

    "Baltimore Sun Slams Sex Offenders in Story of Girls Death"

    Who wouldn't be outraged...a human being was violated and killed by another human being. The apparent killer with a history of criminal behavior, behavior sexually malevolent. I too would like to have some understanding of how Thomas James Leggs Jr. managed to be so troubled, destructive, receive punishment (aren't 'we' supposed to 'rehabilitate' when we punish as well?) and repeat his offending with what appears to be escalating devastation. I'm confused like Mr. Norton (head of Citizen's for Jessica's Law in MD), at the brief amount of time in which Mr.Leggs' offenses took place, that he was incarcerated and released. Who wouldn't be irate and want answers to all of this? I am, I do.

    I wear the label of 'sex offender' by our justice system. It's been referred to as the 'injustice system' - a more accurate 'label'! Yet my actions for which I now journey down this road were inappropriate, unacceptable and wrong. And I feel that way, I recognize them to be that and have taken accountability. My actions and behavior for which I received the 'sex offender' label are vastly different and not at par with that of Mr. Leggs'. This is not to say I am 'better' or a more worthwhile human being than he. Nor is Senator Mark Foley a better or more worthwhile human being than myself or Mr. Legg. In an ethereal (shall I dare say spiritual) sense we are all created equal. Wrong is wrong and it does not have hierarchical levels. Sensibly in this world though we must govern ourselves and construct a society in which we can all live safely and productively. With the opportunity to bring to actualization that 'equality' which is inherent within each of us. Our 'inalienable right' I believe is how our Forefathers explained it.

    Is a sex offender, a sex offender, a sex offender? Well in a ethereal sense yes. In a societal sense, no. And here's where the understanding becomes unclear and the decision making gets murky. I urinate in the park - I'm a sex offender. I'm an 18 year old young woman having consensual sex with my boyfriend, he's 16 in three months - I'm a sex offender. My wife to whom I've been married to for 7 years with three children was 15 when we first conceived, and I was three days past my 18th birthday - I'm a sex offender. I was in college and kissed an underage girl, she had started at the University just weeks before her 18th birthday - I'm a sex offender. Let's stay away from the more morally objectionable scenarios, those deplorable morally but not a sexual threat to the unsuspecting, innocent and helpless. A class of peoples known as 'sex offenders' is rapidly growing in numbers and the smaller group who pose the danger to commit real harm are lost within the range of these masses under the blanket label. A label that is synonymous with 'childmolester', or 'rapist'.

    If things are getting worse not better consider this revelation, the laws get stricter and harsher, the fears for which these laws are developed and enacted are not quelled - the fear, the outrage (all very valid) escalate the severity with which we believe we must deal with the problem, and so on and so on, yet if moving in this direction is not bringing about the solution why do we not LOOK! This wild momentum is vividly depicted in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" when the villagers are incensed and outraged - the angry mob grows in numbers and thus does the destruction (It's called collateral damage). How better we could address a solution by ACCURATELY FOCUSING on the problem. Psychologists will note that anger is destructive, yet it can be a catalyst for change. One must deal with the problem for which the anger was derived, absent of volatile emotion.

    Who of the politicians and interest group activists will lead us in to effective solutions? Solutions that remedy the problem? The problem fails to be accurately defined until we observe and include the damage of this wild momentum. I want an individual with the capacity to destroy himself/herself and other human beings to be handled and dealt with effectively and productively. Determining how to achieve this requires integrity and wisdom, that we should want to offer ourselves first as healthy members of this society to ensure that we are creating a healthy society. In order to move toward such, each of us has to honestly look at ourselves, to consistently evaluate our decisions and choices, the effect and the impact we have and are making through them.

     

    Nebraska Doubles S.O.s to Comply w. AWA
    By posted by Shelly <or4balancedlaws@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 04.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00192]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0192 and be sent to or4balancedlaws@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    ALL RSOL Nebraska participants urged to write letters to the editors all over Nebraska to urge this be halted in the courts! Write brief letters showing the damage done to offenders´ attempt to re-enter society, and to their families!

    Courts to hear sex offender registry cases
    Story Discussion By LORI PILGER
    Lincoln NEBRASKA, Journal Star
    Jan. 3, 2010



    The number of registered sex offenders who live in Nebraska was set to double this weekend.

    Not literally, of course.

    But, by virtue of a law passed by the Nebraska Legislature in May, the public Sex Offender Registry was to add some 1,600 people once labeled at low or moderate risk to reoffend.

    Just hours before the law was to go into effect, a Sarpy County District judge halted its enactment, saying that it warrants additional attention before the names are made public online. A hearing has been set for Jan. 11.

    Another hearing is tentatively scheduled Thursday in Lancaster County District Court regarding a similar injunction request, according to attorney James Beckman, who filed the case here on behalf of two convicted sex offenders.

    Previously, only the names of people classified as Level 3 offenders and considered at high risk to reoffend were made public.

    Schools, day care operators, hospitals, church and youth groups were notified of Level 2 offenders. Level 1's were accessible only to law enforcement.

    If the injunction is lifted and the law is enacted, the Level 1, 2 and 3 classifications will go away, replaced by a system based solely on the charge on which an offender was convicted.

    "I think the changes are fairly subtle on our side," Lincoln Police Chief Tom Casady said. "They're big for the public."

    He said he has a couple of Level 1 or 2 sex offenders living in his own neighborhood.

    He knew because he's in law enforcement. The rest of the neighborhood could soon know, too.

    "I think that's probably a good thing," Casady said.

    But looking at the registry doesn't give someone context to tell if someone on it is "really creepy or not," he said, acknowledging that not all sex offenses are alike.

    If the point of the registry has been to make people aware of sex offenders in their area, it seems equally valid that the general public may now know what day care operators, schools and cops knew before, Casady said.

    There still would be classifications, he said, they would just be different.

    If the law is upheld, classification will be based on the length of time for which offenders have to register - 15 years, 25 years or life. And that is based on whether the conviction that put them on the list was a misdemeanor, felony or aggravated felony.

    On the new scale, aggravated cases that are subject to lifetime registration are on the top end. By law, they involve either forced sexual contact or penetration with someone 13 or older, or any sexual contact with a victim younger than 13 or mentally or physically incapable of resisting.

    In Lincoln, Casady said, instead of focusing on Level 3 offenders, police will focus on those on the registry for life.

    Some of them will be new names to the public because they previously were labeled Level 1 or Level 2 offenders.

    "Just because they were a Level 1 risk doesn't mean their crime wasn't serious," said Sgt. Glenn Elwell of the Nebraska State Patrol.

    He said the classification formerly reflected how an offender scored on an actuarial table. Appeals of the initial result were allowed.

    Elwell said the new system tries to look at the registry more from a public safety point of view rather than trying to dig into an offender's past to try to predict if he or she will reoffend, which he said is pretty much impossible to do.

    "The Sex Offender Registry itself is not the end all be all that is going to keep someone from offending," Elwell said.

    But sex offenders who are subject to more scrutiny are less likely to reoffend, according to studies, he said.

    Information is power, Elwell said.

    "We're trying to provide that," he said, so people can keep themselves and their families safe.

    At the end of October, his office sent letters to the roughly 3,050 registered sex offenders in Nebraska to notify them of the changes and what they need to do to comply.

    Elwell's office also trained jail and prison staff, who register inmates, and county sheriffs' offices, who soon may have offenders showing up in person to give information they used to provide by mail.

    Offenders will be required to check in with sheriffs' offices more often, too, some at least four times a year.

    Lancaster County Sheriff Terry Wagner said it's difficult to say how much staff time will go into their end of the new requirements, but each of the 575 people on the registry here will be required to visit his office.

    "It's one of those deals where we're required to do quite a bit more work and nobody's providing additional funding to do that," he said.

    Nebraska lawmakers changed the law to comply with the 2006 federal Adam Walsh Act that said if states don't publicly register all people convicted of sexual offenses and make other adjustments, they could lose out on federal grant dollars for local law enforcement.

    At least 30 states have passed laws in an effort to comply, and many others are studying it, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

    In Nebraska, lawmakers expanded the list of charges subject to the registry and the information offenders must provide to include all addresses where they live or frequent, all employment locations, palm prints and a DNA sample, among other things.

    It should help investigators if someone on the list reoffends, Wagner said.

    "There's no doubt about that," he said.

    But Wagner said it's a balancing act. There's a fine line between getting the information they need to keep track of offenders and to make sure they don't reoffend and requiring so much information there's no way for them to comply.

    "You want folks to be able to comply with the act if they're inclined to do so," he said. "If they're not inclined to do so, we're going to search them out and arrest them."

    Wagner sounded sympathetic when he spoke of offenders who, under normal circumstances, would have been off the list soon but now will be on longer, and offenders worried they could their jobs or face other scrutiny when someone sees their name on the list.

    "I understand they're upset," he said.

    And, Wagner said, he understands why more than 30 people signed onto a federal lawsuit over the changes.

    They make some interesting arguments, he said.

    But the whole point of the public notification - of Level 3's before and, if the injunction is lifted, everyone convicted of sex offenses - Wagner said, "is so the public is aware of those folks in their neighborhoods or their community that they need to be aware of."

    Casady said it may be discomforting to think about, but criminals, including everyone from murderers to sex offenders, have been around for years. It just was easier to be blissfully unaware, he said.

    Now, every once in a while, he gets calls from people up in arms about convicted sex offenders living in their neighborhoods.

    They ask what they can do about it. His answer: Nothing.

    In the end, he said, people can be cautious.

    "Registered sex offenders have already done their time," he said. "Whether you like it or not, they have a right to go about their business."

    Reach Lori Pilger at 473-7237 or lpilger@journalstar.com.

     

    Sex Offender Capitol of Ohio?
    By Dolly and James <ohiorsol@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 03.01.2010
    Link to this news item: [00191]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item no. 0191, SEX OFFENDER CAPITOL OF OHIO? and send to Dolly & James, the OHIO RSOL contacts, ohiorsol@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    When will this pandering to sex offender panic ever stop? When people like Dolly and James are able to organize more people in Ohio to stop it! Please help. We urge everyone to write a letter to the Mansfield Ohio newspaper
    URL
    http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/article/20100103/NEWS01/100102008/1002/rss01
    --------------------------------------

    Sex offender capitol? No ... but close
    Richland Co. numbers ranks 3rd, but growing
    By ERIK SHILLING • News Journal • January 3, 2010

    MANSFIELD, Ohio — The number of sex offenders in Richland County has grown exponentially since 2004, increasing from about 250 to 398 even as total population in the area has decreased.

    The spike in numbers, officials say, is due in part to the Adam Walsh Act enacted two years ago, requiring even misdemeanor sex offenders to register. But there’s also a general increase in offenders here.

    “We’ve never had more than we had now,” said Betty Detillion, who tracks offenders at the Richland County sheriff’s department. “It doesn’t stop. That’s the thing.” Because of the holiday week, officials from the Ohio Attorney General’s office were unavailable to comment.

    About 60 of the county’s 398 sex offenders are residents of the local Volunteers of America, a 71-bed halfway house that inmates statewide are assigned to coming out of prison. Even without those 60, however, Richland County still would rank among the state’s highest in per-capita registered sex offenders, with almost 32 per 10,000 residents, the state reports. Statewide, the average rate was half that — at just over 16 offenders per 10,000.


    Joining Richland at the top were two rural northwestern Ohio counties, Paulding and Defiance — No. 1 and 2, respectively, with about 33 offenders per 10,000 residents. The state’s smallest populations of sex offenders per capita live in suburban Cleveland and Columbus: Geauga County, in northeastern Ohio, had a fifth of the numbers now residing in Richland and other top counties. In Delaware and Madison counties, outside of Columbus, the numbers were similar, at between five and six offenders per 10,000 residents each. In north central Ohio, Wayne, Ashland, Crawford, Huron and Knox counties remained close to the state average, while Morrow County’s number was closer to Richland’s.

    Ohio sex offenders have had to register in their residing counties since the enactment in 1997 of Megan’s Law, so-called because of a notorious New Jersey case involving the rape and murder of a 7-year-old girl in the early 1990s by a repeat, violent sex offender.
    Sex offender registry requirements were made more strict by the Adam Walsh Act, a federal law in Jan. 1, 2008, that required a three-tier system for sex offenders.


    Those convicted of the worst crimes must register with the state every 90 days for life. It is a felony to fail to register.


    “When they see what has to be done and what they have to do, you’d think the numbers would go down,” Detillion said. “But it hasn’t slowed down.”
    eshilling@gannett.com
    419-521-7205
     

    NEBRASKA Cases Challenge New SO Law
    By posted by eAdvocate <eAdvocate@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 29.12.2009
    Link to this news item: [00190]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00190 and send to eAdvocate@yahoo.com with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    -----------------------
    Monday, December 28, 2009
    Neb. Attorneys Ask to Combine Sex Offender Cases

    OMAHA, Neb. (AP) - Attorneys for the state have asked a federal judge to consolidate two cases challenging the constitutionality of Nebraska's new sex offender registry law.

    The request involves a federal lawsuit filed Dec. 16 and another filed in Douglas County District Court on Thursday. The latter case was moved to federal court on Monday. Omaha attorney Stu Dornan represents plaintiffs in both cases.

    Both lawsuits seek to stop Nebraska's revised sex offender registry law from taking effect Jan. 1. Among other things, the new law will make public information about all sex offenders, not just those considered high-risk.

    A judge is expected to rule in the first case this week. ..Source.. KCAU-TV
     

    MAINE S.Ct. Strikes Down S.O. Retroactivity
    By posted by Jane Cantral & others <ladyfurebear@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 23.12.2009
    Link to this news item: [00189]
     
    Refer in Comments to news item no 00189, Maine Strikes Down S.O. Retroactivity, and send to ladyfurebear@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    This is a great victory in Maine! Let´s hope it spreads nationwide.
    Alex
    ------------------------------------------
    Court wants sex offender law revised
    Retroactivity at issue

    By Clarke Canfield
    The Associated Press

    BANGOR DAILY NEWS
    Bangor Maine
    Dec. 23, 2009

    PORTLAND, Maine — Maine’s highest court on Tuesday upheld a lower court ruling that a 1999 law requiring certain sex offenders to be placed on a sex offender registry for life cannot be applied retroactively.

    In its ruling, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court gave the Legislature until March 31 to revise the law.

    The case was brought by Eric Letalien, a Dixfield man who was 19 when he was convicted of rape in 1996 for having sex with a 13-year-old girl. At the time, he was required to register as a sex offender for 15 years, but was also allowed to seek a waiver from the registry after five years.

    Under changes to the law in 1999, he was required to register as a sex offender every 90 days for the rest of his life. The updated law also took away his right to ask for a waiver.

    In its ruling, the court said it was unconstitutional to apply those changes retroactively.

    David Sanders, Letalien’s attorney, said the ruling was a victory for his client. He contends his client and others among the 3,000 people on the registry are not at risk of repeating their sex offenses.

    “If this was truly administrative, wanting to protect society from individuals, then you have to find that the individual in question who’s going to be ostracized, who’s going to be humiliated, who’s going to be shamed, is in fact a risk to society. A mere conviction doesn’t prove that,” he said.

    Attorney General Janet Mills said the justices did away with the more punitive aspects of law as they are applied retroactively while affirming the state’s interest in having an Internet sex offender registry.

    It’s now up to the Legislature to make the changes the court is seeking, she said.

    “We’re comfortable the court has given us guidance,” she said.

    Sanders said his client did his time and had counseling. He’s now 35, is married, and has a daughter and stepchildren.

    “He just wants to get on with his life and that ought to be allowed,” Sanders said.

    The sex offender registry has gone through a number of changes since it was created in 1992.

    It attracted national attention in 2006 when a 20-year-old Canadian man killed two sex offenders in Maine after randomly getting their names from the state’s online registry.

    One of the murdered men, Joseph L. Gray, 57, of Milo was on the registry as the result of a 1991 conviction in Massachusetts. As a result of the court’s decision Tuesday, Gray’s name most likely would be removed had he not been killed.

    Last year, lawmakers allowed some registered sex offenders to be removed from the registry, upon their request, provided they complete their sentences, commit no additional crimes and meet other standards. In November, the state announced that 100 names of people convicted of offenses that happened between 1982 and 1992 had been removed from the list.

    Associated Press writer David Sharp and Bangor Daily News writer Judy Harrison contributed to this report.
     

    Psychiatry´s Civil War Over DSM-V
    By posted by alex marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 12.12.2009
    Link to this news item: [00188]
     
    Refer in comments to news Item No. 00188, ¨Psychiatry´s Civil War¨and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm. See the url for the full article in the New Scientist.
    ----------------------------

    URL:
    http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427382.400-times-up-for-psychiatrys-bible.html

    EDITORIAL from Dr. Karen Fisher´s blog
    Dec. 11, 2009

    Time's up for psychiatry's bible

    Since this article was first posted, the American Psychiatric Association
    has announced that the publication of DSM-V will be delayed until May 2013.
    "Extending the timeline will allow more time for public review, field trials
    and revisions," says APA president Alan Schatzberg.

    BOOKS are by and large riding out the online revolution that is devastating
    the sales of many newspapers, magazines and other printed works. But this
    week we report on a volume that has outlived its usefulness. The American
    Psychiatric Association (APA) is in the midst of rewriting the mammoth tome
    called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM,
    which provides checklists of symptoms that psychiatrists and other doctors
    use to diagnose what form of mental illness a patient has - and fights are
    breaking out all over.

    The final wording of the new manual will have worldwide significance. DSM is
    considered the bible of psychiatry, and if the APA broadens the diagnostic
    criteria for conditions such as schizophrenia and depression, millions more
    people could be placed on powerful drugs, some of which have serious side
    effects. Similarly, newly defined mental illnesses that deem certain
    individuals a danger to society could be used to justify locking these
    people up for life.

    Given such high stakes, we should all be worried by the controversy (see
    "Psychiatrists at war over broadening mental illness definition").
    Proponents of some of the changes are being accused of running ahead of the
    science, and there are warnings that the APA is risking "disastrous
    unintended consequences" if it goes ahead with plans to publish DSM-V, as
    the new manual will be known, in 2012.

    It doesn't have to be this way. With the advent of the internet, there is no
    longer any compelling need to rewrite the diagnostic criteria for the whole
    of psychiatry in one go. Yes, diagnoses should be revised as new scientific
    findings come in. But for this, specialists can be assembled when necessary
    to address specific areas that have become outmoded. Their suggestions can
    be posted on the web for comment. More research can be commissioned, if
    necessary. And when consensus is reached, new diagnostic criteria can be
    posted online.

    Similarly, standing panels could periodically review issues that cut across
    the whole of psychiatry - such as the inevitable shift away from checklists
    of symptoms towards a system based on measurements of the underlying
    biological and psychological determinants of mental health.

    The APA's leaders suggest that DSM-V will become a "living document" that
    will be amended as necessary. It's a shame they didn't simply move the
    current DSM into this mode. That would have hurt the APA's coffers, as a
    book that becomes a required reference is a big earner; DSM sales since 2000
    exceed $40 million. But it's hard to see who else stands to gain from the
    current exercise - and if the critics' dire predictions come to pass,
    patients will be the biggest losers.

    --Related article: Psychiatry's civil war online at:
    http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427381.300-psychiatrys-civil-war.htm
    l
     

    Police Who Troll Internet to Entrap!
    By Mary <rsolwyoming@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 09.12.2009
    Link to this news item: [00187]
     
    Please refer in comments to News Item No. 00187, Police Who Troll Internet to Entrap, and send to Mary, rsolwyoming@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    ------------------
    POLICE WHO TROLL THE INTERNET TO ENTRAP
    VANITY FAIR published this excellent article in its Dec. 2009 edition, by Mark Bowden. It exposes the work of the police troller, Michelle Deery, who has entraped 100 people in her work. Once we thought entrapment was unconstitutional under US law. Now it´s regular police work - in many areas, but most of all against suspected sex offenders. This article shows how this can go terribly wrong, when an innnocent man who simply liked to fantasize about various types of taboo sex, but never acted on it, was entrapped, prosecuted and went to prison.

    Because of its length, we cannot print it in full. We urge you to go to Vanity Fair and read it!

    The URL is

    http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/12/sexual-predators-200912

    Alex Marbury
     

    Ohio Leads Nation in SO Laws? Hell No!
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 07.12.2009
    Link to this news item: [00186]
     
    Refer in comments to OHIO LEADS NATION?, News Item No. 0186, and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm, and also to the RSOL Ohio contact people, James and Dolly Madison,
    THE URL for this, and all comments, is
    http://www.news-herald.com/articles/2009/12/06/opinion/nh1781496.txt#story_comments
    -----------------------------------------
    WE URGE ALL RSOL PARTICIPANTS TO SEND COMMENTS ABOUT THIS OUTRAGEOUS EDITORIAL - Essentially, RSOL should say, ¨Hell, No! Compliance with AWA is NOT progress. Stop this false security.¨
    (See also excellent comment at the bottom of the editorial)
    -------------------------------------------
    OHIO AT FOREFRONT OF S.O. LAWS
    editorial, Northern Ohio (Cleveland)
    News Herald
    Dec. 6, 2009
    Earlier this year, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Ohio had become the first state in the nation to reach substantial implementation of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), Title I of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006.

    Last week, it was reported that Ohio remains the only state in the country to reach that level of implementation — nearly three years after the law was passed.
    ------------------------
    COMMENT (one of several good ones -

    While the other 49 states debate whether to adopt the mandates or pay the penalty for ignoring the law — states that don't adopt the mandates by July 2010 risk losing millions of dollars in federal grants — Ohio deserves recognition for stepping up its monitoring of sexual offenders.

    We applaud the Buckeye State and its leaders for taking the necessary steps to protect residents.

    The federal law is designed to keep closer tabs on sex offenders, including the estimated 100,000 who are not living where they're supposed to be.

    With every state on board, the law would create a national sex offender registry and toughen penalties for those who fail to register.

    Ohio has such a database in place: the Electronic Sex Offender Registration and Notification database, or eSORN.

    Lake County alone has 209 registered sex offenders, while Geauga County has 69, according to a recent News-Herald report that searched eSORN.

    The database, which is maintained by the Ohio Attorney General and the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, has proven to be one of the state's most vital tools for tracking sexual offenders.

    The eSORN system is linked to all 88 of Ohio's sheriff's offices and all 32 correctional facility records offices operated by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

    Its purpose is to provide one location for all Ohio law enforcement officials to freely share information on registered sex offenders.

    Some local officials believe the number of sexual offenders registered in eSORN will only increase in the years to come.

    Thus, the fact that Ohio is already at the forefront of monitoring sexual offenders means it's well positioned to stay on top of such criminal activity moving forward.

    --------------------------
    EXCELLENT COMMENT, sent to the News Herald by ¨Truth About Sex Crimes¨

    " An unfortunate editorial position.
    Generally across the USA upwards of 92-94 percent of new sex crimes are committed by first offenders not on the registry and of those persons a similar percentage are committed by persons close to the victim; family members ( parent, sibling, uncle, aunt, cousin, step parent), teachers, coaches, clergy, day care providers, medical providers, mentors, scout leaders, family friends, etc.; persons well known to the child not strangers and not registered sex offenders. A little research and you will find these numbers being generated by state agencies and law enforcement not advocates of sex offenders. The January 2006 Ohio study conducted by Ohio State Office of Criminal Justice Services (www.ocjs.ohio.gov ) is but one example. What motive would a state agency dealing with criminal justice issues have in presenting false numbers which support this reality about sex offenses? Ohio is typical rather than the exception. Take the time to read the extensive list of unintended consequences keeping in mind even more legislation has be written across the USA by Federal, State, and municipal governments that exacerbates and adds to the unintended consequences that are suspected to having made everyone less safe, especially minors.

    The general public is being lulled into thinking the most danger is from some registered sex offender hiding behind a bush when in fact the danger is from Dad, Uncle, Doctor, Coach, Reverend, Teacher, Brother, etc. Upwards of 40% of registrable sex offenses are committed by Juveniles ... most who are first time offenders in the system and who do NOT appear on the public registries. These are concerns clearly stated by state and Federal law enforcement authorities. Legislators and elected law enforcement officials ( sheriffs and judges as well ), the media generally, political and financial stakeholders; however, continue to ignore these facts for their personal benefit while falsely claiming enhanced public safety.

    The public is allowing itself to be duped emotionally, intellectually, and financially. Wake up to the real threat and don't be taken in by the political fear hype and rhetoric about the registry. Use some critical thinking and the brains you were given and question what you are being fed by the media and other stakeholders. Sex offenders have become the new N word, big business in the USA, and a political tool.. Little if any money is spent on prevention of 92-94% new crimes committed by first time offenders; persons close to victims. Name all the programs that go toward prevention and intervention prior to a sex crime by first time offenders. California estimates it will cost an additional $38 million dollars to implement the Adam Walsh Act of 2006 just in the State of California, but will it spend a proportional additional amount for prevention and intervention in the amount of $437 million per year? California is typical and does not expend monies proportional to meaningful prevention and intervention compared to existing sex offender registry budgets.

    What state and Federal programs currently spend proportional monies and resources to the cost of the registries to prevent 92-94 out of 100 new sex crimes against minors? How does the registry protect ANY minor from someone NOT on the registry because it is a first or juvenile offense? Registries are a costly fraud on 92-94 out of 100 minors who end up victims.

    This is an issue across the United States that effects everyone. It is unfortunate that some commentators' closed minds about the issue do not hear the valid criticism of the system in general and do not want to hear the chimes of reality about who actually commits the vast majority of these transgressions. What media expends 92 to 94 times the amount of time or print proportionally on constructive prevention and intervention as they do on reporting sensational crimes that are by comparison rare?

    Sex offenses are a public health problem because the vast majority of them are committed by family members and persons close to the minor victims. Until this is recognized and acknowledged by the general public they will continue at an alarming rate. Right or wrong many families do not want to subject the victim, offending family member, or social group to trial, ridicule and social stigma. There is no system in place for potential offenders to seek treatment. The public continues to NOT want to recognize the societal problem as a public health problem as a starting place. As long as punishment is the only theme the number of offenses proportionate to the general population will not change.


    You, the readers, become part of the problem when you do not educate yourself and personally challenge the facts and let the status quo rule. The six to eight crimes that are committed by registered sex offenders should not be ignored, but it is MORE of a crime to ignore the other 92 - 94 out of 100 offenses not committed by registered sex offenders when you allow resources to be expended that do nothing to prevent the vast majority those crimes. Much of the sex offender hysteria is being driven by the Federal government, not just local governments. I challenge readers who make statements to the contrary to come up with facts not fiction and hysteria. Don't be a victim of distorted thinking on this issue, something we all can fall victim to given the emotional hype. Unfilter your thinking and do objective research. Parents do nothing to protect their children when they are blind to abuse in their own families and close associates, the 92-94 out of 100 offenders.

    Readers and the editorial staff should take a look at the State Of Ohio's own report in 2006 before coming to such a positive conclusion. What ever happened to truthful and objective journalism?

     

    DOES MONEY HAVE TO DO WITH IT? YES!
    By patricia <pwpw63@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 06.12.2009
    Link to this news item: [00185]
     
    Refer in comments to News item no. 00185, Does Money Have to Do With It?, and send to pwpw63@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    Patricia is so right! This is the INDUSTRY of sex offender therapy et al - and it is all about the money!
    --------------------------------------------

    From the blog, FEEDBLITZ - URL feedblitz@mail.feedblitz.com
    "In the news by Karen Franklin PhD"

    Record-breaking fee for competency report?

    Forensic psychologists: If someone ever complains about your bill, you might want to share this little factoid:

    A psychiatrist's competency report in the Brian David Mitchell case (Elizabeth Smart kidnapping in Utah) cost a whopping half million dollars.

    And that was just for the report. It doesn't include the cost of expert testimony at Mitchell's competency hearing, currently in progress. And, believe it or not, that was the discounted rate.

    Granted, Michael Welner's report was 206 pages long, and took 1,000 hours to produce. That makes the hourly fee $500, not inordinately high for a prominent forensic psychiatrist. But 1,000 hours is an awful lot of time to devote to any one case.


    In testimony today, the prosecution's expert testified that in addition to evaluating Mitchell, he also did research on polygamy, the Mormon church, and related issues of revelation, prophets and Joseph Smith.

    His bottom-line conclusion: Mitchell was motivated more by lust than religion or psychosis.

    If anyone knows of a higher fee for a forensic report, or even a fee that comes close to this one, please let me know and I'll post your response.

     

    THE SMITH SMEARS
    By posted by Avendora <cfcwashington@hotmail.com>
    Posted on 01.12.2009
    Link to this news item: [00184]
     
    Refer in comments to THE SMITH SMEARS, News Item No. 0184, and send to cfcwashington@hotmail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    ---------------------------------------
    RSOL's VERY OWN MARY SUE MOLNAR (marysueintx@yahoo.com) has made this great comment about this article and about the brave Rep. Smith:

    So sorry that Mr. Cason feels he needs to use political ignorance in his bid to slam Todd Smith. Smith is a truly honest person and I will send everyone I know to the polls to vote for him. Go Todd Smith!! You are one of the few legislators with gutts and a determination to do the right thing. Mary Sue
    --------------------------------------

    THE SMITH SMEARS
    Austin Chronicle Online Blog
    by Richard Whittaker
    Dec. 1, 2009

    There's no more thankless task in the state legislature than being the lawmaker to grasp a thorny issue, and House Elections Committee Chair Todd Smith, R-Euless, has become that guy.

    Unusually for a committee head, Smith has drawn a primary opponent: Former Bedford City Council member Jeff Cason. Painting the primary as "a law and order conservative vs. a personal injury trial lawyer," Cason is going after him for authoring House Bill 3148, which he portrays in his press release as a get-out-of-jail-free bill for sexual predators.
    In fact, the bill did nothing to restrict prosecution or punishment. Instead, it was intended to show a little clemency on painting someone for life with the "sexual offender" tag in very, very specific circumstances. In cases of a sexual relationship between a minor aged at least 14 and a defendant no more than four years older than them, the defendant could ask the judge not to require them to register as a sex offender if, and only if, there was no coercion involved.

    Smith's work on this thorny issue was so well received and commended by his legislative peers that it passed the Senate unanimously and the House 129-14 (after statements of vote), with even hard-core law'n'order GOPers like Jerry Madden and Dan Gattis making empassioned speeches in its support.

    It only failed because Gov. Rick Perry vetoed it. Guess what? His veto statement contained a whopping great big untruth. He claimed that the exemption could be applied for "regardless of the age of the victim." Not true, since the enrolled version clearly states that the rule would only apply if "the victim or intended victim was at least 14 years of age."

    At the time of passage, Smith said to everyone that voted for his bill, Republican or Democrat, "if your opponent comes and says that you were soft on sexual predators, I make a personal pledge to come to your district and call that person a liar." Let's see if anyone out of the 160 other lawmakers who approved this bill has the guts and moral fiber to return the favor.

     

    FALSE CONVICTION: Finally Walks with No Chains!
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 01.12.2009
    Link to this news item: [00183]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 00183 and be sent to alexm60@fastmail.fm - I'll send them along to the rsol participant who sent it in.
    --------------------------------------------
    BRIAN SKOLOFF
    Associated Press


    BAKERSFIELD, Calif. - A man whose child molestation conviction was overturned after he served 20 years in prison was released from custody Tuesday, his 61st birthday.
    "Oh my. I don't know. This is wonderful. It's just amazing," John Stoll said after taking a bow and thanking his lawyers. His first wish was for a steak dinner, followed by birthday cake.
    "For 20 years, I've had to go where others wanted me to go," he said.
    Stoll walked free hours after Kern County prosecutors told Judge Lee P. Felice they would not seek to retry him and the judge dismissed the 17 counts of child molestation he had been convicted of in 1985.
    "He's walking with no chains," marveled Stoll's attorney, Linda Starr, legal director of the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University. "All those cases that you slog through, this makes you want to go back and do it all over again."
    Stoll's decades-old conviction was reversed Friday in Kern County Superior Court after a nearly five-month hearing. Attorneys for two Innocence Project chapters in California had worked for his freedom, claiming authorities coerced false testimony from the victims, who were 6 to 8 years old at the time.
    Stoll was convicted along with two other men and a woman of assaulting six children as part of a crime ring that allegedly included sodomy, group sex and pornographic photography.
    Prosecutors presented no physical evidence at the original trial. None of the children were ever examined by doctors, even though some of the allegations included forcible sodomy. The case rested on testimony alone.
    Four of Stoll's accusers, now adults, testified in January they were manipulated by overzealous investigators until they fabricated the stories. A fifth witness testified he has no memories from that part of his childhood.
    The sixth alleged victim, Stoll's son, Jed, still insists his father molested him.
    Prosecutors said they still believe Stoll was fairly convicted, but acknowledged they no longer have enough evidence to support a new trial.

    The judge sided with defense attorneys, finding investigators overstepped their boundaries with manipulative questioning of the children that led to lies.
    All along, Stoll claimed he was swept up in a wave of hysteria in the 1980s that led to the trials of hundreds of people. Many later had their convictions overturned for reasons including prosecutorial misconduct and coercive interview techniques.
    In Bakersfield, 46 people were arrested in eight alleged molestation rings. Thirty were convicted, eight had their charges dropped and eight struck plea deals that kept them out of prison.
    Twenty-two of those convictions were later reversed for reasons including legal technicalities, prosecutorial misconduct or faulty jury instructions. The rest served out their sentences. One died in prison.
    Stoll, the last of his co-defendants in prison, said he had a lot to catch up on after 20 years. He made a call on a cell phone and said he wanted to go shopping. "I have a pretty good idea what's out there - I just haven't touched any of it yet," he said.
    Stoll said the best part of the whole process is that he will no longer be labeled a child molester.
    "That name does not go with my name any more," he said. "And that's what it's really all about."
     

    Right to Remain Naked at Home?
    By posted by Joe <owensjv@gmail.com>
    Posted on 28.11.2009
    Link to this news item: [00182]
     
    Refer in comments to this opinion piece to News Item 00182 and send to owensjv@gmail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    ----------------
    The Right to Remain Naked?

    Beat the Devil

    By Alexander Cockburn
    THE NATION
    Nov. 16, 2009

    Just how funny was that story of the man in Fairfax County, Virginia, who got up early on the morning of October 19 and walked naked into his own kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee? The next significant thing that happened to 29-year-old Eric Williamson was the local cops arriving to charge him with indecent exposure. It turns out that while he was brewing the coffee, a mother who was taking her 7-year-old son along a path beside Williamson's house espied the naked Williamson and called the local precinct, or more likely her husband, who happens to be a cop.

    "Yes, I wasn't wearing any clothes," Williamson said later, "but I was alone, in my own home and just got out of bed. It was dark and I had no idea anyone was outside looking in at me."

    The story ended up on TV, starting with Fox, and in the opening rounds the newscasters and network blogs had merciless sport with the Fairfax police for their absurd behavior. Hasn't a man the right to walk around his own home (or, in this case, rented accommodations) dressed according to his fancy? Answer, obvious to anyone familiar with relevant case law: absolutely not.

    Peeved by public ridicule, the Fairfax cops turned up the heat. The cop's wife started to maintain that first she saw Williamson by a glass kitchen door, then through the kitchen window. Mary Ann Jennings, a Fairfax County Police spokeswoman, stirred the pot of innuendo: "We've heard there may have been other people who had a similar incident." The cops are asking anyone who may have seen an unclothed Williamson through his windows to come forward, even if it was at a different time. They've also been papering the neighborhood with fliers, asking for reports on any other questionable activities by anyone resembling Williamson--a white guy who's a commercial diver and who has a 5-year-old daughter, not living with him.

    I'd say that if the cops keep it up, and some prosecutor scents opportunity, Williamson will be pretty lucky if they don't throw some cobbled-up indictment at him. Toss in a jailhouse snitch making his own plea deal, a faked police lineup, maybe an artist's impression of the Fairfax Flasher, and Williamson could end up losing his visitation rights and, worse comes to worst, getting ten years plus being posted for life on some sex-offender site. You think we're living in the twenty-first century, in the clinical fantasy world of CSI? Wrong. So far as forensic evidence is concerned, we remain planted in the seventeenth century with trial by ordeal, such as when they killed women as witches if they floated when thrown into a pond.

    Let's head north from Fairfax County to Massachusetts, home of the witch trials. How about if you're white in Boston (wise decision), weigh yourself in your own bedroom with no clothes on and... But let my Boston friend pick up the story, because it happened to him.

    "It was the early '90s. Early on Xmas eve two burly cops pushed into our house and invaded our bedroom--no warrant. They only backed off after they realized that the scale in our bedroom where I weighed myself was in front of a window. To see me there the born-agains who moved in next door (actually on the far side of a vacant lot separating us) had to keep a tight watch since it does not take long to weigh oneself.

    "My girlfriend was dressing in the bedroom and my mom and stepdaughter were visiting. By the time the cops understood that I had been weighing myself every morning, the paddy wagon was there ready to take me away.

    "I would have sued them but I was running for Congress at the time. The cops liked my opponent, a right-wing pro-lifer, and I have always thought that had something to do with their moral diligence that day. One of the cops, the chief, later resigned in a corruption scandal."

    Now this was in the early 1990s, please note. This was when the wave of hysteria over satanic abuse of children was in full spate, with people being imprisoned for life on just the sort of "evidence" the cops are now trying to marshal against Williamson. Massachusetts actually saw the first trial of a daycare teacher charged with satanic abuse. Bernard Baran was released after nearly twenty-two years and exonerated three years after that, on June 9 of this year. As attorney Mike Snedeker, who wrote with Debbie Nathan the 1995 book Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, recently reminded us on the CounterPunch website, there are victims of that hysteria, almost certainly innocent, still rotting in prison: Fran and Danny Keller in Texas, James Toward and Francisco Fuster in Florida almost a generation later.

    Among the many brilliant observations of Morse Peckham in his 1969 book Art and Pornography: An Experiment in Explanation (written under the auspices of Alfred Kinsey's Institute for Sex Research) was that the concern with sexual behavior has nothing to do with sex but everything to do with policing. American sexual prudery is part of political and social policing within the nominally legal context of supposed individual freedom. People learn to be prudish about sex before they understand anything else in society, and this prudery is transferred to other areas later that are even more important for social control and stability. The control of sex and pornography is a major part of promulgating a puritanical political culture without ever imposing an overt censorship regime. Sexual repression, often through the allegation of "deviant" fantasy crimes, is the designated stand-in for violations of the social order that are hard to crush in a courtroom. The function of many sexual crimes is to advertise threats to the established order on the rationale of supposed personal deviance and not on any actual material challenge.

     

    "A Cautionary Tale About Teens"
    By posted by Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 28.11.2009
    Link to this news item: [00181]
     
    Refer in comments to News No. 00181, and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm. See also Tale No. 00131.
    --------------
    Let's separate the misguided from monsters
    column, Feb. 24, 2005
    Chicago Tribune (Chicago, Illinois)

    A concerned mother from Lake Zurich recently contacted me with a cautionary tale about teenagers, child pornography and the Internet.
    In late 2002, she said, her son, then 15, went online with his new laptop computer and began searching for and downloading pictures of naked girls his own age.

    Understandable, perhaps, but not good. Just how not good he learned after the laptop began malfunctioning and he sent it off for repairs.
    Computer technicians found the images--law enforcement allows and in some places even encourages them to look for forbidden material and report it to authorities; the courts have admitted their findings into evidence--and police came to the family home to arrest him for soliciting and possessing child pornography.

    The boy pleaded guilty and now must register as a child sex offender until he's 21.

    There were some complicating wrinkles to this tale, the general outlines of which were confirmed by the family's attorney but could not be otherwise verified because the boy was charged as a juvenile. The main wrinkle is that in the course of downloading batches of pictures of teenage girls, the boy also mistakenly downloaded some "very, very bad" images of younger children, according to his mother. The point here is not to excuse this kid, but to warn other kids and their parents: Trolling the Web for erotica can land you in real and long-lasting trouble.

    The Illinois attorney general's office confirmed that tough state laws on child pornography do not make any exceptions when the offender is the same age as or even younger than the minors depicted, and they do not distinguish between forbidden images of 17-year-olds and forbidden images of 5-year-olds.

    In other words, a teen may see himself as just a curious and hormone-addled adolescent, but the law sees him as a dangerous pervert.
    The above story was one of many I received in response to last week's column (posted below) about a married 29-year-old Oak Park man whose wife and three kids are suffering because when he was 18 he had a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl, and the law still considers him a child sex offender.

    I heard a somewhat similar tale from Kristin Perk of Crestwood, who said she was just shy of her 15th birthday in 1998 when she began a sexual relationship with her adult male guitar teacher. "I pretty much came on to him," she said. "Then it turned into a real romance."

    A real illegal romance, of course. Her parents found out and called police, who arrested the teacher, then 35. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor sex-abuse charges and began a 10-year period in which he has had to register as a child sex offender and stay away from places where children congregate. The teen's parents sent her to school in California, but she and the teacher kept in touch.
    "Older people and younger people do fall in love," said the man, recalling that Elvis Presley's infatuation with his wife Priscilla began when she was 14 and that Jerry Lee Lewis' third wife was only 13.

    The girl returned here when she turned 18, and, in March of 2003, she and the man, Mark Perk, were married by the same Cook County circuit judge who had handled his criminal case.

    The Perks now have a toddler. They lived in the city until last fall, when police found him living within 500 feet of an elementary school and ordered him to move. Perk found extra legal trouble--and ended up in an unflattering WLS-Ch. 7 investigative story--when he protested his ongoing status as a child sex offender by wearing a disguise for a photograph that police posted to an Internet database.
    He said he has lost five jobs and been repeatedly threatened by vigilantes who learn he\'s a child sex offender and lump him in with the molesters who haunt playgrounds.

    To say that he doesn't belong there is not to say that he was right to have had sex with a girl who was so young, no matter who came on to whom. It's to say that these stories show that we need to work harder to sort drooling (child molesters, ed.) from the horndogs who break the law. There's already enough bad judgment out there without us adding to it.
     

    FRAMED FOR CHILD PORN BY A VIRUS!
    By posted by Howard & Rita <nyrsol@aol.com>
    Posted on 18.11.2009
    Link to this news item: [00180]
     
    Comments should refer to news item 00180 and be sent to nyrsol@aol.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    This disturbing trend has made 'sex offenders' of many innocent people. NY RSOL is working with others on a Sentencing Project, which intends to put the case that sentences should be proportionate to the harm done - and in CP cases, with no immediate victims, particularly for those charged only with possession or downloading on the internet, this is the case. Contact Howard and Rita at nyrsol@aol.com if you want to be involved in this project. Alex
    -----------------------------------------------------
    FRAMED FOR CHILD PORNOGRAPHY BY A PC VIRUS
    by Jordan Robertson
    Associated Press
    Nov. 8, 2009

    Of all the sinister things that Internet viruses do, this might be the worst: They can make you an unsuspecting collector of child pornography.

    Heinous pictures and videos can be deposited on computers by viruses — the malicious programs better known for swiping your credit card numbers. In this twist, it's your reputation that's stolen.

    Pedophiles can exploit virus-infected PCs to remotely store and view their stash without fear they'll get caught. Pranksters or someone trying to frame you can tap viruses to make it appear that you surf illegal Web sites.

    Whatever the motivation, you get child porn on your computer — and might not realize it until police knock at your door.
    An Associated Press investigation found cases in which innocent people have been branded as pedophiles after their co-workers or loved ones stumbled upon child porn placed on a PC through a virus. It can cost victims hundreds of thousands of dollars to prove their innocence.

    Their situations are complicated by the fact that actual pedophiles often blame viruses — a defense rightfully viewed with skepticism by law enforcement.

    "It's an example of the old `dog ate my homework' excuse," says Phil Malone, director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "The problem is, sometimes the dog does eat your homework."

    The AP's investigation included interviewing people who had been found with child porn on their computers. The AP reviewed court records and spoke to prosecutors, police and computer examiners.
    One case involved Michael Fiola, a former investigator with the Massachusetts agency that oversees workers' compensation.

    In 2007, Fiola's bosses became suspicious after the Internet bill for his state-issued laptop showed that he used 4 1/2 times more data than his colleagues. A technician found child porn in the PC folder that stores images viewed online. Fiola was fired and charged with possession of child pornography, which carries up to five years in prison. He endured death threats, his car tires were slashed and he was shunned by friends. Fiola and his wife fought the case, spending $250,000 on legal fees. They liquidated their savings, took a second mortgage and sold their car.

    An inspection for his defense revealed the laptop was severely infected. It was programmed to visit as many as 40 child porn sites per minute — an inhuman feat. While Fiola and his wife were out to dinner one night, someone logged on to the computer and porn flowed in for an hour and a half. Prosecutors performed another test and confirmed the defense findings. The charge was dropped — 11 months after it was filed. The Fiolas say they have health problems from the stress of the case. They say they've talked to dozens of lawyers but can't get one to sue the state, because of a cap on the amount they can recover.

    "It ruined my life, my wife's life and my family's life," he says.
    The Massachusetts attorney general's office, which charged Fiola, declined interview requests.

    At any moment, about 20 million of the estimated 1 billion Internet-connected PCs worldwide are infected with viruses that could give hackers full control, according to security software maker F-Secure Corp. Computers often get infected when people open e-mail attachments from unknown sources or visit a malicious Web page.
    Pedophiles can tap viruses in several ways. The simplest is to force someone else's computer to surf child porn sites, collecting images along the way. Or a computer can be made into a warehouse for pictures and videos that can be viewed remotely when the PC is online.

    "They're kind of like locusts that descend on a cornfield: They eat up everything in sight and they move on to the next cornfield," says Eric Goldman, academic director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. Goldman has represented Web companies that discovered child pornographers were abusing their legitimate services. But pedophiles need not be involved: Child porn can land on a computer in a sick prank or an attempt to frame the PC's owner.
    In the first publicly known cases of individuals being victimized, two men in the United Kingdom were cleared in 2003 after viruses were shown to have been responsible for the child porn on their PCs.
    In one case, an infected e-mail or pop-up ad poisoned a defense contractor's PC and downloaded the offensive pictures. In the other, a virus changed the home page on a man's Web browser to display child porn, a discovery made by his 7-year-old daughter. The man spent more than a week in jail and three months in a halfway house, and lost custody of his daughter.

    Chris Watts, a computer examiner in Britain, says he helped clear a hotel manager whose co-workers found child porn on the PC they shared with him. Watts found that while surfing the Internet for ways to play computer games without paying for them, the manager had visited a site for pirated software. It redirected visitors to child porn sites if they were inactive for a certain period.

    In all these cases, the central evidence wasn't in dispute: Pornography was on a computer. But proving how it got there was difficult. Tami Loehrs, who inspected Fiola's computer, recalls a case in Arizona in which a computer was so "extensively infected" that it would be "virtually impossible" to prove what an indictment alleged: that a 16-year-old who used the PC had uploaded child pornography to a Yahoo group. Prosecutors dropped the charge and let the boy plead guilty to a separate crime that kept him out of jail, though they say they did it only because of his age and lack of a criminal record.

    Many prosecutors say blaming a computer virus for child porn is a new version of an old ploy. "We call it the SODDI defense: Some Other Dude Did It," says James Anderson, a federal prosecutor in Wyoming. However, forensic examiners say it would be hard for a pedophile to get away with his crime by using a bogus virus defense.
    "I personally would feel more comfortable investing my retirement in the lottery before trying to defend myself with that," says forensics specialist Jeff Fischbach.

    Even careful child porn collectors tend to leave incriminating e-mails, DVDs or other clues. Virus defenses are no match for such evidence, says Damon King, trial attorney for the U.S. Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section.
    But while the virus defense does not appear to be letting real pedophiles out of trouble, there have been cases in which forensic examiners insist that legitimate claims did not get completely aired. Loehrs points to Ned Solon of Casper, Wyo., who is serving six years for child porn found in a folder used by a file-sharing program on his computer. Solon admits he used the program to download video games and adult porn — but not child porn. So what could explain that material? Loehrs testified that Solon's antivirus software wasn't working properly and appeared to have shut off for long stretches, a sign of an infection. She found no evidence the five child porn videos on Solon's computer had been viewed or downloaded fully. The porn was in a folder the file-sharing program labeled as "incomplete" because the downloads were canceled or generated an error. This defense was curtailed, however, when Loehrs ended her investigation in a dispute with the judge over her fees. Computer exams can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Defendants can ask the courts to pay, but sometimes judges balk at the price. Although Loehrs stopped working for Solon, she argues he is innocent. "I don't think it was him, I really don't," Loehrs says. "There was too much evidence that it wasn't him."
    The prosecution's forensics expert, Randy Huff, maintains that Solon's antivirus software was working properly. And he says he ran other antivirus programs on the computer and didn't find an infection — although security experts say antivirus scans frequently miss things. "He actually had a very clean computer compared to some of the other cases I do," Huff says. The jury took two hours to convict Solon.

    "Everybody feels they're innocent in prison. Nobody believes me because that's what everybody says," says Solon, whose case is being appealed. "All I know is I did not do it. I never put the stuff on there. I never saw the stuff on there. I can only hope that someday the truth will come out." But can it? It can be impossible to tell with certainty how a file got onto a PC.

    "Computers are not to be trusted," says Jeremiah Grossman, founder of WhiteHat Security Inc. He describes it as "painfully simple" to get a computer to download something the owner doesn't want — whether it's a program that displays ads or one that stores illegal pictures. It's possible, Grossman says, that more illicit material is waiting to be discovered. "Just because it's there doesn't mean the person intended for it to be there — whatever it is, child porn included."
     

    Massachusetts May Ban S.O.s from Shelters
    By posted by Joe <owensjv@gmail.com>
    Posted on 18.11.2009
    Link to this news item: [00179]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 00179, Mass. May Ban S.O.s from Shelters, and be sent to owensjv@gmail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm. See the reporter`s email address at the end of the story, and send him feedback, too. Also see, Action Item No. 0066, and the November Monthly Message, and contact the Mass. ACLU to praise their outspoken opposition to this bill, and to criticize the Mass. Housing & Shelter Alliance for their shameless support of it!
    Alex
    --------------------------
    Sex offender ban sought for homeless shelters

    By David Abel, The Boston Globe
    November 18, 2009

    The most dangerous sex offenders would be barred from staying at homeless shelters under a plan proposed by advocates for the homeless and endorsed by key legislators.

    As the state’s steep budget cuts have forced organizations that help the homeless to cut beds, staff, and programs, the advocates for the needy say banning sex offenders would allow shelters to save money on security, open up space for others, and make shelters safer.

    The Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance, which represents 90 organizations that provide services to the homeless, has urged state lawmakers to add shelters to an increasingly long list of residential bans for many sex offenders. They are already barred in some communities from living near schools, day-care centers, parks, playgrounds, libraries, or nursing homes.

    While those who study sex offender recidivism rates say such residential restrictions are counterproductive, state lawmakers who support the proposed legislation argue that it also would fix a loophole in the law, which for five years has required the most dangerous sex offenders to post their names, addresses, and photos on a public website. They say too many sex offenders bypass the law by listing a homeless shelter as their address when they live elsewhere.

    “There are some really bad people, and we have to provide protections against them,’’ said Senator James E. Timilty, a Walpole Democrat who co-chairs the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security and sponsored the legislation. “I think we have a superseding need to protect the public. I would suggest it’s not fair to the families who are recently homeless to have them living next to sex offenders.’’

    In a review yesterday of 162 Level 3 sex offenders - those with a high risk of committing sex crimes again - who list addresses in Boston on the state’s online registry, the Globe found that at least 74 percent reported they were living at homeless shelters.

    The state uses 27 criteria to classify someone as a Level 3 sex offender, including how inmates behaved in prison and whether their victims were children.

    “This is the only solution to make our communities safe and allow the registry to work properly,’’ said Joe Finn, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance.

    “Even in the best of times, we don’t have the capacity to deal with these issues, but the recent cuts exacerbate the problem and make it difficult for shelters to raise money when their work is getting undermined because of the perception that we’re somehow harboring or attracting sexual offenders to our communities,’’ he said. But those who treat sex offenders and monitor recidivism rates say such residential restrictions make it more likely they will commit future crimes.

    Tracy Velazquez, executive director of the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute and author of a report, “The Pursuit of Safety: Sex Offender Policy in the United States,’’ said Massachusetts would be one of the few states to pass such a restriction. Florida also bans sex offenders from homeless and hurricane shelters.

    She said if the bill becomes law, Massachusetts would join other states in making it more likely that a sex offender ends up on the street. In 2000, she said only five states had residential restrictions limiting the proximity of an offender to a school, park, or nursing home; now 30 states have such restrictions, forcing many into homelessness.

    “If the purpose of this ban is to continue to punish and effectively banish people after they’ve done their time and paid their debt to society, then it’s a pretty effective policy,’’ she said. “If it’s to increase public safety, then banning registered sex offenders from shelters is counterproductive. It will make it harder for law enforcement to keep track of their whereabouts, and harder for them to meet their basic human needs, which in turn makes it harder for them to live successfully in the community.’’ She and others said research shows there’s no link between where sex offenders live and whether they commit new crimes.

    Jill Levenson, a professor of human services who researches sex crime policy at Lynn University in Florida, said a study she completed last year of 330 sex offenders who live near schools and day-care centers in Florida found that they were no more likely to re-offend than other former convicts.

    “The risk that sex offenders might pose in shelters for women and children may make sense, but to ban them from any shelter would have to be balanced with the need to provide social services to sex offenders,’’ she said. “If someone is homeless, despondent, and desperate, they’re more likely to resume a life of crime.’’

    Others questioned the constitutionality of banning sex offenders from shelters, which are often obligated by state contracts to accept just about anyone they have room for who presents themselves as homeless.

    Officials at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, which has opposed similar residential restrictions from Barnstable to Lynn, argue that they impose additional punishment after convicts have served their time.

    “Just as a matter of public policy, these restrictions make no sense,’’ said John Reinstein, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts. “Do we want to cut them loose entirely, so we don’t know where they are? What does someone do with no place to live, and they can’t go to a homeless shelter? And what are the implications for public safety and the sex offender law, which requires them to register where they live?’’

    Shelter officials say they were stung this month when the state cut $2.7 million from homeless shelters.

    The ban on sex offenders in shelters is being offered as an amendment to the crime bill, which is expected to see Senate action today.

    Shelter officials said they shouldn’t be stuck with a problem that stems from inadequate state services for sex offenders.

    “This bill is necessary because emergency shelters aren’t really equipped to handle sex offenders,’’ said Peter Duda, executive of the Lowell Transitional Living Center, noting they often end up as long-term residents because it’s difficult to find housing and jobs. “We’re not funded to provide the appropriate supervision. These people should be appropriately tracked, and it shouldn’t fall on the shelters to do that.’’

    Officials at other shelters said recent crimes allegedly involving homeless sex offenders - including an assault last month at Massachusetts General Hospital and a break-in last spring at a woman’s apartment in Quincy - have given their shelters a bad name.

    Mark Alston-Follansbee, executive director of the Somerville Homeless Coalition, said he worries that a sex offense at his shelter, which is in a church, would result in the program’s closure.

    “All it takes would be one offense for our program to be run out of the church, and out of the town,’’ he said. “We’re trying to push back to the state, saying they have to figure this out. It’s their responsibility, and they’re asking us to do something that shelters were never intended to do.’’

    David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com. Globe correspondent Michaela Stanelun contributed to this report.
     

    Let Juries Decide S.O. Fate
    By Joe <owensjv@gmail.com>
    Posted on 02.11.2009
    Link to this news item: [00178]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 00178 and be sent to owensjv@gmail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    THIS horrendous editorial maintains the extreme bias and mean spirit of the Boston Globe. We urge participants also to contact the Boston Globe and protest - write letters to the editor! letter@globe.com or to send an Op Ed piece, oped@globe.com
    Best of luck though since the Globe is one of the most arrogant newspapers in America and doesn't often publish letters critical of its editorials. Alex


    ------------------------------------------------------------
    GLOBE EDITORIAL

    Let juries determine sex offenders’ fate

    November 1, 2009

    MIDDLESEX DISTRICT Attorney Gerard Leone wants state lawmakers to give juries more say in whether some sex offenders should be civilly committed after completing their criminal sentences. It’s a reasonable proposal that could help gain broader community acceptance of verdicts in an explosive area of the law.

    In Massachusetts, convicted sex offenders who complete their sentences get to choose whether a judge or jury will determine if they suffer from a mental abnormality that makes them a likely risk to reoffend. Such a finding results in confinement and, equally important, treatment in Bridgewater State Hospital. Leone wants the Legislature to change the law so that either the defendant or the prosecutor can demand a jury trial, as is the case in other civil matters. Leone notes that juries in Middlesex County since 1999 have been almost twice as likely as judges to commit offenders for periods that can last from one day to life. But juries are not acting reflexively, either. In a quarter of the cases decided by jury, the convicted sex offender was found to be no longer sexually dangerous.

    This is a challenging area in which judges or juries are not asked to determine what, if anything, someone did, but what they are likely to do in the future. Experts argue over whether convicted sex criminals are more likely to reoffend than other criminals. But the law already recognizes the uniquely compulsive nature of sex crimes by allowing for civil commitments in limited cases. It is only reasonable, therefore, to expect that the state should be on equal footing with the convicted sex offender when deciding how those cases should be heard initially. That’s how it works already when convicted sex offenders get to appeal their commitment after one year - either the offender or the prosecutor can demand a jury trial.

    Prosecutors aren’t going overboard to confine sex offenders who have served out their sentences. And judges still play a central role in probable cause hearings to determine whether a case can move forward. Since 2004, for example, district attorneys have sought commitment petitions for just 515 of the 8,700 sex criminals who completed their sentences, according to the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association. Of that number, only 253 went to trial. It’s not a witch hunt. It’s an attempt to deal with the worst of convicted sex offenders.

    The cases are often awash in conflicting medical testimony and legal fine points. Witness that of David Flavell, a 40-year-old homeless man accused of trying to rape a woman last month in a bathroom stall at Massachusetts General Hospital. Flavell’s record is littered with sexual offenses ranging from indecent exposure and lewdness to an attempt to rape a woman outside an American Legion Post in Methuen. Twice prosecutors had tried to convince judges to commit Flavell. Twice they failed, based on conflicting medical reports and Flavell’s apparent willingness to engage in treatment. Would a jury have seen it the same way? It’s not certain. But it is certain that the public would be more understanding of the decision to free him had it been rendered by a group of fellow citizens.

    This is no small matter. Community acceptance of verdicts is a pillar of the legal system, as any judge would attest. And jurors have proven time and again that they are up to the task of fact-finding when deciding difficult cases.




    © Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

     

    Cynical Grandstanding in Mass?
    By posted by Joe O. <owensjv@gmail.com>
    Posted on 27.10.2009
    Link to this news item: [00177]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00177, Cynical Grandstanding?, and send to owensjv@gmail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    ------------------------
    DA seeks to alter offender laws

    Wants process for civil commitments in hands of juries

    By Jonathan Saltzman, Boston, Globe
    October 27, 2009

    Middlesex District Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr. plans to urge lawmakers today to change the state law for civilly committing individuals as sexual dangerous persons, five days after a convicted sex offender freed from jail over prosecutors’ objections allegedly attacked a woman at Massachusetts General Hospital.

    Leone, in a previously scheduled appearance before a legislative committee, intends to promote a bill he helped craft that would make it more likely that juries rather than judges would decide whether to indefinitely commit sex offenders to a treatment center. He says Middlesex judges are more lenient than juries in such cases, which involve keeping offenders locked up after they have completed their prison sentences.

    Under current law, defendants fighting petitions to commit them to the state Treatment Center in Bridgewater can ask for their cases to be heard by judges instead of juries, and prosecutors have no recourse. Under the bill supported by Leone, prosecutors would have to agree to the requests before defendants could waive jury trials.

    “When a convicted sex offender chooses a jury-waived trial, the community is shut out of the process, other than a prosecutor making the best argument possible to a judge,’’ said Leone, who will appear before the Legislature’s Joint Committee on the Judiciary.

    But Michael F. Farrington, the Mattapoisett lawyer who recently persuaded a judge to not civilly commit the man who was arrested in Thursday’s attack at Mass. General, characterized Leone’s measure as cynical grandstanding.

    He said most convicted sex offenders who overcome prosecutors’ efforts to have them civilly committed do not commit new sex crimes, regardless of whether it is a judge or jury that determined they were not sexually dangerous.

    “The United States Congress and our state Legislature are all under the false impression that these fellows have a high rate of recidivism, and it’s just the opposite, but they don’t want to listen to that,’’ Farrington said.

    Leone and state Senator Steven A. Baddour, a Democrat from Methuen, introduced the reform bill in February 2008 after Corey Saunders, a convicted sex offender, was arrested on charges of raping a 6-year-old boy at the New Bedford Free Public Library.

    Saunders had been convicted of attempting to rape a 7-year-old boy in 1999. But a Superior Court judge, Richard T. Moses, ruled in a trial without a jury in December 2006 that Saunders did not meet the state’s high legal standard to be committed to the treatment center after he was released from prison.

    Leone’s measure may gain more traction after last week’s attack on an unidentified 27-year-old female employee at Mass. General.

    At 3 p.m., David Flavell, a 40-year-old homeless man who is designated a Level 3 sex offender because of a long history of exhibitionism and other sex offenses, allegedly grabbed a woman he followed into the women’s bathroom at the hospital. Boston police said he threw her to the floor, punched her in the face, repeatedly slammed her head against the floor, and ripped her pants before she managed to escape. Police arrested him moments later.

    State prosecutors in 2006 and this year tried to persuade Norfolk and Bristol judges to commit Flavell to the treatment center. But two judges, one of them Moses, said they were not persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that Flavell had a “mental abnormality’’ or “personality disorder’’ that made him likely to commit another sex offense if not confined.

    In Middlesex, Leone said juries have civilly committed a far higher percentage of defendants than judges did over the past decade. Since 1999, 51 trials have been held in response to petitions by prosecutors. Of the 27 cases decided by a judge, 44 percent of the defendants were ruled sexually dangerous. Of the 24 cases decided by a jury, 75 percent were ruled sexually dangerous.

    But John G. Swomley, a Boston lawyer, said he has defended about 15 convicted sex offenders in such hearings, and he almost always prefers juries to determine his clients’ fate. Contrary to conventional wisdom, he said, Swomley has found that juries are less apt to be swayed by fears of freed defendants committing new sex offenses than judges.

    “The reality is that everybody [on juries] does actually believe that when you’ve done your time, you shouldn’t be put in jail prospectively for something you haven’t done,’’ he added. He said the disparity in Leone’s statistics might reflect the fact that many court-appointed lawyers in such cases are inexperienced, which can be a particular liability in jury trials.

    Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.
     

    MUGSHOT MAG - Harrasses ALL Offenders
    By posted by Mary D <rickysmom@rickyslife.com>
    Posted on 26.10.2009
    Link to this news item: [00176]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0176 and be sent to Mary, rickysmom@rickyslife.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm . This expands the vigilante injustice from sex offenders to all offenders - as we said it would do eventually. The whole concept of rehabilitation of people after serving their time has gone out the window in vindictive America! Alex
    --------------------------------------------------------------
    Mugshot Magazine generates interest; and death threats
    By Gus Burns | The Saginaw News
    October 23, 2009, 9:05AM

    Mugshot Magazine is for sale at some Saginaw and Bay county retailers. Its publisher says he has received death threats since releasing the tabloid-size paper, which features the jail photographs organized by ZIP code for drunken driving, sex offenses and more.
    Some readers of “Mugshot Magazine,” a new publication available at some Saginaw and Bay county retailers featuring the faces of Great Lakes Bay Region criminals, aren’t cheering its contents.

    The owner, a 46-year-old Saginaw man, said he uses an alias when doing business because of death threats.

    He said that as he delivered a stack of his second edition of the tabloid-sized newspapers featuring jail photos of convicted criminals to a convenience store, the owner told him to watch his back: A group of men wanted to kill him.

    Mug shots include sex offenders, drunken drivers, armed robbers and more. Not all are recent offenders. Copies sell for $1 apiece.

    “This magazine’s controversial, and I know it,” said the owner, a musician, graphic artist and now publisher. “I know exactly what I’m doing here.”

    The man refused to share his true name with The Saginaw News and said his business isn’t licensed in the city, nor has his company filed “doing business as” paperwork with Saginaw County.

    The magazine is “not a bad idea” because it “lets people know who’s out there,” said Saginaw County Undersheriff Robert X. Karl, whose agency supplies the pictures. Karl also declined to reveal the owner’s identity.

    Devoid of ads, the most recent edition is filled with headshots of criminals organized by ZIP code. Scattered within its 12 pages are a few short articles. The owner said he got the idea from similar publications he spotted while traveling.

    “It’s not my brainchild,” he said.

    “We’re all free to request this information,” the businessman said, but people “don’t take the time to request it or look it up.”

    Page 3 of Volume 2 is dedicated to Jason L. Savage, 30, of Swan Creek Township, sentenced in March for indecent exposure in a sex act with a car wash vacuum Oct. 16, 2008, in Thomas Township. Savage, unaware his story had returned to the public eye, said the magazine doesn’t “sound like a good idea.”

    The magazine debuted in July, selling 3,500 of 10,000 printed copies. Volume 2 hit news stands last week; about 5,000 have sold so far.

    “The first issue was kind of a shock to the system,” the owner said. “They’ve really started to take off.”

    The magazine is for sale at privately owned convenience stores mostly in Saginaw, along with locations in Saginaw and Bridgeport townships and Bay City — about 30 places in all.

    “I’m not trying to target just the stores with bulletproof glass in them,” the publisher said, adding he intends to market through chain gas stations and 7-Eleven stores once popularity increases.

    “People love it,” said Kim A. Cox, 45, a manager at Fast Lane Drive-Thru, 1200 State in Saginaw, a top seller of the magazine.

    Cox has received only one complaint, she said, from the aunt of a sex offender whose mugshot appeared within.

     

    More Bad Laws in NY
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 20.10.2009
    Link to this news item: [00175]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item no. 0175 and be sent to alexm60@fastmail.fm. I'll send them on to the person who sent this. We must not let our guard down - THEY ARE STILL AT IT! Passing ever more draconian laws, even in places like Long Island!
    --------------------------------------------------------

    Brookhaven aims to strengthen sex offender restrictions
    October 8, 2009 By PATRICK WHITTLE patrick.whittle@newsday.com
    Long Island, NY, NEWSDAY

    Brookhaven (NY) expands Child Protection Act

    Brookhaven Town is looking to strengthen its restrictions on where sex offenders are allowed to reside, a move town officials say would beef up laws that already are among the toughest in the state.

    The proposed law would prevent Level 2 and 3 sex offenders from living within a quarter-mile of almost anywhere children congregate.

    The legislation, which is scheduled for a town board vote on Nov. 24, came under immediate fire from civil liberties and sex offender reform advocates, who said the restrictions would leave offenders with nowhere to live and little hope of reform or redintegration into society. Others said the measure would force offenders to avoid registering with the state.

    But Supervisor Mark Lesko said the law will "take back the streets from predatory sex offenders who strike fear into the hearts" of families.

    The proposed law also levies up to $1,500 weekly fines on landlords who rent residences within the new limits to sex offenders, Lesko said.

    "If you are a suburban slumlord renting to a Level 2 or 3 sex offender, we're coming after you," Lesko said.

    The town's current laws require registered Level 2 and 3 sex offenders to live more than a quarter-mile from schools, playgrounds, day care centers and parks. The expanded law would add 15 types of locales - including video arcades, churches, school bus stops and ice cream stores - to the list.

    The legislation "sounds good on paper" but will result in sex offenders' skirting the state registry system, making them harder to track, said Kenneth Lau, president of the state chapter of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. Andrea Callan, director of the Suffolk Chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union, issued a statement that said Lesko's "proposal for legislation may actually push sex offenders into the dark and into places where they will live outside of all systems of supervision."

    The proposed law might also be unconstitutional if it leaves sex offenders with nowhere to live in an entire community, Callan said.

    Lesko said the town is creating a map, which will be available on the town's Web site, that will show which parts of town are covered by the law's "community protection zones."

    Brookhaven Town officials unveiled the proposal at a news conference a few miles from Gordon Heights, a neighborhood where, officials say, about 40 offenders live within a roughly half-square-mile area. Lesko said he hopes the new law, and another town law designed to break up clusters of sex offenders, helps reduce the number of offenders there.

     

    Juveniles Should Not Be Registered
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 01.10.2009
    Link to this news item: [00174]
     
    Augusta Free Press
    Waynesboro, Virginia

    Group issues report on sex-offender registration for juvenile offenses
    September 29, 2009 by chrisgraham
    With Ohio becoming the first state to come into substantial compliance with the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) that is part of the Adam Walsh Act, the Justice Policy Institute, a national organization focusing on juvenile and criminal justice issues, warned that compliance with the Act will provide little in the way of public safety benefits at substantial costs, particularly for those who must now be on sex offender registries for juvenile offenses.

    To provide policymakers with more information about the negative impacts of SORNA, JPI is broadly releasing their report Registering Harm: How Sex Offense Registries Fail Youth and Communities. (This report had a limited release in 2008.) Registering Harm concludes that while the prevention of sexual violence should be a priority for policymakers and the criminal justice system, the registration and community notification of youth convicted of sex offenses is unlikely to improve public safety, can have a lifetime of negative effects on a young person, and often penalizes an entire family. Furthermore, advocates say placing youth on sex offense registries is contrary to the purpose of the juvenile justice system, and SORNA has been found to be unconstitutional and in violation of children’s rights.

    “There is a growing concern that this well-intentioned legislation is having serious negative consequences, particularly for young people,” said Tracy Velázquez, executive director of JPI. “Our juvenile justice system was set up to give delinquent youth a second chance; due to the very public and punitive nature of the online registries, the Act denies them this chance.”

    “Courts have ruled as recently as this month that SORNA is unconstitutional as it is retroactively punitive,” added Velázquez, referring to the recent ruling by the ninth circuit court. “We know that states are being pressured to pass this legislation through threats of withholding federal dollars. However, in light of these serious civil rights issues, we urge state lawmakers to resist rushing into compliance, and to instead focus on insisting that their federal counterparts change this flawed legislation.”

    Registering Harm examines the public safety implications associated with implementing SORNA, which would expand registries already established at state levels, requiring states to list all registrants on a national online database and to include children convicted of certain sex offenses. Although originally all states were required to come into compliance with SORNA in July 2009 or face losing a portion of their Justice Assistance Grant Program funds, no states were in compliance at that time and the U.S. Attorney general extended the deadline for compliance to July 2010. Most troubling, according to the report, is that under SORNA youth as young as 14 would be placed on registries, making them more likely to experience rejection from peer groups and positive social networks and therefore more likely to associate with delinquent or troubled peers. Additionally, as the Ninth Circuit Court pointed out, the registration of adult for decades-old juvenile offenses “threatens to disrupt the stability of their lives and to ostracize them from their communities,” notwithstanding years of living law-abiding and productive lives.

    The report also notes that many of the offenses committed by youth are normative teenage behaviors. These behaviors are now criminalized and punished in ways that can last a lifetime. The report also concludes what similar reports, such as “The Pursuit of Safety” by the Vera Institute of Justice, also find, which is that registries do little to protect public safety, and may even endanger youth. And while states may lose federal dollars by not complying, JPI’s analysis shows that meeting the Act’s many requirements will likely cost more. SORNA implementation would leave law enforcement tasked with database management rather than community protection.

    “Rather than educating the public about general practices for keeping children and communities safe from sexual violence, this Act encourages a disproportionate allocation of resources and inappropriate focus on registries and the people on them,” said Velázquez. She added that in some states, people can be placed on registries for offenses such as public urination or lewd bumper stickers on their car, which would make it difficult for people using the registry to determine who could be a possible threat to their families or neighborhoods.

    Key findings in Registering Harm include:
    - The Act misallocates resources to a fraction of sexual violence incidences. Registries are designed to warn the public, and particularly parents, of “stranger danger;” however, sexual assaults are seldom committed by strangers. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that more than nine in 10 sexual offenses against children were committed by either a family member or acquaintance. In addition, 87 percent of the people arrested for a sex offense in 1997 had not been previously convicted of a sex offense and therefore would not appear on a registry. The resource misallocation caused by the expansion of registries in the Act has an especially significant impact given the budget crises faced in many states.
    - Overbroad registration or notification practices make it difficult for the public to determine who on the registry may pose a public safety threat and who doesn’t. Even the tier system of SORNA still provides little context to people who receive notification or view a public registry. In a review of all state registries, Human Rights Watch found that only five states provided enough understandable information on online registries for the public to be able to interpret the charge and the age of both the registrant and the victim.
    - Registration and notification overburdens law enforcement. State and federal laws are enacted at the local level, leaving local law enforcement agencies and corrections departments to implement and shoulder the burden of registration and notification legislation. Law enforcement is forced to dedicate a great deal of time and resources to monitoring people on the registries, finding people who have failed to register, and constantly ensuring that information on the registry is correct.
    - Registries and notification create barriers to education, employment, housing, and other social networks and outlets, making it difficult to live successfully in the community. Many states compound the barriers posed by registries with residency restrictions. This leads to increased risk of probation or parole violations or illegal behavior, which may lead to further incarceration.
    - Public dollars could be better spent on effective prevention strategies that more comprehensively address ways to reduce sexual violence and abuse. The report recommends that policymakers on federal, state, and local levels employ proactive preventative strategies like educating communities about effective ways to prevent sexual violence, which can be a more effective way of increasing public safety.

    “Our public policies should be driven by what works to keep people safe,” added Velázquez. “SORNA is one example of well-intentioned but unsound legislation that will have particularly toxic results, especially for youth. We need to move past emotion and rhetoric, and start putting in place more rational, effective policies for all.”

    The report can be viewed here: www.justicepolicy.org/content-hmID=1811&smID=1581&ssmID=80.htm.

     

    Ga. S.O. Camp Decried
    By posted by Kelly Piercy <semperfidelas@gmail.com>
    Posted on 30.09.2009
    Link to this news item: [00173]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00173 and send to semperfidelas@gmail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    (Originally sent in by Lynn, our Prison coordinator. Thanks, Lynn)
    alex
    -----------------------
    Ga.’s sex-offender laws an injustice themselves
    Sept. 30, 2009
    Jay Bookman
    for AJC.com
    Atlanta Journal Constitution
    Atlanta, Georgia

    You know, it takes a lot to generate sympathy for a sex offender. But Georgia’s draconian laws about where sex offenders can live are doing the trick. It’s downright ridiculous.

    “A group of homeless sex offenders who had been living in tents in the woods behind an office park near Marietta were told they had to leave the land by Tuesday.

    “We don’t want to allow anyone to live on our property for liability issues,” said Mark McKinnon, a spokesman for the Georgia Department of Transportation, which owns the wooded land where the sex offenders had taken residence.

    Several men said their probation officers had told them about the encampment as a kind of last resort for homeless sex offenders trying to meet the strict residency requirements of their probation.

    Georgia’s law prohibits the state’s 16,000 sex offenders from living, working or loitering within 1,000 feet of schools, churches, child care facilities and other areas where children gather. It limits the locations where they can live….

    William Hawkins, 34, a registered sex offender living in the camp, gathered his belongings Tuesday.

    He’s not sure where he’s going to go.

    When Hawkins was 15 years old, he had sex with a 12-year-old in Florida and received two years of house arrest and 10 years’ probation. “I have a 19-year-old case. Technically, I don’t think I have to be on it,” Hawkins said of the sex offender registry.”

    The law hounding those people has no real purpose but to, well, hound them. As experts have testified to the Georgia Legislature, it serves little or no protective function. A sexual predator intent on finding victims will do so, regardless of where he (or occasionally she) is forced to live. Furthermore, unlike many states, Georgia law makes no distinction between somebody like Hawkins and somebody who has a history of true predation.

    An even better example is Wendy Whitaker, who as a 17-year-old was caught performing oral sex on a 15-year-old classmate. That incident back in 1996 put her on the same sex offender list as a multiple rapist, As The Economist recently pointed out in an article featuring Whitaker as an example:

    “The Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board, an official body, assessed a sample of offenders on the registry last year and concluded that 65% of them posed little threat. Another 30% were potentially threatening, and 5% were clearly dangerous.”

    Given that reality, throwing them all into the same bag and forcing them to live together in surreptitious little communities helps no one. If serious threats must be freed, restrict their movements and track them closely. But don’t pretend that they’re all the same. Law enforcement officials have already told legislators that the law is overly strict, forcing officers to spend precious time tracking low-risk offenders that could better be spent elsewhere. But politicians passed the law as an act of grandstanding, and so far they haven’t summoned the courage to correct it.

    Of course, much of the rest of the world is more intrigued by the case of Roman Polanksi, who hasn’t exactly been living in a tent city in the 32 years since he drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl. Ann Woolner, a columnist for Bloomberg, explores that case and reaches what I think is the right conclusion:

    “The shame is that it has taken this long to sort everything out. The blame for that lies with Polanski for refusing to answer for evading the law.

    Celebrate the man’s talent, honor his contributions to filmmaking. However gifted he is, Polanski’s art can’t serve as a reason to ignore his terrible crime or his refusal to answer for it.”

    The injustice done to the Wendy Whitakers of the world, and maybe to the William Hawkins, far outweigh any alleged unfairness to Polanski.

    UPDATE: I should note that my colleague Cynthia Tucker has also weighed in on the Polanski case, reaching a verdict similar to Woolner’s.

    “It’s important for Polanski to face the bar of justice, even thirty years late. His appearance would serve as an example to others among the wealthy and glamorous that they are not above the law. Neither money, fame, connections nor artistic achievement should excuse you from facing up to your crimes. Forcing Polanski into court, in a case which will receive lots of media attention, might also stiffen the resolve of other victims of sexual violence who are trying to find the courage to face their abusers.”
     

    Noose Cartoon Newspaper Responds to Criticism
    By Shelley <or4balancedlaws@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 24.09.2009
    Link to this news item: [00172]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00172 and send to Shelley at or4balancedlaws@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    Comment from Alex: This response by the paper does NOT go far enough. If a paper ran a cartoon showing a black man being lynched and saying that such people deserved it, no-one would defend the paper´s right or the cartoonist! This has got to stop!

    ----------------------------
    Cartoons not so black and white
    By CARRIE WOOD
    Kirkland Reporter Editor
    Sep 22 2009, 4:48 PM



    Fingers shaking, the man hit the keyboard as he defended his 15-year-old son – a level three sex offender.

    His anger was incited by a recent cartoon that ran in the Reporter, which depicted a noose and the words “the only legal loophole fit for a level three sex predator.”

    “I want to reach through the computer and choke some common sense into this person,” the Oregon man said of Reporter cartoonist Jeff Johnson in a letter to the editor. He was afraid the cartoon would put his son "one step closer to the edge."

    Though their aim is not to offend anyone, cartoonists have been known to be inconsiderate and to stir quite the controversy. So when I came in to the office after the paper was delivered last week, perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised when readers compared us to the Nazis and Ku Klux Klan.

    Other readers – from Kirkland and nationwide - criticized the paper itself for encouraging "vigilantism" and advocating a "hate crime." Many demanded an apology.

    Del Jackson, of Ohio, said the cartoon “is one of the most reprehensible displays of journalism” he has ever seen. He also mentioned should anyone in the sex offender population suffer repercussions from “such a public advocation of vigilante justice” that he would file a lawsuit.

    Many others disputed that level three offenders - those who have, by definition, already paid debt to society - are less likely to reoffend than level one offenders. An official for the Sex Offenders Solutions and Education Network (SOSEN) responded with statistics: the truly dangerous offenders make up less than 5 percent of the total number on the national registry, according to the Department of Justice; and the No. 1 cause of unnatural death among former offenders is vigilantism.

    Another father commented on the Reporter Web site that his 15-year-old son has to live with the sex offender label because he flashed his front side at a passing car with some friends.

    On the other hand, a few in the community, including Kirkland resident Donna Rafalski, feel that "innocent lives are destroyed by criminals," she said in a letter to the editor. Don't coddle criminals, she urged.

    I was most perplexed when Kirkland resident Karen Story asked me why the Reporter allowed the cartoon to run and why we endorsed such a cartoon. My short answer: we don't. Any viewpoints expressed by our cartoonist or columnists do not reflect those of the paper.

    But beyond the seemingly safe answer, Story's inquiry prodded me to find out why political cartoons really matter in a community newspaper. So I turned to our cartoonist.

    “All in all, I consider any opinion piece a success when it heightens the awareness of issues in our collective community,” Johnson said. “Right and/or wrong is not my aim. Getting people to discuss the issues that impact their community is. Mission accomplished.”

    Many cartoonists will avow that their work is fundamental to a democracy. It galvanizes opinion and raises the level of debate over a particular issue - in this case, the law regarding level three sex offenders.

    No matter what opinions were expressed, the cartoon kick-started a conversation that some may not have otherwise engaged in. It shed light on the issue of sex offenders and contributed to the communal dialogue.

    Did the cartoon push the boundaries of free speech? Was it offensive or over the edge? We hope not.

    Sometimes political cartoons are not so black and white. But we invite you to keep the conversation going and send us your thoughts.


    Kirkland Reporter Editor Carrie Wood can be reached at editor@kirklandreporter.com or 425.822.9166 ext 5050.
     

    Is Less More in S.O.Lists?
    By posted by Tonia <toniat@sbcglobal.net>
    Posted on 13.09.2009
    Link to this news item: [00171]
     
    Refer in comments to news item no. 00171 and send to toniat@sbcglobal.net, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    See also Blog No. 0173 for Tonia´s excellent letter, which the newspaper published. Way to go Tonia!
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Maybe less is more in sex offender lists

    Bill McClellan
    More columns
    Bill's BiographyBy Bill McClellan
    ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
    09/04/2009

    A month and a half ago, I wrote a column about a man who had to register as a sex offender because of a misdemeanor child pornography conviction several years ago. Two convictions, actually, but for the same offense. He had downloaded the stuff at work, which was in St. Louis County, and he had taken the computer disc to his home, which was in St. Charles County. So he was charged, and convicted, in both counties.

    In both cases, he was given a suspended imposition of sentence, which was supposed to mean that if he successfully completed probation he would have no record. So he got on with his life. He was divorced and had custody of his two children. He married a woman who was divorced and had custody of her two children. In other words, he found himself the head of a melded family of six. He was a former Marine, a college graduate and he had a good job.

    Then in August 2004, Missouri amended its laws to require people who had been convicted of possession of child pornography to register as sex offenders.

    He registered and life suddenly became complicated. Parents didn't want their children coming to his house. Who could blame them? He was no longer allowed at school functions.

    In June 2007, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that a person who had been convicted of a crime that did not require registration at the time of conviction could not later be required to register. So the man's name was removed from the Missouri Sex Offender Registry.

    However, change was coming again, and change in these cases is always one way. The federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act required all offenders, regardless of when they were convicted, to register. GET MORE
    Want more Bill? Read past columns

    In June of this year, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the federal law superseded the state law, and the man was required to register again.

    That column got a lot of response, almost all of it negative. The great majority of respondents were upset that I seemed so sympathetic toward a man who had possessed child pornography. But a few had similar stories to tell, stories about men who have lived good and decent lives, who have never harmed a child, but who got caught up in pornography and are now classified as sex offenders. Most of them will have to register for the rest of their lives.

    Nobody in public life stands up for these guys. Everybody wants to protect the children.

    In fact, when the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in June that all sex offenders would be required to register, politicians from both parties expressed their approval. Attorney General Chris Koster, a Democrat, applauded the decision. So did state Sen. Jason Crowell, a Republican. "This ruling is a victory for anyone concerned with protecting Missouri's children from sexual predators," Crowell said.

    Is it?

    I wondered about that when I read the story in Wednesday's newspaper about the state's efforts to keep track of all the sex offenders. The story was prompted by the case in California, in which Phillip Garrido, who had served time for kidnapping and rape, allegedly held Jaycee Dugard in his backyard for 18 years. He was a registered sex offender. How did this case fall through the cracks?

    Perhaps it's because of all our efforts to protect children. We're going to watch sex offenders. The lists of these offenders keeps growing. In California, it has doubled since 1994. In Missouri, it has gone from 2,454 at the end of 1995 to 9,279 today.

    If we had the money for the increased manpower that the ever-growing list requires, maybe this would make some sense. "To really, truly track these offenders, there needs to be more money and funding available," said Lt. Steve Frisbie of the Missouri Highway Patrol, which maintains the state' sex offender database. But the truth is, no more money is available.

    The same thing is true in Illinois. In fact, there was another story in Wednesday's paper about the impending layoffs of almost half the probation workers in Madison County.

    So it is everywhere. Funding for public safety resources is shrinking, even as the lists of sex offenders grow.

    Perhaps we'd do a better job of protecting children if we narrowed our focus and paid more attention to people like Garrido, people who have a history of violence, rather than watch a population that has done nothing more than look at awful, horrid pictures. That is not meant to justify child pornography. But when it comes to keeping track of sex offenders, maybe less is more.

     

    NYT Editorial: Problem of Sex Offenders
    By posted by Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 13.09.2009
    Link to this news item: [00170]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00170 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    This is an extremely important editorial from the country´s premier newspaper! RSOL participants should write letters agreeing with the editorial and adding our own experience.
    alex marbury

    -----------------------------
    September 12, 2009
    Editorial
    THE NEW YORK TIMES

    The Problem of Sex Offenders
    California’s online sex-offender registry is full of information about Phillip Garrido of 1554 Walnut Ave. in Antioch — a 6-foot-4 white male, born April 5, 1951, with blue eyes, brown hair, a scar on his abdomen and a rape conviction. But in the 18 years that Mr. Garrido dutifully met his obligations as a registered offender — checking in with the state every year — authorities charge that he kidnapped and held Jaycee Dugard, fathering two children with her and imprisoning them all in his backyard.
    His case is a reminder that the solutions to sexual predation are not solutions at all, but frustratingly inadequate, and often ethically and legally murky, tools.
    Continuing to hold offenders, after their prison sentences are completed, under the guise of “treatment”? This punishes people for crimes they have not committed, awaiting cures that never happen, at huge expense. Following them around forever? All states require offenders to register, but few have the resources to constantly monitor everyone.
    In some places, “monitoring” only means an offender has to mail in a yearly postcard. Tens of thousands move away to who knows where. Authorities are often less likely to keep close tabs on offenders whose addresses they know — like in the case of Mr. Garrido.
    None of these efforts, of course, address the reality that the overwhelming majority of victims are assaulted by people they know, who never appear in any database.
    Meanwhile, an attempt to create a national registry — part of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act passed in 2006 — has faltered badly. States fretting about the costs and legal complications all missed the deadline to comply, which was then extended to July 2010. They worry that the registry would create an overwhelming monitoring burden and that it uses crude means of assessing the likelihood that offenders might repeat their crimes. The list of offenders is so large as to be almost useless. It is supposed to include not only rapists and kidnappers but also flashers and teenagers who had consensual sex.
    While officials ponder what to do, many states and cities have adopted another flawed and dangerous strategy: severely limiting where offenders may live. The idea is that children in schools, parks, playgrounds or libraries will be safer if offenders are not allowed to live more than a specified number of feet or yards away.
    That faith in buffer zones ignores the fact that offenders move around and that zones drive predators into ghettos or homelessness. Sick people living marginal lives, away from the stability that jobs, medication, parole officers can ensure, are more likely to offend again, not less.

     

    Hysteria Decried: Mich. S.O.Laws
    By posted for Bill Dobbs <duchamp@mindspring.com>
    Posted on 13.09.2009
    Link to this news item: [00169]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 00169 and be sent to Bill, duchamp@mindspring.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    ------------------------------------
    Between The Lines News [ Detroit , MI ]
    http://www.pridesource.com/article.html?article=37002

    Hysteria hits home
    Michigan's unfair anti-sex laws
    Aug. 27, 2009
    by Rudy Serra

    This month, the British journal The Economist (Vol. 392, Number 8643 " America 's Unjust Sex Laws") warned that " America 's ever stricter approach to sex offenders is doing more harm than good." The same is true in Michigan .

    No one supports sexual violence or the exploitation of the vulnerable. Most sex offender registration laws are enacted during the passionate hysteria that follows a high-profile rape or murder. It is important to think carefully about the effectiveness of such laws, as well as their unintended consequences.

    We need to think about whether sex offender registration really protects children or other vulnerable people. There is evidence that they are superficial "feel good" devices that allow politicians to pander to our outrage, but have no real, long-term effectiveness. Easy, superficial answers often do more harm than objective, scientifically verified responses.

    Murderers, kidnappers, armed robbers, vandals and arsonists are not required to register. If repeat-offenders and violent rapists were the only people on the sex offender list, there would be little reason for concern. When the lists expand to ensnare people who pose no danger, committed no sexual offense and are not likely to commit any other crime, they need to be re-considered. When the same laws have a devastating, disparate impact on an unpopular minority, like LGBT people, the need for reconsideration is urgent.

    The Economist warned that under "the Adam Walsh Act of 2006, another law named after a murdered child, all states will soon be obligated to make their sex offender registries public." They noted that there were more than 647,000 registered sex offenders in America as of December 2008. In Michigan , more than 43,964 people were registered sex offenders by 2009. Over 2,000 of these Michigan registrants were juveniles.

    According to The Economist, " America registers more than four times as many people as Britain , which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. American sex offender registries continue to grow because registration is for life."

    Studies show that over 65 percent of the registered offenders in one state ( Georgia ) "posed little threat" to anyone. A study that included Canada , the U.S. and Britain found that more than 75 percent of registered sex offenders had not repeated any offense after 15 years. These statistics are inconsistent with the language in Michigan 's law that claims that all sex offenders pose a "potential serious menace."

    Despite the political hysteria that promotes the simplistic "get tough" approach, law enforcement officials complain that "if there are thousands of offenders on a registry, it is harder to keep track of the most dangerous ones" (The Economist, p. 22). The Georgia Sheriff's Association complained about registration of "a man who was convicted of statutory rape two decades ago for having consensual sex with his high school sweetheart, to whom he is now married."

    Similarly, this year a Michigan man applied for a pardon from his conviction for criminal sexual conduct with a woman to whom he has now been married for many years. In another case, a member of religious community had voluntary sex with a girl over 19 not knowing that she had a developmental disability. The courts found she was unable to give consent, and the man now has to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

    In another Michigan case, a 12-year-old boy was sneaking out at night to have sex with another 12-year-old boy. One admitted he was gay while the other denied it. As a result, the gay child was pressured to plead no contest to criminal sexual conduct after being assured that, since he was a juvenile, there would be no adult criminal record. The other boy was not charged.

    Years later, after the gay child was an adult, the law was changed. Now he has to register as a sex offender. As a result, he has lost several jobs and now experiences vandalism and harassment from neighbors.

    Michigan's "Sex Offender Registration Act" (MCL 28.721) dictates that a person must register for life if they have one conviction for criminal sexual conduct or contact (MCL 750.520b, c, d or g). This is true even if the alleged contact is touching the clothing of the victim (a misdemeanor).

    This law, of course, is intended to regulate involuntary sex, so many people support registration. It is important to know, however, that you are also required to register for life if, during your lifetime, you have three convictions under the "disorderly person" law.

    This means that in Michigan you face lifelong sex offender registration for neglecting to support your family (MCL 750.167(1)(a), for being a "window peeper" (MCL 750.167(1)(c), or for being a "vagrant" (MCL 750.167(1)(g)).

    Even though vagrancy and non-support have nothing to do with sex, Michigan law requires lifelong sex offender registration. Astoundingly, begging in a public place (MCL 750.167(1)(h)) also warrants life-long sex offender registration.

    No reasonable person could conclude that such a law is fair. Such a law is not even reasonable. It is a product of anti-sex hysteria.

    Supporters argue that since three convictions are needed under this section there is some protection. Many LGBT people know, however, that you need not do anything illegal to be charged with a crime. Undercover cops still pretend to be gay men cruising for sex in Michigan and innocent people still get charged with solicitation, indecent exposure and lewdness. They face a lifelong stigma for seeking unpaid, private, voluntary sex with another apparently interested adult.

    Amazingly, under Michigan law, lawyers face lifelong sex offender registration if they have three convictions for loitering in "a police station, police headquarters building, county jail, hospital, court building or other public building or place for the purpose of soliciting employment of legal services." This violation clearly has no connection to sex, nor does it include violence.

    Under Michigan law, if you get three convictions for "jostling or roughly crowding people unnecessarily in a public place" you can spend the rest of your life as registered sex offender (MCL 750.167(1)(l) and MCL 28.721).

    The same law requires lifelong registration for one conviction under our sodomy law (MCL 750.158 - which is still enforced even after Lawrence v Texas ). Voluntary, unpaid, anal sex in Michigan can get you 15 years in prison and lifelong sex offender registration. Likewise, oral sex in public or in private, or even indecent exposure (MCL 750.335a) can result in lifelong sex offender registration.

    Most sex offenders are members of the family of the victim and most are heterosexual. Anti-gay politicians exploit stereotypes of LGBT people being a threat to the children in order to win votes. By doing so, they victimize people who are not a threat. This makes the vulnerable even more susceptible to victimization.

    Sex offender registration laws were meant to protect the public from violent, repeat offenders. As a result of "get tough on crime" political pandering, they have become counter-productive.



    -Attorney Rudy Serra is in private practice. He was the first openly gay person ever to serve as a Judge in Michigan (on Detroit ’s 36th District Court), as well as the first openly gay member of the Oakland County Commission (1990-92) and the Ferndale School Board. He serves as Chairman of the Executive Clemency Advisory Council for The State of Michigan, and on The State Bar of Michigan Standard Criminal Jury Instructions Committee. He is a Licensed Social Worker, a Certified Clinical Psychopathologist and nationally recognized expert on LGBT issues, ethics, civil rights, police misconduct and sex crimes.

     

    Residency Restrictions Struck Down by Vermont Court
    By posted by Laurie Peterson <lwhite100@comcast.net>
    Posted on 10.09.2009
    Link to this news item: [00168]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00168 and send to lwhite100@comcast.net, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    This TV station does NOT allow full publication of this story.
    To see the whole story visit this URL
    http://www.wptz.com/cnn-news/20812345/detail.html
    -------------------------------------------------------------
    VERMONT COURT STRIKES DOWN RESIDENCY RESTRICTIONS BY TOWN
    as reported on Channel 5, WPTZ, TV, Vermont, Sept. 9, 2009

    The ACLU in Vermont has won what it believes is a major victory in this case, when a sex offender was allowed to stay in his home with his wife and children, rather than move as the town had dictated. If this goes to the Supreme Court, the ACLU believes, it will set a great precedent.
     

    REPRESSED MEMORY Challenged
    By posted by Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 10.09.2009
    Link to this news item: [00167]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00167 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm. I´ll post them. This item was sent by an RSOL signatory from Boston.
    -----------------------------------------
    URL
    http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/09/10/repressed_memory_is_at_issue_in_defrocked_priests_appeal
    -------------------------------------------------
    REPRESSED MEMORY AT ISSUE IN PRIEST´S CASE
    by Jonathan Saltzman
    The Boston GLOBE
    Sept. 10, 2009

    Defrocked priest Paul R. Shanley, one of the key figures in Boston’s clergy sex abuse scandal, plans to challenge his rape and indecent assault convictions before the state’s highest court today when his lawyer argues that the victim’s “repressed memory’’ was junk science.

    Shanley’s appellate lawyer contends that prosecutors should not have been allowed to present evidence that the victim, a 27-year-old firefighter, buried memories of repeated abuse as a Sunday school student for two decades, only to recover them when the scandal erupted.

    “Overwhelming evidence proves that the theory of ‘repressed memory’ is not generally accepted by the relevant scientific community on multiple grounds and that the commonwealth’s experts provided misleading junk science testimony that should not have been admitted in a judicial proceeding,’’ the lawyer, Robert F. Shaw Jr. of Cambridge, argues in his brief.

    Nearly 100 psychiatrists, psychologists, and scientists have submitted a friend-of-the-court brief saying that the notion of people recovering repressed memories is “one of the most pernicious bits of folklore ever to infect’’ the fields of mental health. However, another large group, the Leadership Council, which consists of lawyers, academics, and scientists, has filed a brief saying repressed memory is a legitimate phenomenon.

    Lawyers for Middlesex District Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr., whose office prosecuted Shanley in 2005, plan to argue when both sides appear before the Supreme Judicial Court this morning that Middlesex Superior Court Judge Stephen E. Neel was right to admit the evidence.

    The prosecutors say “dissociative amnesia’’ is recognized as a legitimate disorder by many in the mental health field, including the American Psychiatric Association. Merely because specialists “may not be unanimous about dissociative amnesia does not rule out its validity,’’ prosecutors wrote in their brief.

    Shanley, now 78, was known in the 1960s and 1970s as a “street priest’’ who reached out to troubled youth, roamed Boston’s streets in blue jeans, and was an outspoken backer of gay rights.

    He was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison in February 2005 after a jury convicted him of two counts of raping a child and two counts of indecent assault and battery on a child, all in connection with the attacks on the firefighter as a boy.

    The victim accused Shanley of pulling him out of Sunday school at St. Jean’s Church in Newton when he was between 6 and 11 years old and molesting him in the pews, rectory, confessional, and boys’ room. The former altar boy testified he did not remember the abuse until 2002, when he learned about a Globe article outlining accusations against Shanley by other men, including a former Sunday school classmate. Three other accusers were part of the initial case but were dropped as it went to trial.

    During the two-week trial, Shanley’s defense lawyer, Frank Mondano, argued that the victim’s recollections were “false memories’’ that had been planted by friends, therapists, and personal injury lawyers. Shanley’s accuser had a troubled family history and previous substance abuse problems, and had $500,000 in the bank from a civil settlement with the Boston Archdiocese at the time of the trial.

    In a high-stakes gamble, Mondano called only one witness, Elizabeth Loftus, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, who challenged the validity of repressed memory. Loftus, who has built a career out of debunking the phenomenon, said scientific experiments have proved that people can be manipulated into remembering things that never happened.

    “I don’t believe there is any credible scientific evidence for the idea that years of brutalization can be massively repressed,’’ she testified.

    But under cross-examination, she agreed that people can forget traumatic events and remember them later. Loftus is among those who signed the brief supporting Shanley’s appeal.

    Shanley’s lawyer said in his brief that no appellate court in Massachusetts has considered whether repressed memory is a valid, scientifically accepted phenomenon. If so, the high court’s ruling in the case could have significant repercussions.

    Leone said recently that the concept of recovered memory “by victims of abuse has been accepted by both the scientific and legal communities, as well as the jury that convicted Mr. Shanley of child rape after hearing the full evidence in this case.’’

    He said the verdict was just and expressed confidence that it will be upheld.

    Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com
     

    Is England´s Sarah´s Law the Answer Here?
    By posted by Margie <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 05.09.2009
    Link to this news item: [00166]
     
    Comments should refer to NEWS Item No. 00166 (be sure and say NEWS ITEM, not blog), and be sent to Margie at thesnappy1@gmail.com
    Thanks, margie for sending this.
    BUT - My own editorial comment is that this law, while slightly better than the US versions, Megan´s Law and the AWA, is not as good as the current Canadian version, where ONLY law enforcement has access to the list. Alex
    .----------------------------------------------------------

    Mary Dejevsky: A better way to fight child sex crime
    THE INDEPENDENT
    London, England
    4 September 2009

    Sarah's Law allows carers to ask about people with access to their children

    All they have in common is that they were young girls who met with a cruel fate and their faces, pictured in happier times, smiled out at us around the same time. In most other respects, their cases are quite different. Yet the laws in their respective countries gave one a better chance of avoiding her fate – and it may not be the one you would think.


    Eleven-year old Jaycee Dugard was snatched from her suburban street, and found 18 years later, living in the junk-filled squalor of Phillip Garrido's backyard. By then, she had had two children by her abductor and Phillip Garrido was one of more than 100 registered sex offenders residing in the same down-at-heel postal district in Antioch, California.

    Stacey Lawrence was nine and lived in the West Midlands. She set off with her mother's partner for a trip she saw as a treat. Two days later she was found strangled, and maybe sexually molested, in his lorry. Darren Walker was found hanged from a tree nearby.

    As it happens, the sad, and separate, fates of these girls highlight the way two laws are working here and in the United States – laws expressly framed to protect children from paedophiles and sex killers.

    The legislation known as Megan's Law in the United States differs slightly from state to state. But it is sweeping in its scale and implications. All those convicted of a sex crime must be registered and details of their whereabouts are open to public scrutiny.

    Type the words "California" and "sex offender" into any search engine, and you will very soon come across the photos and personal details – last known address, date of birth, etc – of offenders known to live in a particular place. You hardly have to try. This information is required to be in the public domain and it is readily available.

    This also helps to explain why there is such a concentration of sex offenders in Antioch. Quite simply, there are not that many other places they can live. In most parts of the United States, housing is segregated by income even more than it is in Britain. People in the plusher districts will object to the resettlement of a sex offender in the neighbourhood; if legitimate protest fails, there is always vigilantism.

    Some US states, including California, also have a Jessica's Law, which prevents registered sex offenders from living within a certain distance of a school, park or anywhere else likely to be frequented by children. As most half-desirable areas have such facilities, sex offenders have precious few places to go.

    So they gravitate to low-income and poorly-served towns, such as Antioch. These are towns with scant sense of community, where the very American spirit of looking out for others hardly operates – hence the neighbours who turned a deaf ear to the occasional sound of children next door, even though it was common knowledge that Garrido was a convicted rapist.

    Another consequence, no less predictable, of the laws named after Megan and Jessica, is the growing tendency of convicted sex offenders to disappear. What possible incentive does anyone have for sticking around as a registered sex offender if there is no possible respite from the crime? Yet compulsory registration and a fixed address are two of the most effective weapons in the armoury of the police against such crime. Megan's Law blows that out of the water.

    Here in Britain, the risk that sex offenders will be driven underground is repeatedly cited as the single most compelling reason against introducing legislation on the US model. Yet – understandably – pressure for just such a public "right to know" mounts each time a child's murder or serious sexual assault features in the news. And it is what Sara Payne, mother of eight year-old Sarah – killed by a convicted sex offender – has campaigned for: the right for every parent to know if there is anyone who might pose this sort of threat in the vicinity.

    Last year, the Home Office finally gave its blessing to a pilot project that was widely touted as Sarah's Law. And it was convenient for everyone to pretend that this was, in fact, Megan's Law with a British name. It suited the campaigners, because they could claim a victory they were never actually going to win. It suited ministers, because it allowed them to look responsive to public opinion, and it suited a public that succumbs, with tiresome regularity, to fear of paedophiles lurking behind every corner.

    But this pilot Sarah's Law was, in fact, very different from Megan's Law, and potentially more effective for that reason. As a rule, it preserves the anonymity of registered offenders, leaving in place the incentive to remain above ground. Their disappearance is what prompts disclosure of identity. Information will be provided about convicted sex offenders in the neighbourhood, but only to those with a reason to ask. There are no police websites, where you can scan, voyeuristically, for paedophiles on your own, or someone else's, patch.

    The most innovative, and pertinent, aspect of Sarah's Law, however, allows parents and other carers to ask the police whether someone with access to their children has a child sex conviction. This recognises that abductions, such as that of Jaycee Dugard in California or Sarah Payne here, account for a tiny minority of child sex offences.

    The vast majority are committed by members of the child's immediate circle, with fully 80 per cent taking place in the home of the offender or the victim. Mothers who might have concerns about a new partner are among those encouraged to use the service, and in the four areas of the pilot, more than 80 applications for information were received in the first six months alone.

    It is true that Stacey Lawrence's killer, although accused of assault by his former wife, would not have shown up in police records – even if Stacey's mother had suspected anything (which she did not). Nor can it be known how often paedophiles seek out lone mothers, with a view to gaining access to their children. But what cannot be disputed is that there will be more cases like Stacey Lawrence's than will have drama of Jaycee Dugard's, and that Sarah's Law is better framed to protect children than Megan's – even if in Stacey's case, tragically, it failed.

    m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk

     

    Why Harsh S.O. Laws Didn´t Work
    By posted by Mark <constitutionalfights@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 04.09.2009
    Link to this news item: [00165]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00165 and send to Mark - constitutionalfights@yahoo.com , with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    ------------------------
    Why harsh sex offender laws made Garrido’s crimes easier to commit
    by Laurie Essig
    TRUESLANT.COM
    Sept. 1, 2009

    The case of Phillip Gariddo, accused of kidnapping then 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard and holding her hostage for 18 years, sexually abusing her and fathering two children with her, has revealed the paradox at the center of America’s unusually tough sex offense laws. The harsher the laws get, the more people who are caught in the ever-expanding net of offenses, the easier it is for the real child abusers to go undetected.

    Phillip Garrido is a case in point. Although forced to register as a sex offender, Garrido was just one of several living in his area. According to an article in today’s Times,

    The sheer numbers of sex offenders on the registries in all 50 states — an estimated 674,000 across the country — are overwhelming to local police departments and, at times, to the public, who may not easily distinguish between those who must register because they have repeatedly raped children and those convicted of nonviolent or less serious crimes, like exposing themselves in public.

    Abduction Case Shows Limits of Sex Offender Alert Programs – NYTimes.com.

    This contradictory situation, where the harsher we are on sex offenders, the less likely we are to catch them, was the subject of an August 6th article in the Economist.

    US laws are so incredibly harsh as to merit a plea from Amnesty International to rethink them. For instance, regardless of the act or whether it was consensual and between people of roughly the same age, once convicted of an offense, you’re on the registry and barred from ever being in a school, even if you have children. A recent Illinois law has barred sex offenders from social networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn. That might seem reasonable for someone like Garrido, but what about the 17 year old girl who becomes a “sexual predator” for having sex with her boyfriend who is very nearly 16? Or consider the fact that a Human Rights Watch report found

    at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.

    I have most certainly urinated in public (if national parks are public) with children, had sex as a teenager, and gone streaking (as a teenager). What that means is that even more of us could be registered sex offenders than the 675,000 Americans already on the registries. That means our photos could be on there, our addresses, we could be targeted for harassment, threats, and in a few recent cases, vigilante-style executions. Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded.

    According to the Economist article,

    As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. America’s registers keep swelling, not least because in 17 states, registration is for life.

    How did this happen? How did America become both so obsessed with “sexual predators” and simultaneously unable to make children safer? It no doubt started with the Victorians, as James Kincaid suggests in Erotic Innocence- the conflation of childishness with sexual innocence at the same time “ladies” were imagined as innocent as well- so that wanting a sexually innocent lady became entangled with a sexually innocent child.

    But more recently, starting in the 1980s, with a Conservative Revolution that included all things sexual, Americans began to worry about “stranger danger.” Instead of focusing on where children are most likely to be abused (in the home, by someone they know), we began to focus on preschools as sites of mass violation of children’s innocence, the stranger behind the bush, and the internet as a site of particular danger.

    Laws were passed (in fact, most states only got sex offender registries in the 1990s after the federal government threatened loss of funding if they weren’t established), TV shows and movies were made, educational programs were invented. The result was panic. Panic in Congress and state legislatures as everything from sex between teens to naked photos of one’s children were criminalized. Panic in schools as children were taught that they should worry about abduction all the time. Panic in the homes as parents chose “safety” over “health” and “well-being.”

    Not only did it not work since most children are still abused by people they know and this issue wasn’t ever really addressed. But the net’s so big that too many people are being named sexual predators and too few actual sex criminals are being monitored. The latest expansion of this ridiculous net is about “sexting”- when consenting teens send naked photos of themselves to each other or post them on their Facebook page.

    According to Judith Levine’s blog,(she’s the author of Harmful to Minors- a book that brilliantly exposes this panic), a proposed Massachusetts bill would make it illegal for minors AND for people 60 years and up to send or post naked photos. So if you’re 61, don’t send photos to your 62 year old lover. And if you’re 17, do not snap the photo of yourself nude for your 16 year old lover.

    This sort of sexual panic is so ridiculous that it seems barely worth a comment. But the truth is, people get caught in this awful net and their lives are ruined for committing the most victimless of crimes. Worse, the real creeps, the ones like Garrido, can operate amidst the confusion with little chance of detection.

    Oddly, the real lesson from the tragedy of the Jaycee Lee Dugard is that Americans need to lighten up on sex laws in order to keep the public safer from sexual predators.

     

    Female S.O. Banned from College
    By Tonia <toniat@sbcglobal.net>
    Posted on 03.09.2009
    Link to this news item: [00164]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00164 and send to Tonia, toniat@sbcglobal.net, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    Yes, indeed, murderers coming out of prison can go to college - they are even encouraged to do so - but not a harmless young mother like
    Kristy! Alex

    NOTE - The TV station is taking a survey. I suggest RSOL folks fill it out! Go to the URL for the story, and click on the appropriate boxes! URL http://www.wsoctv.com/news/20691930/detail.html
    ------------------------------
    SURVEY
    Should sex offenders be allowed to attend classes at North Carolina colleges?

    Yes
    No
    Depends on the school.
    ----------------------------------

    SEE COMMENT AFTER THE NEWS STORY, FROM AN RSOL ORGANIZER WHO ALSO HAS THESE PROBLEMS IN COLLEGE!
    ---------------------------------

    Sex Offender Takes Concerns About New Law To Legislator
    Reporter, Ken Lemon
    Channel 9, WSOC TV
    Charlotte, North Carolina
    Sept. 2, 2009

    GASTONIA, N.C. -- A knock with no response at a legislator’s door was not enough for Kristy Hammonds on Wednesday.

    Hammonds is a sex offender who was told this week that she would be arrested if she returned to Wilkes Community College. A new addition to the Jessica Lunsford Act makes it illegal for sex offenders to go the college where high school students take some classes.

    “If I were a murderer or rapist, I could go to college. But people like me can't go to college,” she said.

    Three years ago, Hammonds pleaded no contest to misdemeanor sexual battery of 14-year-old. She then made headlines as one of the Conover Domino's workers who did strange thing with pizza dough and posted video of it online.

    She said she has changed, and now she is the victim of bad legislation.

    “My civil rights are broken so someone is going to have to pay for that,” she said. “I have to provide a future for a baby.”

    So Wednesday she grabbed her daughter and left her Taylorsville home to head to the Gastonia office of Senator David Hoyle, the sponsor of Jessica’s Law.

    When she got no answer at the office, she called his cell phone.

    “Only thing I can tell you to do is get a lawyer,” Hoyle said.

    “He's telling me I should sue the school because of a law he made. I don't think that's right,” Hammonds responded.

    Eyewitness News also called Hoyle. He said the law wasn't intended to keep people like Hammonds out of school.

    “Any law was pass, none of them are perfect,” he said.

    He said he is only responsible for passing the law, not enforcing it.

    “If it's justifiable it needs to be changed, yes sir we'll change it,” Hoyle said.

    The General Assembly won't meet until May, however.

    Eyewitness News has asked a lot of questions about the new law and how other colleges are handling it in the Charlotte area. Central Piedmont Community College and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte responded Wednesday and said neither is actively enforcing the law.

    A spokesperson at Central Piedmont said the school does not ask about criminal history and doesn't know if they have sex offenders on campus. The representative said it's up to the sex offender to come forward and take himself or herself out of any situation where minors are present.

    Eleventh and 12th-grade high school students are on campus regularly in dual-enrollment programs.

    A spokesperson for UNCC said the school is not removing sex offenders from campus, either, but they do ask students to divulge their criminal history. Students are not obligated to do so, however.

    Attorneys at the school said they still have questions about the law.
    -----------------------
    COMMENT FROM AN RSOL STATE ORGANIZER
    I can certainly relate to this story. I attended a community college
    about two years ago to try to update my resume and catch up on computer software. I was not under threat of arrest, but the hastle and continued humiliation was ridiculous. I was asked meet with the Dean of the college and the Director of Security - on a regular basis. I was also told which areas of the college were absolutely off limits to me (athletic fields, the pool...and several other places) while still having to pay full tuition. After one semester I became frustrated with the hassle and constant reminder of being "on the list," so I decided to just forget about it for a while. I expressed to the Dean that I realized this was a formality, and I knew he had no choice but to do as he was
    doing. He nodded and agreed. He read my file, and he realized and even said that I probably was not going to be a threat (I had been arrested for downloading explicit images of children via the Internet six years prior), but he had to comply with the laws. I understood but being contstantly singled out as a "potential problem" eventually has a negative effect on one's psyche.
     

    Garrido Case: Questions About S.O. Monitoring
    By posted by Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 03.09.2009
    Link to this news item: [00163]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 00163, and be sent to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    USA Today is very strict in charging for reprints on nonprofit websites. This is a very restrictive process. But, because of that, I am only posting the URL for this story, the headline, and a brief description.

    See Monthly Message for Urgent Action Item about the Garrido case.
    ---------------------------------------------------
    URL: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-09-01-abduct_N.htm?csp=34

    GARRIDO CASE AGAIN: Questions Arise About Sex Offender Monitoring,
    USA Today, Sept. 1, 2009, article by Marisol Bello.

    The article summarizes the amazing facts in the case of Phillip Garrido who kidnapped and hid the ll year old girl in his backyard for 18 years, despite being on the sex offender registry! Patty Wetterling and others, who helped spawn the laws to register offenders, point out that registries have NOT been helpful, because so many non-danerous offenders are on them.

    We urge you to read this article, as well as the one in News Item 00162, from the New York Times, and FLOOD these newspapers and all other media with letters demanding a major reform of sex offender registries nation-wide, to support the rights of sex offenders, protect their families, and provide REAL help to victims, not feel-good solutions.
    alex marbury

     

    Garrido Case Shows Limits of S.O.Alerts
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 03.09.2009
    Link to this news item: [00162]
     
    Comments should refer to news Item 00162, ¨Limits of S.O. Alert Programs,¨ and be sent to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    --------------------------------------------------------------------
    From the NEW YORK TIMES
    Sept. 1, 2009

    Case Shows Limits of Sex Offender Alert Programs
    Monica Davey

    In all 50 states, registries of sex offenders have grown sophisticated and accessible in recent years, a response to high-profile attacks on children. People can search their neighborhoods for former convicts on state-run Web sites, sign up for private services that alert them if an offender moves nearby, even download an iPhone application, “Offender Locator.”



    But the case of Phillip Garrido, the California man accused of kidnapping a young girl and holding her captive for 18 years, is reigniting a debate about the usefulness of the government-managed lists and whether they might create a false sense of public safety.

    Mr. Garrido, who had been convicted of kidnapping and rape in the 1970s, was listed, as required, on California’s sex-offender registry (complete with a description of the surgical scar on his abdomen and his 196-pound weight) and had dutifully checked in with the local authorities each year for the past decade — all while, officials say, his victim and the two children he is accused of fathering with her were living in his backyard.

    Sex offender lists have made far more information readily available to the public and the police than before, but experts say little research is available to suggest that the registries have actually discouraged offenders from committing new crimes.

    And some experts say that the lists may lead people to presume that anyone registered must also be elaborately monitored, when, in truth, monitoring ranges enormously from place to place and state to state. In some cases, it amounts to little more than an offender mailing a postcard with his address to a police department once a year.

    “We’ve come to see these registries as a panacea that is going to resolve all sex offender problems,” said Richard Tewksbury, a professor of justice administration at the University of Louisville who has written extensively about the effects of registries. “That’s just not realistic.”

    In some jurisdictions, officials tend to focus much of their attention on the estimated 100,000 former offenders nationally who fail to register, give false addresses or disappear, and less on the hundreds of thousands, like Mr. Garrido, who comply. And while some authorities have extensive contact with their registered offenders (Illinois has special monitors who follow those deemed most dangerous for life, looking for even subtle signs of crimes), those in some other states spend little time with offenders once they have filed an address.

    Federal efforts to create a single, consistent registration system have been slowed by states’ concerns about mounting costs, legal challenges and other issues. Deadlines for states complying with a federal plan approved by Congress in 2006 have been delayed a year, until July 2010.

    The sheer numbers of sex offenders on the registries in all 50 states — an estimated 674,000 across the country — are overwhelming to local police departments and, at times, to the public, who may not easily distinguish between those who must register because they have repeatedly raped children and those convicted of nonviolent or less serious crimes, like exposing themselves in public.

    Keeping track, for instance, of the home addresses of the 80 offenders who live in Dubuque County, Iowa, keeps law enforcement officers there “plenty busy most every day,” a sheriff’s official there says. In more populous places like the San Francisco Bay Area — and other places that draw large numbers of offenders — the challenges are far more significant: 1,700 registered sex offenders live in Contra Costa County, where Mr. Garrido lived, including 100 in his ZIP code alone; more than 65,000 are registered statewide.

    “The thing that is hard to remember is that all people on a registry are not the same, and we need to distinguish between them,” said Patty Wetterling, whose son was kidnapped in Minnesota 20 years ago and who now works for a state sexual violence prevention program. “At the end of the day, the registry is just one tool out of a bunch of tools, and it’s only as good as its users. I worry that people want simple solutions to a very complex problem.”

    Certainly, no one is blaming registries for Mr. Garrido’s alleged crimes’ escaping notice for so long, and many defended their broader usefulness. “Look, nobody ever suggested that registering sex offenders is going to remove sex offenders from the planet,” said Ernie Allen, the president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “But let’s at least make sure they’re not working in your elementary school or coaching the soccer team.”

    If anything, Mr. Garrido was getting far more attention than the average offender listed on a state registry. For years and until his arrest last week, he was on parole from the earlier kidnapping and rape in Nevada, and, California authorities said, met several times a month with a parole officer and wore a GPS device that tracked his whereabouts. Three years ago, he was visited by a sheriff’s deputy after a neighbor complained that he had a “sexual addiction” and that children were living in his yard.

    Although Mr. Garrido was listed on the state’s public registry, the deputy, the sheriff said, had not known he was a sex offender and did not search the house or yard, where primitive tents were housing his captives.

    Mr. Garrido’s case has also renewed concern that policies regulating offenders may inadvertently be driving them to live in more remote, out-of-the-way places, where crimes can go unnoticed. Nine other registered sex offenders live within a mile of Mr. Garrido’s home on the outskirts of Antioch, in a dusty neighborhood on the outer reaches of the Bay Area.

    New rules in many states have barred offenders from living near schools, parks and bus stops, and that has led some offenders, unable to find other alternatives that meet the rules, to live in rural areas, in their cars and, in at least one case in Florida, under a bridge.

    But because he was released on parole for his earlier crimes decades ago, Mr. Garrido was exempt from a California law enacted in 2006 that bars offenders from living within 2,000 feet of places where children congregate. Still, at least one neighbor said the unincorporated area was “loaded” with offenders, in part because no schools are around, meeting the current rules.

    No Link Found to Killings

    The authorities in Pittsburg, Calif., said Tuesday that they had found no concrete evidence linking Mr. Garrido and his wife, Nancy, the couple charged in the abduction of Jaycee Dugard, to a string of unsolved killings in the area.

    A collection of law enforcement agencies had searched the Garridos’ house and a neighbor’s backyard in Antioch, Calif., which neighbors Pittsburg, looking for clues in nine homicides, mostly of prostitutes, committed from 1998 to 2002. Several of the victims’ bodies were dumped in industrial areas near places where Mr. Garrido, a printer, had sometimes worked.

    But in a news release on Tuesday, the Pittsburg police seemed to be backing away from that theory, saying their search had come up empty, barring a “few items that will require further forensic examination.”

    On Monday, the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department said that a bone fragment had been found, but that it was not clear whether it was human.



     

    Parole Agency Changes Due to S.O. Case
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 31.08.2009
    Link to this news item: [00161]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00161 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    RSOL Signatory and well-known Texas Attorney, William Habern is to be congratulated on his role in this! (see August 2009 Digest, Part II, for an interview with him about the case mentioned here)
    -----------------------------------------

    Court cases forcing change at Texas parole agency
    U.S. judges question legality of practices they say violate due process rights of prisoners.
    By Mike Ward
    AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
    Austin, Texas
    Monday, August 31, 2009

    U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks had heard enough. After several days of listening to attorneys for the State of Texas defend the state parole board's operations, he became exasperated by the testimony of a parole board lawyer.

    "The lady is wrong. She is stating issues of the law that are wrong," he told the jury.


    (enlarge photo)
    Rissie Owens is chairwoman of Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
    MORE ON THIS STORY

    Sign up for our e-mail newsletter on Legislative coverage
    Legislative news inside the Virtual Capitol

    The rare display of judicial pique resulted in a mistrial after state lawyers objected that his remarks could have improperly influenced jurors. But Sparks had already made it clear that he had serious questions about whether parole board policies violate a prisoner's right to due process.

    Sparks is not the first judge to make such findings. In three other cases in two years, Austin federal judges have questioned the legality of the state's policies for placing restrictions on parolees, particularly sex offenders, who face some of the strictest conditions on their parole. Across Texas, parole officials said, more than a dozen other lawsuits on the issue are pending.

    The court cases have highlighted criticism of the parole board for not taking time to adequately review parole cases, for operating in secret, for not detecting errors in paperwork and for placing conditions on parolees that are not justified by the evidence. Although most of the cases so far have dealt with sex offenders, observers say that changing the rules for those cases could open the door to broader changes, including more openness.

    Although most Texans probably find it hard to sympathize with red-tape travails of convicted felons, a growing chorus of former and current parole officials agree that systemic troubles that have nettled Texas' secretive system for decades seem to be coming to a head.

    "This is all on a collision course," said Scott Medlock, director of the prisoner rights program for the Austin-based Texas Civil Rights Project. "Three federal judges and two appellate courts have told them the system has to change ... but the state's litigation strategy is that the (5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals) will bail them out. I don't think so."

    For their part, state parole officials say the current process is constitutional.

    "We have been advised by attorney after attorney after attorney that it is correct," said Rissie Owens, chairwoman of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.

    Even so, some officials on both sides concede that some change appears to be coming.

    In recent months, parole officials changed their procedure that listed parolees as sex offenders and placed restrictions on their activities once they were released — even if they had never been convicted of a sex crime — to allow inmates to see state-ordered evaluation reports. They have also been ordered to determine in each case whether the parolee constitutes a continuing threat to society because of a "lack of sexual control," a move that, if adopted for all sex-offender cases, promises to bring additional paperwork and reviews.

    "It doesn't appear to be a matter of if the process will change; it's now a matter of when," said Bill Habern, a Huntsville parole attorney who has been battling for years for such changes to the system. "I didn't used to be able to say that. We now have federal courts mandating this (due process in some cases)."

    Even so, parole officials have remained mum on what changes, if any, they are contemplating, citing the ongoing litigation. They also insist that their work may be misunderstood because of 1970s-era state laws that mandate secrecy, much more so than in other states. In Texas, convicts are not even allowed to see their own files and, until recently, could not see documents to which they had to respond as the parole board considered their release.

    The parole board reviews tens of thousands of cases each year of convicts who are eligible for parole. It also decides what conditions to attach to paroles, revokes parole of convicts who have violated those restrictions and rules on requests for clemency and pardons.

    Two former parole board members say they see problems with the way the agency operates.

    "It's horrible, a totally unbelievable system that is not working right," said former parole board member Bert Reyna, who left the panel in 2004.

    For example, he said, case summary reports should be made available to inmates and their attorneys.

    "There are too many mistakes in those files that are never caught, because there are currently no checks and balances in the system," Reyna said.

    In one case, he recalled, an inmate was listed as having killed another man, without any details, when in fact he had gunned down a federal probation officer outside the Laredo courthouse — making it a much more significant crime.

    In another case, an inmate was listed as having been involved in human smuggling and other crimes when he had no such convictions.

    "That information was about another inmate and somehow got in the wrong file," Reyna said. "I can't tell you how many times, when I checked the facts in those case summaries, the information was wrong."

    Then, too, say Reyna and Lynn Brown, who served on the state parole board from 1997 to 2004, the paperwork load facing the board encourages decisions without a full review of convicts' files.

    Even though some convicts' files have thousands of pages, Sparks estimated that board members review and approve parole conditions for some of the worst offenders once every 12 minutes — assuming they take no break for lunch and work an eight-hour day. Former and current board members say it's probably less than that.

    In fact, in 1999 when the Austin American-Statesman was allowed to watch parole decisions being made, in the first public access to the inner sanctum, they approved one every seven minutes — one every four minutes once a reporter stopped asking questions.

    "You have to move cases," Brown said. "There are so many that have to be voted each week. If you were out for a few days, you could get backed up where you couldn't even get in your office (because) there would be so many files there waiting to be voted."

    Owens and other parole board members have insisted in court testimony that they spend an appropriate amount of time reviewing and voting on the more than 74,800 paroles they considered last year. Just over 23,000 paroles were approved in 2008, nearly 31 percent.

    As far as mistakes in the files, parole officials insist they err on the side of public safety and do not vote to release convicts who are dangerous or pose a threat.

    Others have criticized the parole board for having to vote on cases a second time because members missed important information in the files and failed to impose conditions for parole, such as requiring drunken drivers not to drive or sex offenders to stay away from parks and schools.

    "There are hundreds of cases every month that have to be voted again because the board didn't impose the conditions they should have, because they didn't read the files," said Sandra Pickell, who retired last year as an assistant director of review and release processing for the state's parole division that processes paperwork for the parole board.

    Despite the ongoing legal challenges and complaints, parole officials defend the system, noting that any system this large — Texas has the second-highest prison population in the nation — will have some problems.

    Betty Wells, the parole board's general counsel, said any changes made so far to the system have applied only to specific cases, as ordered by a court.

    mward@statesman.com

     

    Ban Sex Offenders from the Internet?
    By posted by Renate <gvr123@aol.com>
    Posted on 16.08.2009
    Link to this news item: [00160]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item no. 00160 and send to Renate, gvr123@aol.com with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    CBS editorial says this law, passed recently UNANIMOUSLY in Illinois, goes too far, and keeps sex offenders from re-integrating into society: Good for CBS - send your comments to them and the editor, Declan McCullagh, declan@cbsnews.com


    URL For this is
    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/13/opinion/main5240568.shtml
    -------------------------------------------------------------------

    Home Opinion August 13, 2009
    CBSNEWS.COM
    Kicking Sex Offenders Off The Internet?
    Editorial by Declan McCullagh


    Forget MySpace: A New Illinois Law Says Sex Offenders Can't Use Google, Yahoo, Amazon, And Many Other Popular Sites

    If you believe its sponsors, a new Illinois law will keep sex offenders from recruiting children on the Internet.

    "If the predator is supposed to be a registered sex offender, they should keep their Internet distance as well as their physical distance," said sponsor Bill Brady, a Republican state senator, according to the Chicago Tribune. "The object is to protect innocent individuals on the Internet from sex offenders."

    If that were its effect, this would be a laudable piece of legislation. But in reality, the state law is written so broadly it would effectively prohibit registered sex offenders from using the Internet.

    It says "social networking websites" are off-limits, and defines those as "an Internet website containing profile web pages of the members of the website that include the names or nicknames of such members," or photographs, or any other personal information. Offenders must "refrain from accessing or using" such Web sites.

    Unfortunately, the Illinois state legislature didn't seem to recognize that many popular Web sites -- perhaps even the majority of the large ones -- fall into those categories.

    Google.com features user profiles, including name, photos and personal information. So do Yahoo.com, Amazon.com, geek site Slashdot.org, and aggregator site Digg.com.

    Sites like Hulu.com, Netflix, and Pandora do too, as do TV.com, MP3.com, and CNET.com. This overly broad scope makes the law vulnerable to a First Amendment challenge. (Those last three are our sister sites and are owned by CBSNews.com publisher CBS Interactive.)

    (It is surely coincidence that Bill Brady is a candidate for governor of Illinois, whose campaign biography says: "He fought for and passed legislation to protect children from sexual predators.")

    Now, perhaps Brady's intent truly was to ban sex offenders from the Internet, although if that's true you wouldn't know it from the former developer and realtor's public statements on the topic. Nor was it probably apparent to his colleagues in the state capitol, where the legislation was unanimously approved by both chambers -- or to Gov. Pat Quinn, who signed it into law this week.

    Like it or not, using Google, Yahoo, TV.com, and so on is part of modern life, and it's reasonable to hope that even sex offenders could be reintegrated into society rather than cordoned off from it and therefore more likely to relapse. One Justice Department release says that 5.3 percent of male sex offenders were rearrested within three years after their release from state prison.

    Brady's legislation also does not distinguish between violent criminals who have served prison time for rape -- and adults who are registered sex offenders because of youthful hijinks.

    The Economist published two stories on this topic last week. One, called "America's Unjust Sex Laws," says: "Janet Allison was found guilty of being 'party to the crime of child molestation' because she let her 15-year-old daughter have sex with a boyfriend. The young couple later married. But Ms. Allison will spend the rest of her life publicly branded as a sex offender."

    A second article tells the story of Wendy Whitaker, a 17-year-old high school student in Georgia, who preformed oral sex on a boy in her class. "Her classmate was three weeks shy of his 16th birthday. That made Ms. Whitaker a criminal. She was arrested and charged with sodomy, which in Georgia can refer to oral sex. She met her court-appointed lawyer five minutes before the hearing. He told her to plead guilty. She did not really understand what was going on, so she did as she was told," the magazine reported.

    No wonder that a Human Rights Watch report recommends a rethinking of U.S. laws in this area.

    It would be one thing if Illinois' new law said "sex offenders shall not use the Internet to harm or seduce a minor," or language to that effect. Unfortunately, the man who would be governor of that state seems to be more interested in taking credit for enacting a law rather than ensuring the right law is enacted.

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Declan McCullagh is a correspondent for CBSNews.com. He can be reached at declan@cbsnews.com.
     

    I-Phone S.O. Locater is Harmful!
    By posted by Margie <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 15.08.2009
    Link to this news item: [00159]
     
    Comments should refer to news item 00159 and be sent to thesnappy1@gmail.com with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    RSO is working on a project to oppose APPLE´s I-Phone use of sex offender data to send out to I-Phone users. At this moment, APPLE has suspended this feature, because it was clearly against the law that says public information (which the registry is) may not be sold!
    But it may come back. Look for action items on this soon.
    Alex

    -----------------------------------------------------------------
    Suffer the Children
    Violet Blue: The iPhone Sex Offender locator: considered harmful
    Violet Blue, special to SF Gate
    San Francisco CHRONICLE
    Thursday, August 13, 2009

    On the California Megan's Law Web site, which maintains a publicly accessible database on our state's registered sex offenders -- where they live, what they look like, what they were convicted for -- the word "masturbate" is spelled incorrectly. On the page that lists the extensive catalog of penal codes detailing offenses for which one would have to register and give up personal privacy for all the world to see, offense 311.3(b)(3) is, in fact, "Sexual exploitation: masterbation."

    I highly recommend that if you're hauled downtown and readied for conviction under 311.3(b)(3) that you bring a dictionary. Then you can pull it out (the dictionary) and say, "But no, Your Honor. I was engaged in masturbation."

    Hey, at least they spelled "penal" correctly.

    If it seems like I'm making light of a serious situation, it's just my hysteria seeping out about how absolutely broken our system is around dealing with sex crimes. I mean specifically predatory, violent, awful, and nonconsensual sex crimes -- the kind that should be illegal, which are illegal and punishable. However, take a trip down Megan's List and you'll never run Bay To Breakers again when you see 314.1 -- "Indecent exposure." Granted, take a closer reading of Section 314.1 and you'll see it expressly "prohibits conduct that is intended to direct public attention to his or her genitals for purposes of sexual arousal, gratification, or affront where there are other persons present to be offended or annoyed." (Citation: In re Smith (1972) 7 Cal.3d 362, 366. PDF) Simple nudity such as sunbathing or skinny dipping is not prohibited under 314.1. But annoy someone with your exposed penal code... and anyone busted for it must register as a sex offender for the rest of his or her life.

    It's no wonder that while I was researching the popular, then pulled, then replaced in a limited edition "Offender Locator iPhone App" I was aghast at which non-violent offenses might land someone's private information on the registry. I remarked about this and got a response on my Facebook page from a woman who works in the East Bay saying, "don't get me started...I work with sex offenders, some of whose "offenses" that they now have to register for are ridiculous."

    In case you're wondering, I tested the application (no, not on my precious N97 -- I am not of the Cult of iPhone) until it kicked me out for making too many searches. I'll put that on my resume. Enter an address or let it use your geo-location, and it gives you a map of offenders' home addresses. I searched my neighborhood -- the Castro -- and I searched SF City Jail (850 Bryant) and I searched the Marina Safeway, because, well, it seemed a good place to look.

    Disturbingly, the brief search icons of three menacing-looking men's faces are all ambiguously nonwhite. Just sayin'. I also got addresses and pictures and phone numbers for lots and lots of guys -- right there and ripe for accessible harassment.

    As The Economist put it in Sex laws: Unjust and ineffective, "The registry is a gold mine for lazy journalists." It's also an unofficial hit list. "Publicising sex offenders' addresses makes them vulnerable to vigilantism. In April 2006, for example, a vigilante shot and killed two sex offenders in Maine after finding their addresses on the registry. One of the victims had been convicted of having consensual sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend when he was 19. In Washington state in 2005 a man posed as an FBI agent to enter the home of two sex offenders, warning them that they were on a 'hit list' on the internet. Then he killed them. Murders of sex offenders are rare, but harassment is common. Most of the offenders interviewed for this article said they had experienced it."

    The article is a must-read, and goes in depth into one of the most glaring errors in the system, Wendy Whitaker, who lives as a registered sex offender for a sex act she did as a teen (with another teen), charged under a law that no longer exists. In Kids Charged for Child Porn: When Teens Make Their Own Porn, Who's Being Exploited? we learned about at least five more teenagers in various states who have been arrested and are currently charged for trafficking in child porn for texting naked pictures of themselves -- to each other. In Crazyland, USA, your kids are sex offenders and will end up on an iPhone app.

    As offenders, they will have no privacy, live in constant harassment, and laws like Megan's will make them live under bridges. This punishment is how you damage an (allegedly) already damaged human being to the point of no return. But aren't all legally bona fide sex offenders hateful and deserving of everything evil? Hate is easy currency to trade on, as you likely see in the comments of this column every week.

    Yes, the information on the Offender Locator iPhone App is public, as they claim to get their data from those carefully spell-checked online government databases -- just as anyone convicted of a crime is public record. It doesn't help though that app creator, TheVision2020, uses negative marketing scare tactics on their home page to sell their product -- spuriously stating, "Typical child sex offenders molest an average of 117 children." Says who?

    Is this company, ThinAir Wireless (aka TheVision2020.com) violating anything in providing, or profiting, off of this information? (If for profit, it'll likely be back and ad-supported, just like the free version I rode hard and put away wet -- which creepily had Harry Potter game ads across the top.) Who does this app actually help? It's not my question to answer, but we all need to ask whether or not the sex offender laws (which vary from state to state) are helping the people who desperately need help.

    In From sexual trauma to healing sex, we heard from the other side of the sexual abuse coin: the survivor. Author Staci Haines opens up about sexual healing after incest, rape, or abuse and her experience teaches us about the predators and the offenders we're too freaked out to even look at. Haines tells us, "The statistics of people who have experienced sexual abuse, from incest to adult rape, are shocking. One in three girls and one in six boys are sexually abused before their 18th birthday. These statistics cross class and cultural differences; there is not one group who sexually abuses while others do not. Most sexually abused children know their perpetrator (60-80 percent)." And as Haines knows all too well from her work at Generation Five, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, 93% of children who are victims of sexual abuse are victimized by family members or acquaintances.

    No wonder that despite there being 63,000 sex offenders registered in California (population: 36,756,666) the Offender Locator found so many, seemingly so close by. In a generation, the little map pins might just point right into your own house.

    So until sex offender laws make sense, and having access to the resulting information in your pocket actually helps people, please try to keep your penal code in your pants.


    Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/08/13/violetblue0813.DTL#ixzz0OHYKvJMP
     

    Police Allege S.O. Registry Misused
    By posted by eAdvocate <eadvocate@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 15.08.2009
    Link to this news item: [00158]
     
    Send comments to eAdvocate@yahoo.com with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    eAdvocate has made comments interspersed with the article, the URL of the article itself is
    http://www.telegram.com/article/20090814/NEWS/908140357/0/NEWS03
    ------------------

    Kim Ring
    Worcester (MA) Telegram & Gazette
    August 14, 2009

    POLICE ALLEGE REGISTRY MISUSED
    Woman accused of harassment of sex offender

    Woman accused of harassment of sex offender

    EAST BROOKFIELD — An Oxford woman who allegedly used the state’s sex offender registry to track down and harass a man she said raped her friend two decades ago will be tried in October on a charge of misusing the sex offender registry.

    Karyn E. Raymond, 46, of 447 Main St., Oxford, allegedly looked up information about Harry Andrews after her friend asked her to see if he was living in the area. The friend was allegedly a victim in a sexual assault case against Mr. Andrews, who is listed as a Level 3 sex offender.

    According to a police report, Ms. Raymond got the information from the Internet, used a mapping program to find Mr. Andrews’ address, and drove her friend to his home on Dec. 28.


    ((It would be nice to know what method she used to find him, a computer, a mapping site or a iPhone type of application! If anyone finds out please forward the link...eAdvocate))

    When they arrived, Mr. Andrews’ wife answered the door and summoned him after they asked to see him.

    According to the report, Ms. Raymond’s friend told Mr. Andrews that “she wanted him to know, ‘I forgive you.’ ” She later told police she has been in therapy and “they decided it would be a good time to let Harry know that she forgives him.”

    During the conversation, Mr. Andrews asked how the women had found him and Ms. Raymond told him she’d found him “on the Internet listed with all the other sex offenders. You are a monster.”

    The women were asked by Mr. Andrews’ wife to leave and Ms. Raymond became upset, pushing her and screaming, “A sex offender lives here,” and warning that something could happen to his family.

    The alleged victim then got Ms. Raymond to the car. The Andrewses copied the license plate number and called police, who tracked her down and filed charges.

    Ms. Raymond is to be tried on Oct. 7 in Western Worcester District Court in East Brookfield on charges of disorderly conduct, trespassing and two counts of assault and battery in addition to misuse of the sex offender registry.

    State law forbids use of the sex offender registry to harass an offender. A conviction on the charge could result in two-and-a-half years in the House of Correction or a fine of not more than $1,000.

    It is not clear whether the woman who visited Mr. Andrews was the victim in any of the three cases referenced on the state Web site.

    Ms. Raymond has been ordered to stay away from Mr. Andrews and his family
     

    Prosecutor´s Shrill Response to ECONOMIST
    By posted by Mary Sue Molnar <marysueintx@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 14.08.2009
    Link to this news item: [00157]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00157. Send comments to Mary Sue, marysueintx@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    ---
    Note from Alex - The mentality of this prosecutor shows how much work we have to do. Her attitude is prejudiced and uninformed. Among his worst ideas - long apposed by all civil libertarians - are mandatory minimums. We urge RSOL participants to go to this Huffington Post article and to send comments to them, with comments also on his Twitter site. Keep onto the Economist website, too, and send comments there.

    the url is
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-sax/did-the-economist-do-sex_b_258282.html
    His twitter address is www.twitter.com/robinsax

    Note: Ms. Sax has commented on the comments! And most comments are very strongly against what she has written. As one RSOL participant commented - Check out the responses from the readers, very encouraging. The author has her pitchfork ready, but the readers say, "Not so fast!"

    ----------------
    DID THE ECONOMIST DO SEX CRIMES JUSTICE?

    Robin Sax
    Former Deputy District Attorney, Legal Commentator, Author
    The Huffington Post
    August 13, 2009


    It's not often when an article from The Economist screams, "Robin, you need to read me." But it happened on August 6, 2009 when I read America's Unjust Sex Laws with the stringer, "An ever harsher approach is doing more harm than good, but it is being copied around the world."

    When I finished this article, my first feeling was shock. Clearly whoever wrote this article was a journalist and not a therapist, social worker, prosecutor, judge, and obviously not a politician. Nor did the writer live in the trenches of child sexual assault, as I have. Not wanting to rush to judgment, and agreeing/conceding some of the points presented, I decided to wait a few days to form any firm opinions on the article. Now that three days have passed, my nagging concerns have not subsided and I must address some of the issues I have with this article.

    First of all, child sexual assault is a disgusting issue -- we all can agree on that. But what most people don't realize is that far more often the misuse or abuse of sex laws lies with the enormous number of cases that do not get prosecuted -- or even filed!

    This occurs because the cases may not have qualified legally: there may have been lack of corroboration, lack of sufficient evidence, or dueling viewpoints ("he said/she said)." Sometimes, too, the perpetrator was so crafty in his abuse and so skilled, he ensured that corroboration would not be possible. Other times, there was a delay in the disclosure.

    If anything should be explored about the state of the law relating to sex offenders, it's the huge issue of a lack of prosecution, rather than too much of it!

    As a sex crimes prosecutor for the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, I always took into account the age, and the age difference, between a victim and a perpetrator. I never treated cases the same (as this article suggests is the common practice). And I can tell you that prosecutors around the country are using the same practices I used.

    For example, a person over 18 who had sex with a 10-year-old will be prosecuted differently than an 18-year-old having sex with a 15-year-old. Something in your gut tells you that this is a different situation, and the law treats it differently as well.

    In a case with only a three-year age difference and where the perpetrator is an otherwise upstanding member of society, there is no way that a first-time young "perp" would have to register as a sex offender for life. On the other hand, a 40-year -old having sex with a 15-year-old would be eligible for registration for life - and with good reason!

    There was one point that I did agree with in the article:

    The fact that kids engaging in "sexting" (kids who send nude or half naked photos of themselves over text messages) are being treated as sex offenders is not in the spirit of the law created to protect kids. The "sexting" phenomenon is an extension of children being curious during their sexual development.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm not condoning the behavior. However, a teenager sending a photo of herself to another teenager cannot be said to be sending commercial porn. Furthermore, making those kids register as sex offenders would be far too harsh an approach and would have a life-ruining effect that we want to avoid.

    The spirit of the article suggests that we need reform and as you can see, I agree--reform is necessary! But the biggest reform needs to be in how we judge sex crimes against children and particularly victims. Sex crimes should be treated as the heinous crimes they are.

    Sex offender registries should be very specific as to who the perpetrators are and what crimes got them on the list to begin with. However, before we start protecting the offenders, it's time we stood up for the victims.

    We need to realize that sexual assault does exist---in frighteningly huge numbers. And later, victims get re-victimized on the stand, and here, reform is also badly needed. But as we think about reform, let's first put our attention on the following areas first (For my reasoning and rationale, you will need to read my newest book It Happens Everyday: Inside the Life of A Sex Crimes DA):

    1. There should be mandatory sentencing schemes in all jurisdictions.

    2. We need utilize professional juries in sexual assault cases.

    3. There needs to be better supervision of registered sex offenders.

    4. Money and time should be available to train professionals in this field. This
    includes all the agencies involved, including law enforcement, prosecutors,
    advocates, therapists, judges, probation, and parole officers. Besides being current
    on the latest advances in this area, including the laws, studies show that training
    and resources prevent burnout and inspire and motivate people in this line of
    work.

    5. Specific courts should be designated and designed for child sexual assault (and child
    abuse) cases so they are 100% devoted to the needs and realities of kids who
    testify.

    This system can be modeled after the drug courts. These are in place in many
    jurisdictions where specific courts are devoted to drug addicts and focus on
    treatment as opposed to punishment. The courts work with defendants to address
    their issues and are sensitive to the needs of addicts.

    6. There should be limits to an attorney's ability to cross-examine and badger
    kids. One of the guarantees of our Constitution is that criminal defendants have the
    right to confront and cross-examine the witnesses against them. However, it often
    seems that our criminal justice system offers greater protection to the accused than
    to the child victim involved in a sexual abuse prosecution.


    7. Closed-circuit TV should be allowed more readily than presently used.

    8. Currently, admissibility of expert testimony requires the prosecutor to jump through a
    number of legal hoops. And even when admitted, the admissibility tends to be for
    extremely limited purposes. Expert testimony should be welcomed and encouraged
    (from both sides) in order to assist jurors in understanding the unique issues of child
    sexual assault.

    9. Defense attorneys should be as sensitive "true believers" about victims as they
    are about their own clients. There must be legislation to stop re-victimizing the victim
    during the court process and to cease casting blame on the victim for being a crime
    victim.

    10. Continuing a child sexual assault case for a prolonged period should be
    discouraged. Currently, the speediest cases are tried in roughly a
    year from the date they were filed (but not necessarily reported). Unlike fine
    wine, an aging case never gets better for the prosecution as time goes by.

    In fact, cases involving children should go to trial as soon as possible and definitely no
    later than six months from the filing. This is not only better for the pleading of the
    case, but is critical to the victim's healing process.

    11. As an alternative to jail and/or prison there should be live-in/lock-down facilities
    intended specifically for working with, treating and studying sex offenders. Like drug
    rehabilitation, there should be facilities where we can take a low-level sex offender off
    the street to ensure the safety of the public and treat him or her (if possible) or at least
    learn from the offender.

    12. There should be amendments to the rule against double jeopardy (which means you
    can't be tried twice for the same offense) to enable the re-opening of proceedings
    against acquitted defendants where there is compelling new evidence. This will apply
    to a range of grave offenses, including those involving serious sexual offenses.

    13. Defendants currently have a right to represent themselves (called pro per).
    There should be a total ban, or at least limitations, on what a child sexual assault
    defendant should be allowed to do in the criminal process. For example, he should
    not be able to personally conduct a direct or cross- examination of the complaining
    child witnesses against him. He should not be able to access all the discovery
    information that a defense attorney (an officer of the court) would normally receive,
    such as the victims' school records, rape exam photos, and other confidential records.

    14. If a case is appealed after a conviction, it may take two or three years before a court
    determines if the defendant is entitled to a new trial. If the defendant is granted a new
    trial, the prosecution would need to bring the victim in to testify again. The new or old
    testimony could then be used as inconsistencies, thus casting doubt on the victim's
    credibility. If the cause for appeal has nothing to do with the victim's testimony, the
    victim should not be made to come to court again and the entire prior testimony
    should be stipulated as accurate and complete.

    So, there you have it. I have finally fleshed out my response to the article that gave me so much angst.

    Follow Robin Sax on Twitter: www.twitter.com/robinsax
     

    Victim´s Parents Target AWA
    By posted by Fima <estrinyefim@gmail.com>
    Posted on 12.08.2009
    Link to this news item: [00156]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0156 and be sent to Fima, estrinyefim@gmail.com , with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm .

    --------------------------------------------------------------------
    URL:
    http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/08/12/victims_parents_target_violent_offender_laws/

    VICTIMS´ PARENTS TARGET VIOLENT OFFENDER LAWS
    By Maria Cramer
    THE BOSTON GLOBE
    August 12, 2009

    A violent offender is released from jail, moves into a town, and commits a hideous crime. The horrified community is outraged and demands a response. A politician drafts legislation, usually named after the victim, which at least temporarily quells the outcry.

    But that legislation is often not effective, can target the wrong people, and leaves the community no safer than it was before, said Andrea Casanova, the mother of Alexandra Zapp, a 30-year-old sailing enthusiast who was murdered by a sex offender at a rest stop in Bridgewater.

    Now, in partnership with the RAND Corporation, Casanova and her husband, working through the Ally Foundation created in her daughter’s honor, are launching a nonprofit institution that would analyze research done on sexual and violent offenders.

    The idea is to study the issue of recidivism the way scientists study disease: objectively and with an eye toward prevention. The goal is to provide research based on scientific evidence that would guide policy makers and community activists as they draft legislation or strategies to deal with violent perpetrators.

    “We keep making these laws that don’t protect the public,’’ said Casanova, who created the foundation after Zapp’s 2002 killing. “They don’t really help prevent recidivism.’’

    The partnership between the Ally Foundation and the global policy think tank comes as several laws and measures that target released sexual and violent offenders are facing criticism.

    Advocates say such laws, which impose a variety of regulations on sex offenders, help residents stay on guard for convicted predators whose behavior is difficult to predict once they are freed.

    Others have criticized the restrictions, for example, limits on where offenders can live, rules that stay in place even if the offender never commits another crime. Often, measures do not distinguish between criminals who are at high risk for reoffending and those who are not. Under some laws, a teenager caught having sex with an underage partner may be forced to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

    Through the partnership, Casanova said she hopes to provide a clearinghouse that will disseminate reliable research to both legislators and other citizens who want to know whether the laws in their own state or county are effective.

    Greg Ridgeway, RAND’s director of safety and justice research, said the plan is to raise about $2 million a year to analyze existing research and conduct new research. The Ally Foundation will help raise funds and raise awareness about the effort.

    “They are an unusual victim’s family, in that they recognize that there are serious problems in the system and they simply didn’t want another piece of legislation with Alexandra’s name on it that solves one little loophole,’’ said Ridgeway. “They wanted to do something bigger. They noticed there are tens of thousands of families like them, and they want to do something broader, that has an impact.’’

    Casanova has pushed for new laws on sex offenders since her daughter’s murder. She successfully fought to pass Ally’s Law, a state statute that makes it easier to commit sex offenders even after they have served their prison terms.

    Zapp’s killer, Paul J. Leahy, had previously been convicted of raping a 21-year-old woman at knifepoint, but a judge ruled he could not be civilly committed after his release from prison because his most recent sentence was for a nonsexual crime.

    This weekend, Casanova is hosting the seventh annual Flip Flop Regatta, a fund-raiser for the foundation.

    But she said this latest effort with the RAND Corporation is a “quantum leap’’ for her small organization.

    “We are just trying to figure out what really would work,’’ Casanova said. “I’m hoping it will reset all the standards for how we deal with sexual and violent offenders.’’

    Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, has worked with the foundation and supports the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, a federal law signed in 2006. The law, named after a 6-year-old boy who was kidnapped and killed in Florida, mandates that all states classify sex offenders into three tiers, strengthen penalties for failure to register, and order the worst offenders to update their whereabouts every three months.

    The law, which has yet to be implemented in any state, has been criticized in part because it bases its classification system on the crimes for which the offender was convicted, not a comprehensive risk assessment of the individual.

    Casanova said such laws are flawed because they are not based on research into successful programs or on scientific evidence.

    Allen praised the goals of Ally Foundation, but said he is skeptical of research that would try to predict the behavior of offenders.

    “I think the work they’re doing could add a great deal to our understanding of these problems,’’ Allen said. “The more we understand about why people offend and who they offend against and the more we can predict the behavior, the better we’re going to function as a society. The problem is the success of attempting to do that has been mixed at best.’’


     

    Judge Scolds Officers in S.O. Hearing
    By posted by Mary Sue Molnar <marysueintx@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 09.08.2009
    Link to this news item: [00155]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0155 and be sent to Mary Sue Molnar, marysueintx@yahoo.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    We congratulate Atty. William Habern, RSOL signatory, on yet another victory!!! Among other things, recent decisions in cases with Habern as the defense attorney, mean that defense attorney fees will be paid! This allows more pro bono cases for sex offender rights in Texas! Alex
    --------------------------------------------------------------

    Judge scolds parole officials over sex offender classification.
    Judge Sam Sparks stops trial after attorneys object to comments he made to jury about witness' testimony.
    By Mike Ward
    AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
    Austin, Texas
    Friday, August 07, 2009

    A federal judge on Thursday issued a stern rebuke to state corrections officials for the way they classify some parolees as sex offenders even though the defendants have never been convicted of sex crimes.

    U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks also voiced frustration with state parole officials for ignoring earlier court decisions and a previous directive by him and ordered the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to review whether to leave parolee Ray Curtis Graham on sex offender restrictions.

    "It's time for the parole division and the Board of Pardons and Paroles to stop being defensive and start trying not to use technical defenses," Sparks said, in ruling that the restrictions were not imposed on Graham legally and that parole officials ignored a subsequent court warning about the deficiency.

    "The undisputed evidence established no official involved in the ... process has ever made the necessary finding that Mr. Graham constituted a threat to society by his lack of sexual control."

    Sparks also declared a mistrial in the case after a week of testimony when attorneys for the state objected to comments he made to the jury about a witness' testimony.

    Graham filed suit against parole officials after they officially listed him as a sex offender in December 2007 — without allowing him to see the results of a psychiatric evaluation they ordered him to undergo or to appear with his attorneys at a hearing at which the decision was made. Graham, who served time in prison for burglary and attempted murder, was never convicted of a sex crime. He was arrested for aggravated rape in 1982, but was never convicted.

    In January 2008, Sparks warned the parole board that he had serious concerns about their policy on imposing restrictions on some parolees. For Graham, that meant requiring him to undergo sex-abuse therapy and barring him from becoming a minister and going to church, among other things.

    In a parole system known for its secrecy — decisions are usually made behind closed doors, and most parole files are not public record — Thursday's development marked a rare crack in that armor, although not the first. In three other cases in two years, Austin federal judges have questioned the legality of the state's policy by which restrictions are placed on parolees. Across Texas, parole officials said, more than a dozen other lawsuits on the issue are pending.

    "I think this case displays the arrogance of power that permeates the parole board," said Bill Habern, one of Graham's attorneys.

    That view is strongly disputed by parole officials, who insist they are following the law as they interpret it.

    Sparks stopped the trial Thursday morning after he contradicted a parole board witness on her testimony about federal court decisions.

    After former parole board general counsel Laura McElroy testified that federal court decisions allowed the state's policy, Sparks had told jurors: "The lady is wrong ... the lady is wrong ... (McElroy) is stating issues of the law that are just wrong."

    Assistant attorneys general representing the state complained that the judge's remarks might have prejudiced the six-member jury against Parole Board Chairwoman Rissie Owens and state parole director Stuart Jenkins.

    "I was out of bounds," Sparks said of his remarks. But he also told parole officials they will have to answer for their actions in not giving Graham a hearing before they imposed the conditions.

    While the case involved only Graham, Sparks said he believes the parole board has illegally placed restrictions on perhaps thousands of parolees who have been classified as sex offenders.

    "I don't believe the Board of Pardons and Paroles can justify the imposition (of the condition) on any parolee," Sparks said, citing wording in the current policy that says the condition can be attached if an offender "could" pose a public safety threat.

    "Everyone in this room is a possible risk to the public, including this federal judge," Sparks said, noting that restrictions had been placed on Graham even though the parole board never had made that finding in his case. "Actually, that's more troubling to the court than this individual case."

    Until June, parole officials routinely refused to give offenders a copy of psychiatric evaluations and other documents and to provide face-to-face hearings. That policy was changed after Graham's case appeared headed to trial.

    In testimony, parole officials said they specifically made the new policy retroactive to cover Graham and about 650 others without sex-crime convictions who have been placed under sex-offender rules.

    Parole officials repeatedly insisted the state policies are legal — even though Sparks in January 2008 strongly hinted they were unconstitutional and ordered copies of his order delivered to state parole officials. Several testified they had either never received it or not read it.

    Parole officials also said there was no legal requirement for a "live" hearing. To provide offenders hearings, they said, could cost more than $1.7 million a year for additional staff.

    Parole officials and a spokesman for the attorney general declined to comment on the case.

     

    ECONOMIST, PART II - Unjust, Ineffective Laws
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 09.08.2009
    Link to this news item: [00154]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0154 (see also News Item No. 0153) and be sent to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    PART II from the Economist - Featured as lead story in the Aug. 6 print and online editions.
    THIS IS BIG - please send comments to the Economist! Spread the word, send copies to legislators and opinion leaders.
    -------------------------------------------------------------------
    URL
    http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.?cfmstory_id=14164614
    Sex laws
    Unjust and ineffective
    Aug 6th 2009 | HARLEM, GEORGIA
    The Economist, Print Edition

    America has pioneered the harsh punishment of sex offenders. Does it work?

    ONE day in 1996 the lights went off in a classroom in Georgia so that the students could watch a video. Wendy Whitaker, a 17-year-old pupil at the time, was sitting near the back. The boy next to her suggested that, since it was dark, she could perform oral sex on him without anyone noticing. She obliged. And that single teenage fumble wrecked her life.

    Her classmate was three weeks shy of his 16th birthday. That made Ms Whitaker a criminal. She was arrested and charged with sodomy, which in Georgia can refer to oral sex. She met her court-appointed lawyer five minutes before the hearing. He told her to plead guilty. She did not really understand what was going on, so she did as she was told.

    She was sentenced to five years on probation. Not being the most organised of people, she failed to meet all the conditions, such as checking in regularly with her probation officer. For a series of technical violations, she was incarcerated for more than a year, in the county jail, the state women’s prison and a boot camp. “I was in there with people who killed people. It’s crazy,” she says.

    She finished her probation in 2002. But her ordeal continues. Georgia puts sex offenders on a public registry. Ms Whitaker’s name, photograph and address are easily accessible online, along with the information that she was convicted of “sodomy”. The website does not explain what she actually did. But since it describes itself as a list of people who have “been convicted of a criminal offence against a victim who is a minor or any dangerous sexual offence”, it makes it sound as if she did something terrible to a helpless child. She sees people whispering, and parents pulling their children indoors when she walks by.

    Punish first, think later
    The registry is a gold mine for lazy journalists. A local television station featured Ms Whitaker in a spot on local sex offenders, broadcasting a helpful map showing where she lives but leaving the specifics of the crime to each viewer’s fearful imagination. “My husband’s family saw me on TV,” she says. “That’s embarrassing.”

    What Ms Whitaker did is no longer a crime in Georgia. The state’s sodomy laws, which in 1996 barred oral sex even between willing spouses, were struck down by court rulings in 1998 and 2003. And since 2006, thanks to a “Romeo and Juliet” clause in a sex-crimes law, consensual sex between two teenagers has been a misdemeanour, not a crime, if one partner is underage but no more than four years younger than the other.

    The Romeo and Juliet clause was not retroactive, however, so Ms Whitaker is stuck on the register, and subject to extraordinary restrictions. Registered sex offenders in Georgia are barred from living within 1,000 feet of anywhere children may congregate, such as a school, a park, a library, or a swimming pool. They are also banned from working within 1,000 feet of a school or a child-care centre. Since the church at the end of Ms Whitaker’s street houses a child-care centre, she was evicted from her home. Her husband, who worked for the county dog-catching department, moved with her, lost his job and with it their health insurance.

    Thanks to a lawsuit filed by the Southern Centre for Human Rights, a group that campaigns against rough justice, Ms Whitaker won an injunction allowing her to return home. But her husband did not get his job back, and now works as a labourer. The two of them are struggling financially. And Ms Whitaker is still fighting to get her name removed from the registry. “When you’re a teenager, you do stuff,” she says. “You don’t think you’ll be paying for it when you’re nearly 30.”

    Every American state keeps a register of sex offenders. California has had one since 1947, but most states started theirs in the 1990s. Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.

    Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded. As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota. As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. America’s registers keep swelling, not least because in 17 states, registration is for life.

    Georgia has more than 17,000 registered sex offenders. Some are highly dangerous. But many are not. And it is fiendishly hard for anyone browsing the registry to tell the one from the other. The Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board, an official body, assessed a sample of offenders on the registry last year and concluded that 65% of them posed little threat. Another 30% were potentially threatening, and 5% were clearly dangerous. The board recommended that the first group be allowed to live and work wherever they liked. The second group could reasonably be barred from living or working in certain places, said the board, and the third group should be subject to tight restrictions and a lifetime of monitoring. A very small number “just over 100” are classified as “predators”, which means they have a compulsion to commit sex offences. When not in jail, predators must wear ankle bracelets that track where they are.

    Despite the board’s findings, non-violent offenders remain listed and subject to a giant cobweb of controls. One rule, championed by Georgia’s House majority leader, banned them from living within 1,000 feet of a school bus stop. This proved unworkable. Thomas Brown, the sheriff of DeKalb county near Atlanta, mapped the bus stops in his patch and realised that he would have to evict all 490 of the sex offenders living there. Other than the bottom of a lake or the middle of a forest, there was hardly anywhere in Georgia for them to live legally. In the end Georgia’s courts stepped in and suspended the bus-stop rule, along with another barring sex offenders from volunteering in churches. But most other restrictions remain.

    Sex-offender registries are popular. Rape and child molestation are terrible crimes that can traumatise their victims for life. All parents want to protect their children from sexual predators, so politicians can nearly always win votes by promising curbs on them. Those who object can be called soft on child-molesters, a label most politicians would rather avoid. This creates a ratchet effect. Every lawmaker who wants to sound tough on sex offenders has to propose a law tougher than the one enacted by the last politician who wanted to sound tough on sex offenders.

    A self-defeating pillory
    So laws get harsher and harsher. But that does not necessarily mean they get better. If there are thousands of offenders on a registry, it is harder to keep track of the most dangerous ones. Budgets are tight. Georgia’s sheriffs complain that they have been given no extra money or manpower to help them keep the huge and swelling sex-offenders’ registry up to date or to police its confusing mass of rules. Terry Norris of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association cites a man who was convicted of statutory rape two decades ago for having consensual sex with his high-school sweetheart, to whom he is now married. “It doesn’t make it right, but it doesn’t make him a threat to anybody,” says Mr Norris. “We spend the same amount of time on that guy as on someone who’s done something heinous.”

    Money spent on evicting sex offenders cannot be spent on treating them. Does this matter? Politicians pushing the get-tough approach sometimes claim that sex offenders are mostly incorrigible: that three-quarters or even nine out of ten of them reoffend. It is not clear where they find such numbers. A study of nearly 10,000 male sex offenders in 15 American states found that 5% were rearrested for a sex crime within three years. A meta-analysis of 29,000 sex offenders in Canada, Britain and America found that 24% had reoffended after 15 years.

    That is obviously still too high. Whether or not treatment can help is disputed. A Californian study of sex offenders who underwent “relapse prevention”, counselling of the sort that alcoholics get from Alcoholics Anonymous, found that it was useless. But a meta-analysis of 23 studies by Karl Hanson of Canada’s department of public safety found that psychological therapy was associated with a 43% drop in recidivism. Some offenders—particularly men who rape boys—are extremely hard to treat. Some will never change until they are too old to feel sexual urges. But some types of treatment appear to work for some people and further research could yield more breakthroughs.

    Publicising sex offenders’ addresses makes them vulnerable to vigilantism. In April 2006, for example, a vigilante shot and killed two sex offenders in Maine after finding their addresses on the registry. One of the victims had been convicted of having consensual sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend when he was 19. In Washington state in 2005 a man posed as an FBI agent to enter the home of two sex offenders, warning them that they were on a “hit list” on the internet. Then he killed them.

    Murders of sex offenders are rare, but harassment is common. Most of the offenders interviewed for this article said they had experienced it. “Bill”, who spent nine months in jail for having consensual sex with a 15-year-old when he was 27 and is now registered in North Carolina, says someone put up posters with his photograph on them around his district. (In at least four states, each offender’s profile on the online registry comes with a handy “click to print” function.) The local kids promptly stopped playing with Bill’s three children. And someone started leaving chopped-up sausages on his car, a possible reference to castration. Bill and his family moved house.

    Jill Levenson, of Lynn University in Florida, says half of registered sex offenders have trouble finding jobs. From 20% to 40% say they have had to move house because a landlord or neighbour realised they were sex offenders. And most report feeling depressed, hopeless or afraid.

    “Mike” spent a year and a half behind bars for statutory rape after having sex with a girl who said she was 17, but was two years younger. He was 22 at the time. Since his release, he has struggled to hold down a job. Once, he found work as a security guard, but his probation officer told him to quit, since the uniform lent him an air of authority, which would not do.

    He is now unemployed, and lives in a flophouse in Atlanta between a jail and a strip club. The area is too desolate to have any schools or parks, so he is allowed to live there. His neighbours are mostly other sex offenders and mentally ill folk who talk to themselves. “It’s Bumville,” sighs Mike. His ambition is to get a job, keep it and move out. Any job will do, he says.

    Several studies suggest that making it harder for sex offenders to find a home or a job makes them more likely to reoffend. Gwenda Willis and Randolph Grace of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, for example, found that the lack of a place to live was “significantly related to sexual recidivism”. Candace Kruttschnitt and Christopher Uggen of the University of Minnesota and Kelly Shelton of the Minnesota Department of Corrections tracked 556 sex offenders on probation and found less recidivism among those with a history of stable employment.

    Some bosses do not mind hiring sex offenders, if they know the full story and the offender does not seem dangerous. But an accessible online registry makes it all but certain that a colleague or a customer will find out about a sexual conviction. Sex offenders often report being sacked for no apparent reason. Mike had a job at a cake shop. His boss knew about his record. But one day, without warning, he was fired.

    Publicly accessible sex-offender registries are intended to keep people safe. But there is little evidence that they do. A study by Kristen Zgoba of the New Jersey Department of Corrections found that the state’s system for registering sex offenders and warning their neighbours cost millions of dollars and had no discernible effect on the number of sex crimes. Restricting where sex offenders can live is supposed to keep them away from potential victims, but it is doubtful that this works. A determined predator can always catch a bus.

    Laws that make life hard for sex offenders also affect their families. A survey by Ms Levenson found that 86% of family members felt stressed because of registration and residence rules, and 49% feared for their own safety. “It’s very difficult,” says Bill. “Pretty much all the things that make you a good father are now illegal for me to do.” He cannot take his children to a park, a pool, or a museum. He cannot be at any of their school events. And his children are ostracised. “The parents find out I’m registered and that’s it,” he sighs.

    The penalties for sex offenders who break the rules can be severe. In Georgia the first time you fail to provide an accurate address or register annually with the county sheriff to be photographed and fingerprinted, you face ten to 30 years in prison. The second time: life. Yet because living on a public sex-offender registry is so wretched, many abscond.

    Some states have decided that harsher sex laws are not always better. Iowa has sharply reduced the number of sex offences for which residency restrictions apply. Previously, all Iowan sex offenders who had abused children were barred from living within 2,000 feet of a school or child-care centre. Since where offenders lived was defined as where they slept, many would spend the day at home with their families and sleep at night in their cars at a highway rest stop. “That made no sense,” says Corwin Ritchie of the Iowa County Attorneys Association. “We don’t try to monitor where possible bank robbers sleep.”

    The Iowan politicians who relaxed the law gave themselves cover by adding a new rule against “loitering” near schools. Mr Ritchie thinks the new rules are better, but he would rather get rid of the residency restrictions entirely and let probation officers make recommendations for each individual offender.

    No quarter
    Nationwide, the trend is to keep getting stricter. In 1994 Congress ordered all states that had not yet done so to set up sex-offender registries or lose some funding. Two years later it ordered them to register the most serious offenders for life. In 2006 it passed the Adam Walsh Act, named for a six-year-old boy who was kidnapped and beheaded, broadening the categories of offence for which registration is required and obliging all states to upload their registries to a national database. States had until this summer to comply with that provision. Some objected. In May they were given another year’s breathing space.

    Other countries now seem to be following America’s lead. Hottest on its heels is Britain, where the sex-offenders’ registry includes children as young as 11. The British list is not open to the public, but in some areas parents may ask for a check on anyone who has unsupervised access to their child. France, too, now has a closed national directory of sex-offenders, as does Austria, which brought in some American-style movement restrictions on sex offenders earlier this year. After the disappearance in Portugal in 2007 of Madeleine McCann, a British toddler, some European politicians have called for a pan-European registry.

    Human Rights Watch urges America to scale back its sex-offender registries. Those convicted of minor, non-violent offences should not be required to register, says Ms Tofte. Nor should juveniles. Sex offenders should be individually assessed, and only those judged likely to rape someone or abuse a child should be registered. Such decisions should be regularly reviewed and offenders who are rehabilitated (or who grow too old to reoffend) should be removed from the registry. The information on sex-offender registries should be held by the police, not published online, says Ms Tofte, and released “on a need-to-know basis”. Blanket bans on all sex offenders living and working in certain areas should be abolished. Instead, it makes sense for the most dangerous offenders sometimes to face tailored restrictions as a condition of parole.

    That package of reforms would bring America in line with the strictest laws in other rich countries. But few politicians would have the courage to back it. “Jane”, the mother of a sex offender in Georgia, says she sent a letter to her senator, Saxby Chambliss, urging such reforms. “They didn’t even read it,” she says. “They just sent me a form letter assuring me that they were in favour of every sex offender law, and that [Senator Chambliss] has grandchildren he wants to protect.”
     

    THE ECONOMIST: AMERICA´S UNJUST SEX LAWS
    By posted by Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 08.08.2009
    Link to this news item: [00153]
     
    Comments should refer to news item no. 00153 and be sent to alex marbury - alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    This is a FANTASTIC breakthrough for sex offender law reform - we urge rsol participants to mail copies of this to all state legistlators and US congresspersons who represent them. If this could get to Atty Gen Holder, it should make a difference.
    Also, buy the Economist and give it to opinion makers you know - pastors, teachers, social workers, lawyers in your hometown. And visit the Economist url, and put your comments there!
    Alex
    -------------------------------------------------
    URL for this article is
    http://www.economist.com/printedition/

    Illiberal Politics

    AMERICA´S UNJUST SEX LAWS
    by Robert Guest
    Aug 6th 2009
    From The Economist print edition

    An ever harsher approach is doing more harm than good, but it is being copied around the world

    IT IS an oft-told story, but it does not get any less horrific on repetition. Fifteen years ago, a paedophile enticed seven-year-old Megan Kanka into his home in New Jersey by offering to show her a puppy. He then raped her, killed her and dumped her body in a nearby park. The murderer, who had recently moved into the house across the street from his victim, had twice before been convicted of sexually assaulting a child. Yet Megan’s parents had no idea of this. Had they known he was a sex offender, they would have told their daughter to stay away from him.

    In their grief, the parents started a petition, demanding that families should be told if a sexual predator moves nearby. Hundreds of thousands signed it. In no time at all, lawmakers in New Jersey granted their wish. And before long, “Megan’s laws” had spread to every American state.

    America’s sex-offender laws are the strictest of any rich democracy. Convicted rapists and child-molesters are given long prison sentences. When released, they are put on sex-offender registries. In most states this means that their names, photographs and addresses are published online, so that fearful parents can check whether a child-molester lives nearby. Under the Adam Walsh Act of 2006, another law named after a murdered child, all states will soon be obliged to make their sex-offender registries public. Such rules are extremely popular. Most parents will support any law that promises to keep their children safe. Other countries are following America’s example, either importing Megan’s laws or increasing penalties: after two little girls were murdered by a school caretaker, Britain has imposed multiple conditions on who can visit schools.

    Which makes it all the more important to ask whether America’s approach is the right one. In fact its sex-offender laws have grown self-defeatingly harsh (see article). They have been driven by a ratchet effect. Individual American politicians have great latitude to propose new laws. Stricter curbs on paedophiles win votes. And to sound severe, such curbs must be stronger than the laws in place, which in turn were proposed by politicians who wished to appear tough themselves. Few politicians dare to vote against such laws, because if they do, the attack ads practically write themselves.

    A WHOLE WYOMING OF OFFENDERS

    In all, 674,000 Americans are on sex-offender registries—more than the population of Vermont, North Dakota or Wyoming. The number keeps growing partly because in several states registration is for life and partly because registries are not confined to the sort of murderer who ensnared Megan Kanka. According to Human Rights Watch, at least five states require registration for people who visit prostitutes, 29 require it for consensual sex between young teenagers and 32 require it for indecent exposure. Some prosecutors are now stretching the definition of “distributing child pornography” to include teens who text half-naked photos of themselves to their friends.

    How dangerous are the people on the registries? A state review of one sample in Georgia found that two-thirds of them posed little risk. For example, Janet Allison was found guilty of being “party to the crime of child molestation” because she let her 15-year-old daughter have sex with a boyfriend. The young couple later married. But Ms Allison will spend the rest of her life publicly branded as a sex offender.

    Several other countries have sex-offender registries, but these are typically held by the police and are hard to view. In America it takes only seconds to find out about a sex offender: some states have a “click to print” icon on their websites so that concerned citizens can put up posters with the offender’s mugshot on trees near his home. Small wonder most sex offenders report being harassed. A few have been murdered. Many are fired because someone at work has Googled them.

    Registration is often just the start. Sometimes sex offenders are barred from living near places where children congregate. In Georgia no sex offender may live or work within 1,000 feet (300 metres) of a school, church, park, skating rink or swimming pool. In Miami an exclusion zone of 2,500 feet has helped create a camp of homeless offenders under a bridge.

    MAKE THE PUNISHMENT FIT THE CRIME

    There are three main arguments for reform. First, it is unfair to impose harsh penalties for small offences. Perhaps a third of American teenagers have sex before they are legally allowed to, and a staggering number have shared revealing photographs with each other. This is unwise, but hardly a reason for the law to ruin their lives. Second, America’s sex laws often punish not only the offender, but also his family. If a man who once slept with his 15-year-old girlfriend is barred for ever from taking his own children to a playground, those children suffer.

    Third, harsh laws often do little to protect the innocent. The police complain that having so many petty sex offenders on registries makes it hard to keep track of the truly dangerous ones. Cash that might be spent on treating sex offenders—which sometimes works—is spent on huge indiscriminate registries. Public registers drive serious offenders underground, which makes them harder to track and more likely to reoffend. And registers give parents a false sense of security: most sex offenders are never even reported, let alone convicted.

    It would not be hard to redesign America’s sex laws. Instead of lumping all sex offenders together on the same list for life, states should assess each person individually and include only real threats. Instead of posting everything on the internet, names could be held by the police, who would share them only with those, such as a school, who need to know. Laws that bar sex offenders from living in so many places should be repealed, because there is no evidence that they protect anyone: a predator can always travel. The money that a repeal saves could help pay for monitoring compulsive molesters more intrusively—through ankle bracelets and the like.

    In America it may take years to unpick this. However practical and just the case for reform, it must overcome political cowardice, the tabloid media and parents’ understandable fears. Other countries, though, have no excuse for committing the same error. Sensible sex laws are better than vengeful ones.

     

    Chasing Monsters Who Don´t Exist
    By posted by Fima and Tonia <estrinyefim@gmail.com,toniat@sbcglobal.net>
    Posted on 25.07.2009
    Link to this news item: [00152]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00152 and send to Fima and Tonia at the above email addresses, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    This is a very important article, including good quotes from Nancy Sabine of the Jacob Wetterling Research Center (JWRC), a group that is dedicated to opposing child sexual abuse, but which has increasingly advocated real reform. We urge rsol participants to go to the JWRC website - www.jwrc.org. (Alex Marbury)

    ---------------------------------------------

    TOO CLOSE TO HOME
    by Bob Grawey
    Staff writer
    STAR NEWS
    Elk River, Minnesota
    July 24, 2009


    When a Level 2 sex offender recently moved into Otsego, it caused people some anxiety. Around that same time the city passed an ordinance governing where a Level 3 sex offender could live, and most importantly to many people, where such an at-risk offender could not live.

    For many, the answer is simple: Do not allow sex offenders of any kind near any children at any time. However, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) Web site states, “There are no provisions in Minnesota’s registration law which prohibit registered offenders from living in the vicinity of a school or day care.”

    It does go on to say that restrictions can be placed on certain offenders.


    The city of Minneapolis Web site clarifies that such a provision can be made in the case of an offender committing a sexual crime whereby he or she had gotten access to a school or day care in committing the sexual crime. In that case the person would not be allowed near such places.

    According to Nancy Sabine, director of the Jacob Wetterling Research Center (JWRC), classifying all sex offenders as predatory and harmful and restricting where they can live is a flawed approach in dealing with sex offenders.

    “Residency laws don’t do one shred of good,” Sabine claims. “We’ve worked all the Minnesota cases backwards from 2007 to see if any residency restrictions would have prevented one crime. Not one. The crimes are happening because they are connected to relationships. They are people you trust, so you go off with them to your house, their house, to the park or wherever.”

    She contends a sex offender living near a school or playground has no significance.

    “Think of how many crimes you see committed in those two areas. These sex crimes to children are committed on the way to school or on the way home from school by a neighbor, a friend, a civic leader like a Boy Scout or Girl Scout leader and that kind of thing,” Sabine explains.

    One of the classic examples, the JWRC director says, is that these zoned residencies keep the offender away from children at schools or day cares, but while kids are at these places during the day, most offenders are away at work. In essence the system is restricting where the offender sleeps at night, she points out.

    “It’s ridiculous. We don’t think it through far enough to make sound public policy,” Sabine says. “What we’re doing is grandstanding around one of the most loaded issues in the public’s mind. Politicians pass all these regulations, and the public thinks they’re doing well, but we don’t see any change in things.”

    It is ironic, but Sabine says the very foundation that was so influential in getting the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act passed, is now speaking out against its widespread misuse. She says the law’s intent mandated that violent sex offenders get placed on a registry. It was meant to be just one tool in a tool kit that dealt with serious, violent and patterned sex offenders. Now, however, it is being applied to all sex offenders.

    The JWRC director adds the misuse is caused because everyone who has committed a sex crime is registered on the Predatory Offender Registry, and that there are many sex crimes that are not predatory in nature.

    Sabine explains: “Non-predatory crimes include things like public urination and what we call “Romeo and Juliet” situations where you might have a 19-year-old getting caught having sex with a 15-year-old which is beyond the three-year age limit (difference in age of someone over 18 years old and someone under the legal age). These are two kids who care about each other, and it’s not predatory. We don’t want the same kind of punishment levied on these kinds of situations as we do the Alfonso Rodriguezes of the world who steal young women like Dru (Sjodin).”

    Other lower level sex crimes Sabine talks about that are included in the offender registry include oral sex at school and sexting (when people send pornographic images of themselves or others via their cell phones). These are sex crimes juveniles commit that are added to the sex offender registry, but crimes Sabine maintains are not predatory.

    “These are good kids making poor choices that harm other people,” Sabine says, “especially when they share the photos. But, I want to be clear; there are no lower level sexual crimes that are excusable. We are all for preventing every single act of sexual harm we can.”

    Research shows, Sabine continues, that treatment and supervision is far more effective with juvenile sex offenders, and that 97 percent of those juveniles on the registry never offend as adults.

    But Sabine has issues with more than juvenile offenders getting classified with the more serious sex offenders. She says the way the system is set up now does a disservice to everyone, including the offender who is not a predator.

    “If you keep using a one-size-fits-all approach,” Sabine says, “you keep confusing who is doing the deed, how they are doing it, where they’re doing it and more specifically and most importantly, what works best in preventing and reducing those kinds of crimes.”

    Sabine’s idea of a predatory Level 3 sex offender is someone who willfully victimizes another person, often done in a manipulative, conniving and pre-planned manner. Often, she says, they are crimes of aggression and less sexual in nature but because they are sexual crimes, people cannot separate the two.

    As with abduction crimes that have declined over the past 15 years due to better prevention methods to keep kids safe, Sabine wants to see the same trend evolve in the case of sex oriented crimes. The approach has to change, though.

    “The more we allow hatred to drive our choices, the less likely our families will come forward to get help for these kids who are doing harmful acts. They’re just going to hide it,” Sabine contends.

    She quotes a statistic that says 90 percent of all sex criminals incarcerated every year in Minnesota prisons are first-time offenders.

    “That means we are growing sex offenders, and we are growing them in our homes,” Sabine warns. “People think they are coming from somewhere else so nobody is getting them help.”

    In 19 years of dealing with law enforcement agencies in issues involving sexual exploitation, Sabine says of the 78 families that experienced the most heinous crimes during that time frame, just two perpetrators had any previous sex offenses.

    “That’s staggering to me,” Sabine says. “We keep going after the monsters that don’t exist.”


     

    Mississippi Court Throws out Banishment
    By posted by Mary <rsolvirginia@comcast.net>
    Posted on 24.07.2009
    Link to this news item: [00151]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00151 and send to Mary, rsolvirginia@comcast.net, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    ------------------------
    By Associated Press
    4:31 AM CDT, July 23, 2009
    (As aired by WREG TV, Channel 3, Memphis, Tn.)

    JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The state Court of Appeals has thrown out a lower court order that a McComb man be banished from Mississippi once his completes a 25-year sentence for a sex crime conviction.

    Richard A. Simoneaux (SIM'-uh-noh) pleaded guilty in 2004 in Pike County to spying on and assaulting nursing home residents. Simoneaux pleaded guilty to attempted burglary, two counts voyeurism, sexual battery, sexual abuse of a vulnerable adult and burglary of a dwelling.

    The trial judge sentenced Simoneaux to 30 years without parole with five years suspended. The judge also ordered Simoneaux to leave Mississippi once he is released from prison.

    The Appeals Court rejected Simoneaux claims his pleas were not voluntary, that his attorney could have done a better job but agreed banishment was too harsh.


     

    Son of S.O. Murdered by Vigilante
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 22.07.2009
    Link to this news item: [00150]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00150 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    How much further does this hateful madness have to go before America wakes up? This is from an rsol participant who does not leave an email address - PLEASE INCLUDE email even if you want to be anonymous, and I´ll send you the comments. Also, I´ve included the original item from the website news, plus comments.
    Alex
    ----------------
    Atlanta Teen Killed in Florida

    Atlanta Teen Killed in
    Daytona Beach

    Monday, 20 Jul 2009, 6:00 PM EDT

    * Edited By: Leigha Baugham | myfoxatlanta.com

    ATLANTA (MyFOX ATLANTA) - A 13-year-old from Atlanta was murdered while visiting family in Florida. Police said the boy was shot in the face early Monday morning by someone lurking around his family's home.

    Thirteen-year-old Lloyd Robinson, Jr. had just finished 7th grade and was spending the summer with his dad before heading back to school.

    "It's just a total period of pain for me and I wish this on nobody. I fear burying my kids and I am making funeral arrangements for my son and I shouldn't be," said the teen's father, Lloyd Robinson, Sr.

    Daytona Beach police said there was a knock on the door at the Robinson's home just after 4:00 a.m. A woman asked for someone who wasn\'t there and the teen's father told the woman to go around to the glass door. When Robinson, Sr. tired to open the door a man came around the side of the house and fired two shots inside.

    One bullet grazed Robinson, Sr., the other one killed his son.

    "It's very sad they would come into a house and shoot and kill nothing but a child," said Martha Hamilton.

    Robinson Sr. said he is a registered sex offender and it is possible someone went after him because of those charges, but he said it was probably a case of mistaken identity.

    Police said there was no motive in the case.

    Chief Michael Chitwood said he was pretty sure that it wasn't a random shooting, and the woman and the shooter were looking for Robinson, Sr., but killed his son instead.

    The teen's mother drove from Atlanta to Daytona Beach Monday. The teen was originally supposed to return to Atlanta Sunday morning, but decided to stay a little longer.
    COMMENTS
    Guest says:
    Today, 7:38:48 AM
    “Dad May Have Been Intended Target In Son's Murder
    http://www.wftv.com/countybycounty/20120208/detail.html

    Robinson Sr. 38 years old , didn't try to hide his past, which starts with a sex offense on a minor in 1990

    He was charged 04/01/1991, Lewd, lascivious child U16: F.S. 800.04 (principal) case 9005436 Volusia, Fl.

    What I find very interesting is Florida's sex offender laws began in 1996. Mr. Robinson is listed retroactively? He was what 17- 18 years old when he was charged. Was this one of the consensual teenage incidences where the young man pays for life or should I say his sons pays with his life? There is a Hugh problem with these laws if Mr. Robinson was the main target because he was a registrant of the sex offender registry. The government must face the FACT that these laws do more harm then good. Florida created the "HIT LIST" and they should pay! Florida put that "bulls eye" on this man and his son! The way I see it, The state of Florida is responsible for the death of this little boy!

    If any person created a "HIT LIST" they would be prosecuted, it would not matter what their reason would be, they are held responsible. If someone on their list is harmed they would be charged with the crime. 1 + 1 = 2 Can Florida's government add?

     

    On Eve of RSOL Conference, SO Kills Self in Mass
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 21.07.2009
    Link to this news item: [00149]
     
    COmments about this News Item refer to News Item 00149 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    A VERY SAD AND IRONIC story. On the eve of our first national RSOL conference in Massachusetts, a terrible tragedy took place near-by. So many desperate people are affected by the current US approach to ¨sexual deviance.¨ Nothing can possibly be helped by this. Something has to change!
    Alex Marbury
    -------------------------------------
    http://lohud.com/article/20090711/NEWS02/907110350/-1/SPORTS

    Pound Ridge man who faced teen-rape charges in Mass. kills himself

    By Hoa Nguyen and Shawn Cohen

    POUND RIDGE - A former Boy Scout leader from Pound Ridge who had arranged to turn himself in to Massachusetts police on charges he raped a teenage boy killed himself Thursday, officials said.

    Dan Bathrick, 56, of 26 Lower Trinity Pass Road was to be charged with rape of a minor and conspiracy to commit rape of a minor by Northfield , Mass. , police on July 23 - the date Bathrick's lawyer, Geoffrey Nathan, had arranged for him to surrender. But he sent a suicide note to his family Wednesday, left his vehicle at his office and walked 3 miles south to his home where he killed himself, Nathan said.

    He was found suffocated with a plastic bag taped over his face, said the Westchester County medical examiner. Asphyxiation was the cause of death.

    "I never saw this coming," said Nathan, whose office is in Boston . "I want it known that he appeared to be a very nice man, and as a lesson, that no one should do what he did. No crime is something to take your life over."

    Bathrick was accused of having sex with a teenager who was between the ages of 14 and 15 at the time.

    A judge in Greenfield ( Mass. ) District Court issued the warrant Tuesday charging Bathrick with the two felonies, the court clerk's office said. Northfield police reported the case to the District Attorney's Office on April 6, saying the abuse started about two years ago and that Bathrick, a longtime friend of the victim's family, abused the boy multiple times.

    Bathrick's relationship with the family dates back 25 to 30 years, and started through the Boy Scouts, according to a report Northfield police Sgt. Robert Leighton wrote detailing Bathrick's statements to authorities.

    Bathrick said he would visit the victim and his family four times a year, even vacationing with them on Cape Cod and taking them on vacation to Disney World in Florida , according to the report. Authorities released the report yesterday, redacting all of the names to protect the identity of the victim and his family.

    Bathrick initially said "he never played with (the victim) below the waist line" and "that there was nothing sexual with what he was doing." But later, Bathrick's denials about touching the victim's genitals became less definitive.

    "He said, 'Could it have happened, I don't believe it did.' He then said, 'If it did, it was short,'" the report said.

    Bathrick also told police that when he was 9 years old, he was abused by his father's now-deceased friend, and had male oral sex on two occasions when he was 12 years old, the report said.

    After interviewing him, Leighton walked Bathrick out to the parking lot.

    "At this point, Bathrick turned to me and asked how much trouble he was in. I replied, 'How much trouble do you think you're in?' Bathrick said, 'Big time.' He then walked away," Leighton said in the report.

    Bathrick, who never married, lived with his mother and sister, appeared to be extremely courteous and ran a successful insurance business, Nathan said. Bathrick's family could not be reached for comment.

    Marc Andreo, Scout executive for the Westchester-Putnam Council, Boy Scouts of America, did not return a call seeking comment. His secretary confirmed Bathrick volunteered with the group.

    Bathrick also was president of the Pound Ridge Lions Club for four years, ending his term last month. New President Andrew Brodnick would not comment on Bathrick's leadership of the organization or what he called "a tragedy for all involved." The Record Review featured Bathrick last month in an article that said he was to be honored with a past president award, and was chosen to head the local zone, which encompassed the Pound Ridge, Bedford, Bedford Hills and Mount Kisco clubs.

    Nathan said he never met Bathrick in person, and communicated with him only by telephone and e-mail. Nathan said it was only in retrospect that he saw Bathrick exhibit telling behavior.

    "I was trying to get the client in my office, and he had written communication that was indicative of someone who needed help," Nathan said. "I offered to fly to White Plains and meet with him, but he kept putting me off and saying, 'I don't know what the benefit would be.' "

    On Wednesday, Bathrick's distraught sister called Nathan to tell him the family had received a suicide note and was having problems finding Bathrick. Nathan said he contacted police and filed a missing persons report.

    The authorities were able to find Bathrick by tracing his cell phone, which he had left on, Nathan said. Bathrick's body was found in a shed on the family property. He had apparently nailed the door shut from inside, authorities said.

    Cassidy-Flynn Funeral Home in Mount Kisco is handling arrangements. There are no visiting hours and services are private.

    -E-mail: nguyen@7lohud.com
     

    Calling Children Sex Offenders Destroys Families
    By posted by Mary Sue Molnar <marysueintx@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 19.07.2009
    Link to this news item: [00148]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00148 and send to marysueintx@yahoo.com with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm. Thanks, Mary, for sending this, and thanks also to the brave Texas Voices participants for telling the story of injustice to their family.
    alex
    --------------------
    Sex-offender label on boys unravels family's lives
    July 19, 2009
    By DIANE JENNINGS / The Dallas Morning News
    djennings@dallasnews.com

    In 1998, 7-year-old Mary was sexually assaulted.

    That's enough sorrow for a lifetime.

    It gets worse: Her assailants were her brothers, Billy, 12, and Mark, 10.

    Their mother, Carol, says watching her adolescent sons shuffle into court – in handcuffs and oversized orange jail jumpsuits rolled up to fit their scrawny frames – for assaulting their sister "just tore my heart out."

    Following the juvenile justice philosophy that children deserve a second chance, the boys received probation, and their delinquency records remained private. But ostensibly to protect the public, their names were added to the sex offender registry.

    The Smith sons, now in their 20s, are due to be removed from the registry next year after the 10-year juvenile registration limitation expires. But Carol says the family will never recover from the boys being branded as sex offenders.

    "Even though they were 10 and 12 when this happened ... they'll be sex offenders when they die," she says.

    The Smith family – whose names have been changed to protect Mary's privacy – is not unique. According to a Dallas Morning News analysis, about 4,000 people are on the Texas sex offender registry for crimes committed as juveniles. About a thousand of them were younger than 14 at the time of their crimes.

    ¨It's Her Label, Too¨

    Mary is 19 years old now, thin, pale and soft-spoken. She forgave her brothers long ago.

    But she's never been able to put the matter behind her, primarily because of her brothers' registration. "It's always in the back of my mind," she says. "You know, not so much what happened, but [it's] who we are now."

    Though she was never identified publicly as the victim, she suspects people know. Her brothers' registration information includes their address and the victim's age and gender. Even if the people in her North Texas town don't know she was the victim, she's recognized as the sibling of sex offenders.

    "They see the word 'sex offender' and they automatically see it as some horrible monster that took some little girl out somewhere and raped her," she says. "Nobody really cares what the story is."

    The case file is sealed, and attorneys and others involved in the matter would not discuss it, but court papers provided by the brothers' father, Bob, describe the story clinically: Billy penetrated Mary and had her perform oral sex. No violence was involved, but because of her age the crime is aggravated sexual assault. Mark later touched her genitals and was charged with indecency with a child.

    Sex offender treatment providers say penetration by young children is unusual, but looking and touching is fairly common, falling within the range of "normal development."

    Their parents, while not playing down the seriousness of the offenses, say the boys learned the behavior from adults.

    "A kid came over and spent the night with Billy and brought with him a porno tape from his dad," Carol says. "That's where they got these ideas from."

    Billy declined to talk for this story, but Mark says they also witnessed sexual activity between a teenage baby sitter and her boyfriend. Both boys were diagnosed with learning disabilities from an early age, and Billy was treated for emotional problems in kindergarten.

    The Smiths admit their family isn't suited for a Norman Rockwell painting. Bob's trucking job took him away for long stretches of time. Carol worked at the post office and made extra money cleaning houses. The kids were often left with the sitter.

    "We may not have been the perfect people, but we both tried," Bob says.

    Mark doesn't blame his parents. "They did the best they could," he says.

    Both parents say they don't know how long the behavior went on, but after Carol walked in on Billy and Mary in the bathroom one day, she and Bob "told him this is not acceptable, this is not the way people conduct themselves."

    They also told Mary not to let anyone touch her that way.

    Carol sought help, unaware the therapist was required to report the incident. When authorities interviewed Mary, she told them about Billy and about when Mark touched her.

    Mark says Billy encouraged him to touch their sister, and their parents say Billy did so because he didn't want to be in trouble by himself.

    Billy and Mark pleaded guilty and received two years' probation. Mark went to live with a foster family from Carol's church; Billy was sent to a residential treatment center.

    Carol expected the kids to get help "and we could go back to being the family we were," she says.


    4 feet 7, 80 pounds

    But to the Smiths' horror, the boys' names, descriptions and crime soon cropped up on the Internet. Bob shuffles through a stack of papers and pulls out a copy of Mark's early state sex offender registration: white male, 4 feet 7, 80 pounds, size 6 shoe.

    The family knew the boys would be registered with law enforcement authorities – Mark's acknowledgement was printed with childlike letters, signed in careful cursive – but didn't realize the information would be listed on the public sex offender registry.

    Juvenile registration was not mandatory at the time but was left to judicial discretion as it is today. Court records do not show whether a judge specifically ordered public registration, and the Smiths are puzzled about why their sons, who received light sentences and eventually were sent home to live with their victim, were listed.

    The Smiths say they favor public registration for sexually violent criminals, and maybe for repeat juvenile offenders, but "you don't need to protect the community from an 11-year-old kid," Mark says.

    Carol says: "This was a horrible thing that happened, but ... they are not these horrible animals."

    Registration "ruined both their lives," she says softly. "It totally ruined them."

    When they returned to school, the principal vowed to keep a close eye on the boys; teachers asked if they were dangerous; fellow students quickly learned about the crime.

    Attending church camp was nixed. Sleepovers became a thing of the past. After an old friend's mother saw Mark on the Internet, "He was not allowed to associate with that child," Carol says.

    Both boys gravitated toward young thieves and junkies, Bob says, "because they're the only people that would accept [them]."

    Neither son dated much. When Carol asked Mark why he didn't ask a girl he liked to go out, he replied, "I can't ask her out, Mom, I'm a sex offender."

    Mark says his life spiraled out of control after his arrest.

    "Once I was in jail when I was 10, that made me accept that jail was OK," he says. "It exposed me to drugs. It made me accept a world I never would have accepted."

    Mary also struggled. At school, she says, her teachers told her that they knew her brothers and warned her not to be a troublemaker like them.

    And, she added, "it was hard making friends."

    Mary "continued really to be a victim," Bob says. "She couldn't live a normal life.

    "We were scared to death if some girl came to the house and they were here and their parents knew."

    At a counselor's suggestion, alarms were installed on Mary's bedroom door when the boys returned home. "I was OK with that," Carol says, "because I want Mary to be safe, too."

    Being the parents of both the victim and the perpetrators is like "being pulled apart," Carol says. "Because if you take up for your boys, then they're thinking, 'What about your daughter? Don't you care about her?' And if you take up for your daughter, it's, 'What about the boys?' "

    Her dream of a normal family life vanished "as soon as I knew it was on the Internet," she says. "Our family was looked at as a family of degenerates."

    'Tremendous Strain'

    The Smiths' marriage was already on shaky ground, and the situation with their children made it worse.

    "It caused tremendous strain," Carol says, and for a long time the couple blamed each other for what happened. "We don't feel that way now," she says.

    Carol particularly had a difficult time dealing with the situation. She quit going to church after a deacon asked her, in crude terms, exactly what happened. And she began abusing methamphetamines.

    "I can't deal with it," Carol says of her sons' status. "The way I've dealt with it is to not think about it."

    She and Bob divorced in 2004.

    All three kids dropped out of high school. Mary works at a fast-food restaurant, and Billy, who earned a GED certificate, recently landed a construction job. But employers willing to hire poorly educated teen sex offenders in a town of 25,000 are rare.

    Bob considered sending his sons to live with relatives who were willing to give them jobs. But "nobody wanted their address" on the sex offender registry, he says.


    ¨Under One Roof¨

    Today, Billy, Mark and Mary call Bob's small rental house home. He's grateful his landlord has not objected to having sex offenders on the property, but others have not been so welcoming.

    Bob points to a jagged hole in the siding where a passer-by shot a pellet gun, then ticks off the other incidents: two broken car windshields; a Molotov cocktail thrown in the driveway; a neighbor who complained about the boys visiting a nearby park; talk of forming a neighborhood group to keep an eye on the Smiths' sons.

    Bob admits he has not always turned the other cheek. In 2002, he received deferred adjudication for a misdemeanor assault he says sprang from escalating tensions with a neighbor.

    Ironically, Bob says, when irate people target his house, they're also victimizing his daughter again.

    "I really didn't have much of a childhood at home," Mary says. "I kept to myself most of the time because I was afraid."


    ¨In and Out of Jail¨

    Neither Smith boy has committed another sex offense. But they haven't stayed out of trouble either.

    Both have been in and out of prison for crimes such as burglary. Billy also spent a year behind bars for failing to register as a sex offender.

    "He didn't want to create problems for me and his sister," Bob says. "He didn't want his face in the newspaper. He had just made new friends – he was a teenager."

    Even though juvenile registrations are capped at 10 years, the conviction for failing to register "is going to be on his record the rest of his life," Bob says.

    What bothers Carol is that her boys accept prison life as normal.

    "Billy's all but institutionalized," Carol says. "He sees no point in trying, because he's branded."

    The last time Billy got in trouble, Bob asked him, "Why? Why did you do this?"

    "What else do I got to do?" Billy replied. "At least if I'm in prison, I can crawl into my little hole. I don't have to deal with anybody on the outside."

    Mark is currently in the local jail for using heroin in violation of his latest probation.

    He doesn't seem particularly bothered by the prospect of spending a couple of years behind bars. "I don't have to deal with it in here," he says. "Nobody really knows."

    By the time he is released, his registration period will have expired, and he hopes to find a job and a place to live without worrying about a sex crime appearing on his record.

    "When I get out, it'll be a clean slate," he says hopefully.

    He is less optimistic about his brother's chances.

    "He may have taken it worse than anyone else," Mark says. "He's shy; he's never had friends.

    "Me and my sister, we can get past this, but I don't think my brother ever will."

    The rest of the family also continues to suffer. Bob recently applied for a part-time job as a security guard. After a background check, he was asked, "Who's the sex offender?" at his home. He explained the situation and never heard back from the company.

    At 56, on disability because of two bouts with cancer and other health problems, he longs to leave Texas. But he's trapped, he says, because his sons would have no place to live.

    "If I take off, if I bail out, then I'm stuffing it all on her," Bob says of his ex-wife. "I don't want to do that."

    If Billy and Mark were simply thugs, "I would have said, 'Boys, I'm leaving. Y'all want to be crooks and thieves all your lives, fine,' " Bob says. "But because of the registration thing, that I feel deeply in my heart had such negative impact on their lives ... I don't have a choice."

    The rest of the world may have given up on the Smith brothers, but their victim hasn't.

    People can't understand "why we were still there for them if they were such awful people," Mary says. "But I'm not going to do that. I'm never going to abandon them."

    Dallas Morning News researchers Darlean Spangenberger and Molly Motley Blythe contributed to this story.

     

    Homeless S.O. Says Prison is Better
    By Kelly Piercy <semperfidelas@gmail.com>
    Posted on 16.07.2009
    Link to this news item: [00147]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00147 and send to Kelly at semperfidelas@gmail.com, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    (This was actually sent by the RSOL prison coordinator, Lynn, but we are not at liberty to give her email - thanks Lynn!)
    ---------------------------------
    Sex Offender Begs For More Jail Time
    Maze of Laws Don't Work, Only Coddle Public Into Sense of Safety, Says Expert
    By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES
    ABC News
    July 15, 2009

    Raphael Marquez served seven years for a sex crime, but has asked a Florida judge to put him back in jail because he cannot find a job or a home.

    These laws require offenders to register with the communities in which they live and stay away from schools and playgrounds, leaving some who have served their time and are trying to comply with the law homeless.

    Marquez was released June 20, but the only legal and affordable option he could find was a rat-infested overpass in Broward County next to a park filled with 100 other sex offenders.

    "This is a very nasty crime, but I deserve a second chance," said the 38-year-old former cabinet maker who was charged with sexual battery of a 12-year-old relative.

    "I am positive I won't do this again, but I need all the support and help I can get," Marquez told ABCNews.com. "I am willing to risk my life on it."

    And the problem isn't just there. In Miami, a legal battle has erupted over a growing colony of sex offenders who have been forced under the Julia Tuttle Causeway. The vagrants live in shacks, creating a national dialogue over the unintended consequences of residency laws.

    Marquez was required to register in his Oakland Park neighborhood and carry a large GPS box to track his every move.

    He must observe an indoor curfew from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. and not live within 2,500 feet of a school, day care facility, playground or other place where children regularly congregate.

    That, in addition to the high cost of rent, has made finding a place to live impossible, according to his public defender lawyer, Cheryl Koewing.

    "No one wants to employ him," Koewing told ABCNews.com. "How can law enforcement keep track of these individuals and not have them turning to other means to get food to live? They've served their time."

    Marquez can't drive alone without his parole officer's approval, rent a post office box or use the Internet. He must submit to warrantless searches of his home and vehicle, as well as to sex counseling and regular polygraphs at his own expense.

    Better Jail Than Violate Parole
    "I'd rather be here than violate my probation and run," said Marquez, stressed and losing weight in the Broward County Jail. "I am back to square one."

    Twenty-four of Broward's 31 cities have adopted laws banning offenders from moving near children. The state requires only 1,000 feet separation, but most of these cities have 2,500-feet buffer zones, essentially blanketing entire cities.

    His mother wired him $500, which he spent on cheap motels, but that money ran out. His parole officer found him a rehabilitation home for sex offenders, but he couldn't afford the $750 deposit and had no transportation to get there.

    Marquez, who has no family in Florida, wants to move to Buffalo with his mother, hoping that he can trade more time in prison to get lifetime regular probation, allowing him to travel across state lines.

    "But he's getting information from the other inmates who want to transfer to New York that they were flat-out rejected," said Koewing. "Now he's scared to death because he cannot live in Florida."

    ARTICLE TRUNCATED - See URL to contine
    http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Story?id=8083584&page=2

     

    African Soccer Star Falsely Convicted
    By posted by John & Mary <rsolvirginia@comcast.net>
    Posted on 15.07.2009
    Link to this news item: [00146]
     
    Comments about this article should be sent to Mary, rsolvirginia@comcast.net, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    -------------------------------------------
    THE STORY OF ERIC FRIMPONG, A RISING SOCCER STAR
    by Sam Alipour, ESPN The Magazine, filed from Los Angeles
    Special to DAILY GUIDE, Accra, Ghana
    July 15, 2009

    It's March 3, 2008, a brilliant day in Santa Barbara. But for Eric Frimpong, it feels like hell. He's in Superior Court, encircled by sheriff's deputies, making one more trip to the Department 2 courtroom.

    This is his last stop on the outside for a while, a painful reminder of how far he has fallen. He left his native Ghana in 2005 to play soccer for UC Santa Barbara; a year later he became a campus hero while leading the Gauchos to their first-ever national championship.

    If the immigrant experience can have a sound, Frimpong's sound was a raucous stadium. But in 2007, just weeks after being selected by the Kansas City Wizards in the MLS draft, he was accused of raping another student on the beach near his house. Now he's a convicted felon.

    Frimpong enters the courtroom, which is packed with students and parents, former teammates and coaches -- row upon row of supporters. They've come for the sentencing that concludes a trial that has rocked this community: People v. Eric Frimpong. Or more accurately, People v. Eric Frimpong and His People.

    A victim's advocate reads a statement on behalf of the accuser, referred to in this story and in news coverage throughout the trial as Jane Doe. "I don't care that he's a soccer star…and I'm a nobody," the statement says. "Eric Frimpong ruined my life."

    There's a rumble in the gallery. If his supporters could chime in now, they'd say that the kid in the prison garb has never spoken an unkind word or acted aggressively toward anyone.

    They would remind the court of the points made at trial: that his accuser was a woman with little memory of what happened that night because of a near-toxic blood alcohol level; that Frimpong's DNA wasn't found on the victim; that semen found on her underwear belonged to a jealous boyfriend, a white student who was never a suspect.

    They would argue that overzealous law enforcement was determined to nail a high-profile athlete, facts be damned, and that this was the Duke lacrosse case all over again -- except that the defendants in the Duke case were white men from affluent families with the means to navigate America's justice system, unlike Frimpong, who is poor and an immigrant.

    Judge Brian Hill, citing Frimpong's clean record and "a lot of community support," delivers his sentence: six years in state prison. As Frimpong is led away, many people in the gallery are crying. Out in the hall, Paul and Loni Monahan stand solemnly while the courtroom empties. Their son, Pat, was Frimpong's teammate, and the Monahans -- a white, middle-class family -- had ¬embraced "Frimmer" like a son and a brother.

    Loni distributes copies of a printed statement: "We will continue to fight for Eric. We will not rest until he is exonerated and the ugly truth of his wrongful prosecution and conviction comes out." When the leaflets are gone, she leans against a wall, tears flowing. "Eric believed in our system," she says. "He believed justice would prevail." Then she straightens. "Before I was sad," she says. "Now I'm mad."

    Something good happened in Santa Barbara. Even now, as Frimpong sits behind a glass partition in the visitors' room of a California jail, he smiles easily while talking about where he's come from and what he has achieved. The way he sees it, he has always been fortunate.

    Back in Ghana, in western Africa, he and his three younger siblings were raised by their mother, Mary, in the poor farming community of Abesin, but her job as a typist with the government forestry department allowed the family to have plumbing and electricity, unlike many of their neighbors.

    Eric was an engineering major and a midfielder for Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, in Kumasi, when he caught the eye of UCSB assistant Leo Chappel, who attended a 2005 match to scout the son of a Ghanian pro but ended up offering a scholarship to Frimpong instead. The first words out of Frimpong's mouth? Thank God. The next: What's UCSB?

    By that August, the Gauchos had a crafty midfielder with intangibles to burn. Frimpong's intelligence, instinct and vision, along with his speed and touch, made him an on-the-ball force. He also had a winning personality. "Frimmer was very humble and considerate, on and off the field," says head coach Tim Vom Steeg.

    As a senior the next year, the 5'6" Frimpong developed a reputation as a lockdown defender in leading the unseeded Big West champs to a string of improbable NCAA tournament wins. When the final whistle blew on the 2006 national championship game, the Cinderella Gauchos had defeated four-time king UCLA. Frimpong earned All-Big West honors, a spot in the MLS supplemental draft and the gratitude of his peers.

    "He was the heart and soul of the team," says Pat Monahan. "Eric won us that championship."

    Everyone around Frimpong was buoyed by his success: his mother, friends and classmates, prominent locals who had helped him out along the way with invites to dinner, rides to the store and, when he struggled with homesickness during his junior year, a fund-raiser that yielded $3,000 for a ticket to Ghana. "We all tried to pitch in, because Eric's so darn likable," says Tim Foley, a booster who made Frimpong a regular guest at his family's home. "He was an American success story."

    The Monahans were especially proud. Frimpong had met his "American parents" on move-in day in 2005, and they promptly invited him to spend Thanksgiving in San Diego. They gave him his first cell phone and laptop and took him on family vacations. They sat in their kitchen for hours listening to his stories about Ghana.

    They were also impressed by his knowledge of the Bible, and his quiet spirituality helped bolster their own faith. "He was going to graduate, play professionally, make more money here than he ever could in Ghana and bring it back to support his family," Loni says. "Eric really had it all."
    With the support of friends, including girlfriend Prieto (far right), Frimpong stayed in school after the incident and graduated.

    Something bad happened in Santa Barbara. On Feb. 17, 2007, sometime after midnight on a fast-eroding bluff of beach right below 6547 Del Playa Drive, Jane Doe was raped. She said Eric Frimpong did it, and an all-white jury agreed.

    But the nature of the case, and some of the more slippery details surrounding it, has divided the community, raising questions about the reliability of the victim's memory, the true character of the accused, the motives and tactics of law enforcement, even the fairness of the justice system.

    Amid all the controversy, though, two simple truths remain: A young woman was victimized, and a young man's dream was shattered.

    UCSB is among the nation's top party schools, and oceanfront Del Playa is the belly of the beast. Even a model student-athlete like Frimpong, who maintained a 3.0 GPA while working on a double major in applied mathematics and business economics, found it hard to skip the party entirely.

    After the Gauchos won it all, they were the toast of the town, especially Frimmer. As Pat Monahan puts it, "You'd walk into apartments and see Ghanian flags hanging over people's beds."

    Frimpong's journey from soccer hero to convicted felon began a little more than halfway through his senior year. (The account that follows is based on police reports, interview transcripts, court proceedings and comments from trial observers.)

    The night of Feb. 16 began for Frimpong in the same place where he started most Friday nights, on the couch in his house at 6547 Del Playa Drive, watching a movie with housemates. His girlfriend, Yesenia Prieto, was working late, but Eric had reason to celebrate, fresh off an impressive 10-day tryout for the Wizards, so he showered and went to meet friends at a party at 6681 Del Playa Drive. It was outside that home, at about 11:30 p.m., that Frimpong met Jane Doe, a UCSB freshman. They struck up a conversation, then walked back to his house to play beer pong.

    They arrived just before midnight, and Eric introduced Jane to his roommates before taking her to the patio, where the two of them played beer pong for a few minutes until, according to Frimpong, Doe said she wanted to smoke, so they headed for the park next door.

    At the park, he says, Doe approached another male, who appeared to have followed them. When she walked back to Frimpong, she started kissing him, but he wasn't interested because she smelled of cigarettes.

    Doe became aggressive, he says, and stuck her hand down his pants. He pushed her away, then headed to the home of his friend, Krystal Giang, who'd been expecting him. By 4 a.m., he was in bed at Prieto's apartment.

    About an hour and a half earlier, Jane Doe, accompanied by her sister and two friends, checked into Goleta Valley Cottage Hospital emergency clinic, claiming she had been raped. She was transferred to the Sexual Assault Response center downtown, where a nurse discovered a laceration to Doe's external genitalia and bruises on her body, findings consistent with sexual assault.

    "Yesterday was a really good day," Doe told sheriff's detectives Daniel Kies and Michael Scherbarth when they arrived at her dorm room the next morning, according to a police transcript. The reason for cheer:

    The 18-year-old Doe had just regained her driver's license following a juvenile DUI conviction. At around 9 p.m. on Feb. 16, she went to a party with her sister, Elizabeth, and friends Mia Wolfson and Lakshmi Krishna. After stopping at a second party, Doe left the group and headed for a fraternity bash on Del Playa. "That's where I saw the guy," she told police.

    From there, Doe's story is mostly consistent with Frimpong's, up to and including their game of beer pong. "He was really nice," she said. But their accounts differ sharply after that. According to Doe, the next thing she remembers is being on the beach, where the nice guy turned violent, knocking her to the ground, striking her in the face, holding her throat and raping her before fleeing.

    Having lost her purse, Doe walked to Del Playa, where she stopped a passerby, student Justin Hannah. Using his cell, she phoned a friend, her father and then Wolfson and Krishna, who picked her up around 1:30 a.m. Doe, who admitted to drinking heavily throughout the evening, couldn't remember anything between stepping into their car and going to the hospital -- a period of one hour -- but her friends would fill in the blanks: At first Doe didn't want to go to the hospital because she was worried about getting in trouble for drinking.

    But back at the dorm, her friends kept urging, and she relented. Sitting with the detectives that morning, she described her attacker as a black male who spoke with an "island accent" and had "big lips" and short hair. His name? "Eric, I think."

    Sometime around noon on Feb. 17, Kies and Scherbarth spotted Frimpong hanging out with friends at the park on Del Playa. When Kies asked if he would accompany them to the station to talk about "what happened last night," Frimpong agreed to go, despite being unsure what the detective meant. Once at the station, Kies reminded Frimpong that he had come voluntarily and asked him to describe what he'd been doing the previous night.

    According to the police transcript, Frimpong told Kies about watching a movie at home, then going to a party and eventually meeting Doe, whom he described as one of the "random soccer fans," and playing beer pong with her before heading to Giang's house and later to Prieto's. Kies then asked for Frimpong's consent to collect the clothes he'd worn the night before. "Yeah," Frimpong responded, "but I still don't know what's going on." Kies explained that the girl said that they'd "had sex" on the beach.
    "Wow," Frimpong responded.

    Kies then informed Frimpong that he was being detained and read him his rights. Minutes later, he explained the rape accusation. "I didn't have sex with her," Frimpong insisted. Charged with felony rape, he phoned Paul Monahan, who spread the word. Vom Steeg couldn't believe it: "I'm thinking, Frimpong? Rape? No way." (The coach later asked Frimpong directly.

    "I said, 'Eric, is there any chance you had sex but you thought maybe it was consensual?' He said, 'Tim, I never pulled my pants down.' I said, 'If you did this, DNA will prove it.' He said, 'Coach, I'm not stupid.' ")

    By the next day, Frimpong supporters had mobilized. Vom Steeg arranged for Paul Monahan to meet with Foley, and it was agreed that Monahan would fund a defense while the $100,000 bail would be paid by Foley and Cam Camarena, a former UCSB soccer player who helps finance Right to Dream, a program that brings Ghanian players to America. Based on a referral, they hired attor¬ney Robert Sanger, and funds were bolstered by the campus-based Eric Frimpong Freedom Fund, which raised $25,000 within months.

    When Frimpong was released on bond, teammates were waiting outside the police station. "Nobody knows Eric like we do," says former teammate Alfonso Motagalvan. "And he's just not capable of doing something like this."

    When the test results came back in March, Frimpong's DNA hadn't been found on Jane Doe's clothing or body, but Doe's DNA had been found on Frimpong: in two nucleated epithelial cells, found on his scrotum and penis, and in an unspecified trace under his fingernail. (Epithelial cells are found inside the body and in body fluids like mucus, saliva and sweat.

    These tested negative as vaginal cells, but such tests can be inconclusive. When the case went to trial that November, the defense argued that the findings were consistent with Frimpong's claim that Doe had grabbed his genitals.)

    Also, semen found on Doe's underwear didn't match Frimpong's -- but it was a match for that of Benjamin Randall, Doe's sexual partner throughout her freshman year. Randall told authorities that he and Doe had engaged in intercourse seven days before the rape; Doe said they'd had sex four days prior but that she thought she was wearing different underwear, and she told a nurse that they'd used a condom. (During the trial, Doe and Randall confirmed they'd been together at parties the night she met Frimpong.

    Randall testified that, while en route to a friend's house, he spotted Doe and Frimpong walking on Del Playa at about 11:40 p.m. Randall then called Doe, and she told him she was headed to "Eric's house to play beer pong." Under cross-examination by Sanger, Randall admitted, "I might've been a little upset. I guess you can call that jealousy." He also testified that after the call, he returned to his dorm at Santa Barbara City College, where he spent the night alone.)

    Despite having DNA evidence matched to him, Randall was never a suspect. Neither was the man who retrieved Doe's purse, which she said she'd lost either on the beach or at Frimpong's home. It was delivered to the sheriff's department the next day, minus $30, by someone described in the police report as a "can recycler." But because of a "language barrier," he wasn't questioned.

    Frimpong was the only suspect, even though there was no apparent sign of sexual activity -- no blood, semen, vaginal secretions -- or any scratches or other telltale marks of rape on his body or clothes.

    The absence of abrasions was odd. Doe told authorities she was wearing a "thicker ring" on her right ring finger and that she hit her attacker so hard, "all my knuckles were screwed up." There was also very little sand found on his clothes. (At the trial, Dianne Burns, a criminologist who examined the physical evidence, testified to the presence of two small vials' worth of sand in the cuffs of Frimpong's jeans and in one pocket.)

    Still, the district attorney's office pressed on, in a case reminiscent of one that was unraveling on the East Coast. "There was always a strong parallel to the Duke case," Vom Steeg says. "From the start, the sheriff's department felt like they had their guy. But when the evidence didn't turn out the way it was supposed to, their position became, 'If she's willing to testify, we'll go forward.'"

    Using phone records, authorities estimate that the attack took place between 12:15 and 1:15 a.m., a time period for which Frimpong did not have a solid alibi. James Jennings, a bicycle taxi driver, said he gave Frimpong a lift between 12:30 and 2 a.m. and that the player acted like "the happiest guy in the world." Giang told authorities that Frimpong arrived at her home sometime between 11 p.m. and midnight. But a 1:34 a.m. phone call from Frimpong to Giang seemed to place his arrival later than she had estimated. Also thorny was the testimony of Hannah, the student who had lent Doe his phone.

    He said that while Doe "looked like she had just come out of a traumatic experience," her clothing didn't appear to be dirty or sandy. He also said that she told him that she "didn't know what had happened."
    Throughout the investigation and during the trial, Doe admitted to gaps in her memory.

    In her interview with detectives, she claimed she had consumed "a couple shots of vodka" before leaving her dorm. In an interview that April with assistant district attorney Mary Barron, the lead prosecutor, Doe said she'd consumed more throughout the evening. "I know I had beer," she said. "And I know I had rum." She also acknowledged that her memory after beer pong was hazy.

    "That's when it starts to, like, cut out," she told Barron. According to the transcript, Doe had little memory of going to the beach, and her recollection of the rape itself was scattered. Asked whether she recalled going outside to smoke, Doe said she "probably" smoked but didn't remember when. "I don't even know, since there's that chunk missing."

    So what happened on the beach? Doe said Frimpong may have tried to kiss her, but when pressed by Barron she admitted, "I have no clue. I'm just assuming…" She also said, "I remember him biting me on my face," even though she had told the emergency room doctor she thought she'd been hit, and when questioned by detectives, she said she didn't know about being bitten -- despite Kies' saying, "That's definitely, most definitely, teeth marks, dude," about the bruise on her cheek. When Barron questioned her about it, Doe said, "But later, when they're, like, 'It looks like teeth marks' …I remember that happening."

    Doe continued, "I saw him, like, feel around -- take off his belt -- or something on his pants -- I don't know." She said she remembered being penetrated, and "it felt like a penis." Barron asked if the attacker was the same person she'd played beer pong with.

    Doe said that while she couldn't recall going to the beach, she remembered the attacker's accent, his eyes ("They were white") and his lips ("They're big"). She was also fairly confident that the rape lasted "15 minutes at the most… but then, since there's that huge chunk of time that I don't remember, it could be anything."

    Many of Frimpong's supporters believe that race is at the heart of the case. Santa Barbara County has nearly 425,000 residents, but only 2% are black. "I love this town," says Foley, a resident for 30 years, "but there's no question there's racism here."

    Thanks to Frimpong's celebrity status, he wasn't flying under the radar. "I'm 100% convinced that they were going to nail this guy before he walked into the station," Foley says. (At the trial, Burns testified that in a Feb. 22 phone call from Kies, the detective asked her to expedite her usual process, reminding her that this was a "high-profile case.")

    Back on campus, media coverage led to an unwelcome surprise for the defense: After reading about Frimpong's arrest, another student came forward claiming that she too had been assaulted by him. This new Jane Doe told police that a few weeks before the rape, he had acted aggressively toward her, grabbing her buttocks and tackling her on the beach. The DA used the accusation to charge Frimpong with misdemeanor sexual assault, which made for a second count at trial.

    (He was found not guilty.) "The DA's office filed a weak claim of sex¬ual assault to portray Eric as a serial sexual predator and bolster the flawed rape claim," wrote Kim Seefeld, a local defense attorney and former prosecutor, in a blog post on Jan. 15, 2008. "The allegations severely prejudiced him before the jury."

    The second charge also sent Frimpong back to jail, where friends say he was taunted by deputies. When Paul Monahan picked him up later that day, after Foley and Camarena paid the additional $250,000 bail, Frimpong broke down in tears.

    There was no trip to the White House with the rest of his teammates. After the second arrest, Frimpong went into seclusion, moving to an apartment with Pat Monahan and relying on friends to run errands and deliver food.

    He still ventured out for dates with Prieto, and he remained active on the field, playing in an intramural league and with the semipro Ventura Fusion. He also took a part-time job with Foley. "I tried to give him pocket money, but he wouldn't take it," Foley says. "He was a different kid, just as sad as can be."

    Meanwhile, a battle raged among the student body. On one side were Frimpong's loyal backers, who attested to his character in TV interviews and who carpooled in large numbers to his hearings.

    On the other side were victims' rights advocates, who responded with rape awareness presentations on campus and a confrontation with Frimpong supporters at an MLK Day rally. "It was ugly, with a lot of people saying a lot of dumb things," Giang says. "People just forgot that at the heart of this are the facts, not just vague concepts."

    None of it kept Frimpong from graduating in June 2007. "Nine out of 10 kids would have dropped out," Vom Steeg says.

    "It says a lot about his character." Adds Camarena, now the head coach for the University of Hawaii at Hilo: "Eric never blamed corruption, never called anyone a racist, never called the girl a liar. He continued to uphold American values. And he maintained faith that our justice system would see him through."

    Frimpong put that faith in an all-white jury of nine women and three men. His trial began on Nov. 26, and for three weeks Department 2 was home base for Team Frimpong. Many supporters came with notebooks, and during recess they would go to the café across the street to discuss the latest unfavorable ruling.

    They point to the time, for example, when Barron may have implied to the jury that Frimpong had chosen not to testify, even though the prosecution is not allowed to refer to the defendant's right to remain silent.

    While Judge Hill said that there were "possible inferences," he denied Sanger's motion for a mistrial. Also, during jury deliberations, Hill refused to dismiss juror No. 5 after her arrest for drunken driving.

    (The defense argued that the juror, whose case was in the hands of the DA, couldn't remain impartial.)
    Perhaps the most troubling ruling, as far as the defense was concerned, involved bite mark analysis.

    The prosecution's forensic expert, Norman Sperber, testified that he couldn't rule out Frimpong for causing the bite on Jane Doe's face. But detectives failed to disclose that they had first approached another expert: Raymond Johansen would later testify, outside the jury's presence, that after preliminary analysis, he told Kies that the bite mark was "vague."

    Law enforcement is required to turn over evidence that doesn't point to the defendant as the suspect; suppressing such evidence is grounds for a mistrial. But Kies failed to file a report of his conversation with Johansen. When questioned by Sanger, the detective stated that while he had indeed approached Johansen first, the dentist had failed to provide any opinion.

    Kies and senior DA Ronald Zonen both told the court that they had passed over Johansen because he wanted to charge for his services, and Sperber wasn't charging. But Sperber testified that he always charges for his services, and he did so for this case, too. Judge Hill, who had served 19 years as a Santa Barbara DA prior to sitting on the bench, ruled that Johansen's testimony was not exculpatory and denied that motion as well.

    Nonetheless, Frimpong's supporters save much of their scorn for Sanger. The prosecution rested its case on Dec. 12, having called 32 witnesses; Sanger questioned them all on the stand but called only one additional witness, a blood expert who testified that Doe's blood alcohol level at the time the sample was taken, 5:37 a.m., was .20, and that it could have been as high as .29 at the time of the incident -- an almost lethal level. Sanger rested his case the next day.

    "The final score was 32-1," Vom Steeg says. "I feel guilty, like we didn't do enough." Loni Monahan spoke to Sanger throughout the trial about his strategy. "He told me, 'The best defense was no defense, because it would demonstrate there's nothing to defend,'" she says. "We made a mistake."

    The jury began deliberating on Friday, Dec. 14; the next Monday, just after 3:30 p.m., came the guilty verdict.

    On Jan. 31, 2008, with Frimpong in jail awaiting sentencing, the defense filed a motion for a new trial, citing several factors, including a development with the jury: In a written declaration to the court, juror Ann Diebold stated, "I regret the decision I made in finding Mr. Frimpong guilty."

    Among her many points was the court's refusal to provide the jury with evidence they had requested for review, including Doe's testimony and Frimpong's interview with Kies -- the latter because some jurors stated that they wanted "the opportunity to hear Mr. Frimpong's side of the story." (They were read only Doe's direct testimony, without cross-examination, because Judge Hill said "it would take some time to gather the additional information," Diebold wrote.) Diebold also claimed that the jurors rushed through deliberations so they could conclude the case by the Christmas holiday. "I felt pressure from the judge and other jurors to reach a verdict by Dec. 18," she wrote.

    Sanger's motion was a last-second heave, but it allowed him to put his own forensic dentist on the stand. Defense expert Charles Bowers fell ill during the trial and was unable to testify, but at the hearing on Feb. 28, he delivered his opinion: Frimpong's teeth could not have made the bite, but Randall's teeth could have.

    As Bowers spoke, there was a buzz in the gallery. But Judge Hill was unmoved. He began the hearing by saying that in his 27-year career, "I've not seen a rape case with so much incriminating, credible and powerful evidence," and ended it by dismissing the motion.

    Three days later, he sentenced Frimpong to six years.
    Today Eric Frimpong is prisoner F95488, a ward of the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi, about 75 miles northeast of Santa Barbara. Friends and supporters continue to fight for him, but none worries more than his mother.

    "She's sick to death," says Loni Monahan, who provides Mary with weekly updates. "We understand one of every 10 words, but we're moms, so it's enough." Loni's own son marvels at Eric's almost preternatural calm in the face of adversity. "The kid's in jail, and with all his issues, he's the one keeping us sane," Pat says.

    Frimpong is small in size, but he seems to have avoided many of the pitfalls of life behind bars.

    He even calls many of his fellow inmates his friends. One of them is 45 year-old Terry Carter, who served time with Frimpong at Santa Barbara County Jail. "Eric was a godsend, just an amazingly positive influence," he says. "It's funny, but to guys twice his size, the kid's a leader."

    Every day, Frimpong led group exercises in the yard, but his primary pastime was Bible study. Before his arrival it was Hispanics-only, so Eric started his own, and some of them joined his.

    "It's a terrible thing that happened to me," Frimpong says. "Being in here, I keep asking myself why God put me in that situation. And then it struck me: Maybe I can reach more people, help more people, if they hear my story." His supporters say it's working.

    "All you have to do is look at Frimmer's camp -- he hasn't lost anyone," Vom Steeg says. "In fact, since the trial, he's actually gaining supporters." In Ghana, Frimpong's plight is well-documented by the media.

    In Santa Barbara, people continue to proclaim his innocence, even when it's not easy to do so. After writing several opinion pieces in the local papers, Kim Seefeld was inexplicably subpoenaed to appear at the hearings on the motion for a new trial. (She was never called to testify.)

    "I got harassed by the DA, subpoenaed and threatened, all because I stuck my neck out for someone I believe is innocent," says Seefeld, who plans to continue her writing. "That's what happens to a citizen who dares to question our justice system in Santa Barbara."

    And then there are the letters from all over the world, many containing donations. "These are people who don't even know Eric, have never spoken directly to him," Loni Monahan says with awe. "Eric was born to be a pro soccer player, but he's realized he has more impact in the direction he's going. There's a groundswell going on."

    The key addition to Team Frimpong is Ronald Turner, a Sacramento-based, court-appointed appellate attorney who has filed the opening brief in an appeal with the Second Appellate ¬District of California.

    The process gives Frimpong hope. So too does his dream of eventually attending seminary and becoming a priest. Not that he has given up on turning pro. "He's very determined," says Andy Iro, Frimpong's friend and former teammate, now with the MLS' Columbus Crew.

    "His reputation has been tarnished, but if anyone can come out of this a better person, it's Eric."

    Many nights, Frimpong says, he dreams the same dream: He is running, but not from anyone or anything. His bare feet punch the shoreline, toes clawing the sand, while the sun sets on the Pacific Ocean. "My body can be in prison," he says. "But my mind and soul are in Santa Barbara."

    Something bad happened there. Two young lives were suddenly, sadly interrupted. But in the end, something good may still come of it.

    Sam Alipour is based in Los Angeles. His Media Blitz column appears in ESPN The Magazine and regularly on Page 2. You can reach him at sam.alipour@gmail.com.This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it


     

    How Sex Laws Are Screwing the American People
    By annonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 07.07.2009
    Link to this news item: [00145]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 00145 and be sent to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    -------------------------------------------


    15 Shocking Tales of How Sex Laws Are Screwing the American People
    By Ellen Friedrichs, AlterNet. Posted June 12, 2009.

    In the land of the free, the freedom to express your sexuality can land you in prison. THe older I got, the lukier I feel. I don't bombard my friends and colleagues with XXX emails. But in a world where a teen can get arrested for texting a boyfriend her own nudie shots, I don't want to take anything for granted.

    Really though, my clean record probably has as much to do with where I've lived, as with what I've done. Growing up in Canada, meant that I didn’t worry about the legal ramifications of losing my virginity to my high school boyfriend. Had I spent those angst-ridden years in Texas, or even Maine, I could have been charged with the crime of underage sex.

    Similarly, accompanying a terrified 16-year-old to a New York City clinic for an abortion a few years back could have been illegal if I had done the same thing in many of the 34 states with parental consent and notification laws for this procedure.

    So I've been fortunate. But plenty of other people haven't. We often don't realize that sex regulations extend beyond archaic blue laws banning things like having sex in a toll booth, or forbidding sororities on the basis that women living together constitute a brothel. Such prohibitions may remain on the books, but people seldom, if ever, face charges for breaking them. The sex laws that do get enforced every day tend to be a lot less laughable.

    Occasionally, the focus on a particular case can lead to a law’s repeal. For example, in 2004, a Texas mom was arrested for violating that state's ban on selling sex toys after she was busted hawking vibrators to her friends. The coverage of the incident drew attention to the statute and eventually lead to its 2008 nullification. And famously, following a 2002 arrest for having anal sex with his boyfriend, John Lawrence argued his case before the U. S. Supreme Court, and succeeded in getting the federal sodomy laws overturned.

    Nevertheless, for many people, simply paying their fine or doing their time is preferable to embarrassing publicity that can accompany fighting charges. Still, plenty of cases do make the papers, whether those involved want them to or not.

    Here are fifteen recent examples highlighting the fact the land of the free, the freedom to express your sexuality can still be pretty limited.

    1) Over the past year, New York City has seen thirty-four gay men arrested for prostitution in what many people are calling an anti-gay sting operation. One case, reported by the New York Times, involved Robert Pinter, a fifty-three-year old massage therapist, who was approached by an undercover police officer in the adult section of a video store. As Pinter told the Times, “[the man who propositioned me] was very charming and cute, and we agreed to leave the store and engage in consensual sex.” Pinter explained that man then offered him $50 for doing so--an offer which he says did not respond to. Once outside, Pinter was handcuffed and arrested on charges of, “loitering for the purpose of prostitution.” The relationship between gay men and the police has often been far from harmonious (hell, arrests of gay men in the sixties are what prompted the Stonewall riots in 1969), and this situation has renewed fears that old habits die hard.

    2) Despite the fact that Georgia has some real problems with youth sexual health -- among other things it boasts the eighth highest teen pregnancy rate in the country -- this state has put a lot more effort into targeting teens than it has into helping them stay safe. One particularly outlandish case involves a young man named Genarlow Wilson. Genarlow was recently freed after serving almost three years in a Georgia prison. He had been sent there at seventeen for getting a blow job from a consenting fifteen-year-old girl. Though Generlow was only two years older than the girl, in Georgia, he was above the age of consent and she was below it. As a result, the high school senior was charged with aggravated child molestation. At the time, Georgia had a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years for this crime, so that's what he got. A year into his sentence, the law was changed to make the maximum penalty a still pretty serious twelve months in jail. Even so, it took another two years for a judge to order Genarlow's release.

    3) Florida is famous for it's liberal views on how little clothing can be considered publicly acceptable. It's not so liberal, however, when it comes to the kind of sex it considers acceptable for people to have privately. In February, a lawsuit was filed against a strip-mall based private swingers club. The charges came after a year-long undercover operation, and despite the sheriff's acknowledgment that, “detectives never found any evidence of drug use or sales and never saw any instances of anyone paying for sex.” Swinging is legal, so in the end, the best the cops could do was charge the club with violation of local zoning codes.

    4) Starting off 2009 with a bang, seventeen Pennsylvania teens -- thirteen girls and three boys -- were busted for child pornography. The charges came after a teacher confiscated a student’s cell phone and discovered that the girls had sent “provocative” pictures of themselves to the boys. Initially, the boys were charged with possession of child pornography, and the girls with manufacturing, disseminating and possessing child pornography. These charges could have come with jail time and the requirement to register as sex offenders. The New York Times reports that given such daunting prospects, almost all of the students accepted a deal requiring them to attend a ten hour class dealing with pornography and sexual violence. But three of the girls rejected the deal and instead filed a lawsuit against the district attorney, claiming that offering them such a deal was illegal, as their actions never should have been considered criminal.

    Public panic over sexting is growing and as a result the Pennsylvania case is far from an isolated incident. In fact, USA Today reports that between January and March police had already, “investigated more than two dozen teens in at least six states...for sending nude images of themselves in cell phone text messages.” And as a girl busted for sexting in Idaho this June can tell you, that number has surely grown since then.

    5) No one has ever claimed that Georgia is a haven for the LGBT community. But a recent decision by a custody judge to bar a gay dad from “exposing” his kids to his “homosexual partners and friends,” is a reminder that in this state, the notion that everyone is equal under the law only applies if the “everyone” in question isn't gay. In this case, the man’s soon to be ex-wife argued that the fact that her kids have a gay dad has landed them in therapy. So she asked that the restriction be imposed to protect them from discomfort. But as the father said, “In general, that [restriction] will never allow me to have my children present in front of any friends, whether they’re gay or straight -- no one hands you a card saying are you gay, straight, heterosexual, bi, whatever.”

    6) After his boxers were spotted by cops as he peddled his bike around town, a twenty-four-year-old Bainbridge, Georgia man became the first person arrested there under a new city ordinance that prohibits wearing pants low enough to expose a person’s underwear. Arrests like this have become common all over the country as more and more cities adopt such so-called baggy pants bans. But it isn't only men who are targeted by these laws. This June, the city of Yakima, Washington, voted to change the city's indecent exposure laws to include "cleavage of the buttocks." This means that women whose thong or G-string show can now be fined $1,000 or face up to 90 days in jail. If a child under the age of 14 is thought to be a victim of this form of indecent exposure, the perpetrator is looking at a $5,000 fine and up to a year in jail. Still while most cities choose to focus on legislating visible underwear, some laws take the clothing restrictions even further. For example, an ordinance passed in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana in 2007, not only outlaws “any indecent exposure of any person or undergarments,” but also bars a person from, “dressing in a manner not becoming to his or her sex.”

    7) In February 2008, Wisconsin mom, Amy Smalley, was charged with the felony of “exposing a child to harmful descriptions.” The issue came to light after her eleven-year-old son told a counselor about conversations his mom had with him and his brother. These included talking about her sex life, explaining how to perform oral sex and showing the boys a sex toy. The charges, which could have landed Smalley three years in prison, were plead down to a misdemeanor. Smalley was placed on probation and had to undergo court ordered counseling. As the Court TV website put it, “Smalley called it education. Prosecutors called it a crime.” I call it terrifying. As a mom myself, I can easily see having similar conversations. (Okay, not for a while as my kids are only both under three. But still…). Sure, Smalley probably made a bad judgment call. But really, is this any worse than parents who let their kids watch Family Guy and South Park, despite the endless stream of rape jokes and blow job humor?

    8) Come 2010, a law designed to protect child prostitutes will take effect in New York State. Until that time, kids as young as twelve can continue to be charged with the crime of prostitution. This is true even if they were forced into the business by pimps. Interestingly, since 2000, foreign-born teens have been protected from prosecution by anti-trafficking laws which view them as victims. For the next year, however, teens with American citizenship may still find themselves in juvie for being the victim of something most people would consider pretty horrific abuse. Hopefully, this is a sign that we are making progress not only the issue of sex work, but on the treatment of juvenile offenders in general.

    9) In December, a Florida woman reacted to the penis being forced into her mouth by biting. Twenty-seven-year-old Charris Bowers told police that despite the fact that she didn't want to have oral sex, her husband, Delou pushed himself into her mouth, and that she clamped down to get him to stop. He responded by punching her in the head until she let go. In the end no charges were filed against Delou, even though it is illegal for anyone, including a spouse, to make another person perform a sex act. Charris, on the other hand was arrested and charged with battery. Apparently, the era of blaming the victims of sexual assault is not a thing of the past.

    10) That sexual double standards for men and women are alive and well shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone. But a Wisconsin town recently showed just how damaging such notions can be. On consecutive January days in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, seventeen-year-old Norma Guthrie and seventeen-year-old Alan Jepsen were charged with sexual assault for having consensual sex with their fourteen-year-old partners. However, that's where the similarities between the cases end. Guthrie was charged with a misdemeanor, which carries a maximum nine months in prison. Jepsen, on the other hand, was charged with a felony, which carries a maximum twenty-five years in prison. The Sheboygan Press reports, “Assistant District Attorney Jim Haasch, who filed both complaints, said the misdemeanor charge was filed in part because Guthrie has no prior criminal record. But online court records show Guthrie has a pending charge of misdemeanor battery, filed in October. Haasch would not say whether Jepsen has a prior juvenile record -- which is typically sealed -- but the boy has no adult charges listed in online court records. Haasch also said the cases are different because Guthrie's boyfriend is “almost 15,” with a birthday in February. Jepsen's girlfriend turns 15 in April.”

    11) In December, something called a paramour clause was used to force a lesbian in Tennessee to move out of her house and away from her family. The clause prohibits cohabitation of unmarried partners if minor children are in the home. In this particular situation, the lesbian couple had lived together for over ten years. Much of that was with the biological mom's kids, who were the product of a previous relationship with a man. There was no indication that this living situation was harming the thirteen and fifteen-year-old teens. Nor had the father requested that his ex’s partner move out. Still, a custody judge imposed the rule, leaving few options for the women in a state where same sex couples cannot legally marry. And people wonder why Proposition 8 matters?

    12) As a sex ed. teacher, I believe in answering teens’ questions honestly and in using language that they will relate to and understand. So had I overheard a conversation between a New York State high school teacher and some of her students, I probably would have applauded her candor. But I didn't get wind of this conversation. Josephine Isernia’s school board did. According to the board, when asked for advice on oral sex by one of the girls, Isernia used words that were, “vulgar, obscene and disgusting.” The words in question? Head job, hand job, and fellatio. Isernia was a teacher with over twenty years of experience who had never been in trouble before. Yet despite her clean record and the fact that the students sought her out for information, when 2009 rolled around, she was out of a job and educators everywhere were given a sad wake up call.

    13) Remember a few years back when PDA policies were making the news every other day? Lately stories about sexting and mom's who pose as teens on MySpace, have been stealing the headlines. But rules regarding public displays of affection never really went away and this February, twenty-two-year-old Jessica Garica was arrested at her local mall for kissing her girlfriend. According to Garcia, mall security told the couple, "This is a family mall, y'all can't do this. Y'all kissed, and if y'all do it again I'm going to write you a citation or I'm going to kick y'all out." The mall countered that after being asked to leave following the kiss, the couple returned and became belligerent. This, a mall spokesperson claimed, and not the kiss, is what lead to the arrest. Regardless, Garcia is considering suing for discrimination.

    14) Imagine this: You’re sixteen and having sex with your boyfriend. You want to be safe so you ask your mom to take you to the doctor for birth control. Most people would call this a sign of maturity and responsibility. The state of Mississippi would call it an incident to be reported to the cops. That’s because a bill that passed in January makes it a crime for parents not to report to the police that their kids are having sex. The Mississippi Child Protection Act of 2009, requires mandatory reporting of sex crimes against children and imposes new abortion restrictions on minors. Though there is much to quibble with in the bill, one section is particularly alarming. This is the clause that prohibits, “the intentional toleration of a parent or caretaker of the child's sexual involvement with any other person.” Supporters of the law claim that they are trying to protect young people from abuse. But nowhere does the bill distinguish between sexual abuse and consensual sexual encounters between teens. Mississippi already boasts the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country. Maybe they are striving for the number one spot in preventing parent/child communication, as well...

    15) This past November, a convicted sex offender in Oklahoma had little reason to celebrate having his criminal record expunged. That’s because the requirement that he register as a sex offender for life remained. This is particularly problematic seeing as the individual in question is a kid. Due to age of consent laws, he was convicted at sixteen of having consensual sex with a thirteen year-old girl. His mother explains that sex offender status meant the boy was, “removed from high school [and] prohibited from being in the presence of children other than his younger brother. He can't go near schools, day care centers or parks. His brother, age 11, can't bring friends into their home. If his brother had been a girl, Ricky [the offender] would have been removed from his home.” The United States has some of the toughest sex offender laws in the world and Ricky is far from the only teen forced to live under such conditions. As Human Rights Watch reports, “Some children are on registries because they committed serious sex offenses, such as forcibly raping a much younger child. Other children are labeled sex offenders for such non-coercive or nonviolent and age-appropriate activities as “playing doctor,” youthful pranks such as exposing one's buttocks, and non-coercive teen sex.”

    There has been talk recently about America’s liberalizing morality. But as long as teens and gay men are still under attack for having sex, and teachers and parents still get in trouble for taking about it, then it would seem as if there is still quite a ways to go before we can claim that this is the dawn of a progressive new era.

     

    US S.Ct.Reviews Lower Ct Decision ag. Civil Commit.
    By E Advocate <eadvocate@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 22.06.2009
    Link to this news item: [00144]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 00144 and be sent to eadvocate@yahoo.com, an excellent observer who finds and comments on these articles. Alex.
    Alex' comment: When will the courts ever catch up with the common understanding of the terrible and unintended consequences of these laws? And when will the media stop pandering to hysteria?
    --------------------------------------------------------------
    DC- Supreme Court to Review Law Targeting Sex Predators (Federal Civil Commitment)

    Comment from Critical Observer:

    First I object to this reporter's use of "sex predator" and "sexual deviants" because that merely shows the prejudice of the reporter and does not fairly tell the story, factually. The reality is, the way that portion of the Adam Walsh Act is written, IF a federal prosecutor prosecuted a Romeo & Juliet case and sent that person to federal prison, then at the end of that person's sentence s/he would be subject to civil commitment proceedings; guaranteed! The flaw is in the law, the Adam Walsh Act. Further, I think it is more egregious that the U.S. Supreme court will not hear the case until the next term, and in the meantime will be holding these men in a civil commitment facility. Hopefully that action is not a show of how the entire court feels.
    ------------------------------------------------------

    From FOX NEWS
    6-22-2009 Washington DC:

    The Supreme Court announced Monday it will review a lower court's order that struck down part of a federal law designed to keep sexual deviants locked up beyond their criminal sentences.

    The Court's decision will be welcome news to victim's rights advocates and others who supported the 2006 law known as the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act. A provision of that law allowed federal prosecutors to seek court-ordered "civil commitment" of sex offenders whose criminal sentences were about to end.

    Earlier this year, a three judge appeals court panel in Richmond, Va. unanimously ruled that part of the law unconstitutional. They concluded the Constitution doesn't allow the government to confine someone simply because it believes the person is sexually dangerous.

    They said the government "has no unexhausted power to prosecute a former federal prisoner simply because he could violate [a law]; any person could violate federal law."

    In asking the Supreme Court to take the case, Solicitor General Elena Kagan defended the "important act of Congress" designed to protect Americans from people who are "sexually dangerous to others." She argues the law is necessary and appropriate.

    The Solicitor General glosses over the real question here, which is, whether Congress is authorized by the U.S. Constitution to do something (i.e., civilly commit persons) which has historically been vested ONLY to the states. The SG trys -by sensationalizing the issue- to take the readers mind off the real question.


    The primary purpose of the legislation was to create a national database of sex offenders.

    "The goal of the act was to track these guys going across state lines," says Ernie Allen President and CEO of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

    That part of the law is not under scrutiny nor are the civil commitment laws of at least 20 states.

    The lawyers for five men each convicted of sexually-based crimes who remain imprisoned after their sentences expired asked the Court to deny further review. They argued there are other cases that would have provided the Court a better vehicle for examining the issue.

    They also contend Congress does not have the authority to "institute new proceedings that extend federal power over an individual beyond that authorized by" the original conviction.

    The Court will not hear the case until after its next term starts in October. However in April, Chief Justice John Roberts issued an order that keeps the men behind bars until the case is finally resolved.
     

    `You Are a Sex Offender!`
    By anonymous <posted by alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 21.06.2009
    Link to this news item: [00143]
     
    Refer in comments to news item no. 0143 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm. I`ll send the comments to Joni! Congratulations, Joni, for getting this good article published.
    Joni is an RSOL participant and activist!

    -------------------------------
    URL FOR THIS ARTICLE IS
    http://www.opednews.com/articles/You-Are-A-Sex-Offender-by-Joni-Greever-090618-985.html

    You Are A Sex Offender

    by Joni Greever

    www.opednews.com
    (A progressive online news journal)
    June 19, 2009


    No crime evokes the rage and fear in people as a violent, senseless, random act against a helpless child. No crime headlines the news as when children are plucked off the street or out of their bedrooms by lurking strangers. Parents naturally want to keep their children safe from predators and believe laws like Jessica's, Megan's, and the Adam Walsh Act will do so.

    The fact is, stranger abduction is very rare. Most offenses against children are by family members or friends. The laws have so changed the definition of sexual offenses (SO) that it includes innocent acts such as kissing a nude baby on the belly button and taking pictures of your children in the bath. A teacher can't hug a child for a job well done and a photographer can't take pictures of children he doesn't know building sandcastles for fear of arrest. Adults are cited for being in parks without children. A mother cannot take pictures of her own daughter at a skating rink; you can't even watch the children at the rink. Consensual sex between teens results in lifelong SO registration, as does texting self-taken nude photos. If you're a man walking down the street, don't catch the eye of a teenage girl and smile at her! You're an SO for breastfeeding your child in public or getting caught peeing behind a dumpster. Can anyone honestly say they've never done any of the above?

    If you think it's easy just to change the laws back to some semblance of sanity, you're wrong. The media is excellent at whipping people into a mindless frenzy and politicians, of course, are only concerned with the next election. This atmosphere of paranoia is destroying more than helping. One man saw a little 2 year girl wandering by herself, but didn't dare approach her to help. She ended up falling into water and drowning.

    While we bemoan the rising costs of prison inmate care and over-crowding, more and more are being buried alive in these institutions that have essentially done nothing wrong. People arrested for an SO don't have the Constitutional rights of those charged with, say, murder or embezzlement. In fact, touching a child will get you penalties worse than if you tried to murder that child.



    Once you're deemed a sex offender, no matter how trivial the 'crime' was, others automatically assume you are the sleazy pedophile, just waiting to grab their children and do all sorts of perverted acts on them. The new laws are designed to keep SO's at least 2000' from where children congregate - schools, parks, restaurants, churches - virtually anywhere. In some towns, this makes it impossible to find a home or go back to their old homes. Their families suffer, too. Thousands of families have been torn apart when a parent has been arrested and convicted. In some areas, just a charge with no conviction is enough to put you on a list.

    It used to be automatic to reach out to a hurting child and hold them close, as a teacher or minister might. This vital human touch may be something a child doesn't get at home, yet desperately needs. What happens to these kids that have to grow up without loving touch because everyone is afraid of getting arrested on charges that will completely ruin theirs and their families' lives? Just more collateral damage.

    Before you dismiss what you've just read as being soft on scum that prey on children, stop and think how you would feel if this happened to someone you know or love - even yourself - because if this keeps up, it's almost guaranteed that, sooner or later, it will.
     

    Mentally Disabled Teen Gets 100 Yrs for Fondling
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 12.06.2009
    Link to this news item: [00142]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00142 and send comments to alexm60@fastmail.fm. I`ll forward them to the participant who sent this article. MSNBC does NOT allow us to reproduce any portion of the article itself, so the Heading and the URL are below.

    This is a travesty - where a mentally disabled teenager is sentenced to 100 years in prison for fondling a neighbor boy.
    Alex


    -----------------------------------------------
    MSNBC.COM
    June 10, 2009

    Teen with 47 IQ gets 100 years in sex abuse case
    Case stems from charges involving the fondling of a 6-year-old neighbor

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31213058/
     

    Editorial to Revise Michigan Age of Consent
    By posted by anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 11.06.2009
    Link to this news item: [00141]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00141, and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    NOTE: RSOL thinks this is a step forward, but only one step among many to change outdated sex laws. Most important, take shaming out of registries altogether - abolish the public registry and move to a Canadian model where only the truly dangerous are on a registry, and only law enforcement can see it. Alex
    --------------
    Thursday, May 28, 2009
    Editorial: Michigan's age-of-consent law should be revised
    The Detroit News
    Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy is drafting a proposal for a much-needed update of Michigan's age-of-consent law. The revision is designed to protect Michigan teens who have engaged in consensual sex from unnecessary prosecution.

    When Worthy's proposal arrives in Lansing, it should be taken seriously. All it takes is one overzealous prosecutor to change a kid's fortunes forever. Minors under the age of 17 cannot consent to have sex in Michigan. But what about when there are two minors involved? Or when a high school senior is dating a junior?

    Under Michigan's black-and-white statute, the age of consent is the legal age of adulthood, 17. A young man just months into adulthood can be sent to prison and registered as a sex offender after having sex with his girlfriend, who is just months away from adulthood.

    Certainly, a 23-year-old male having sex with a 13-year-old girl is a different situation from a 17-year-old having sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend.

    Of course, nonconsensual sex, or sex with a minor involving an authority figure such as a minister or teacher, should be vigorously prosecuted.

    Sex among minors is not ideal, but it happens. Michigan would be wise to carve out an exception for teenagers or give judges more discretion in dealing with this issue.

     

    Miami Herald Editorial: Close S.O. Camp!
    By Rod Wagner <letsgetreal50@gmail.com>
    Posted on 09.06.2009
    Link to this news item: [00140]
     
    Refer in comments to news item No. 00140 and send to Rod Wagner at letsgetreal50@gmail.com.
    ======

    MIAMI HERALD
    Editorial
    June 6, 2009

    Close the sex offenders' camp under causeway
    OUR OPINION: The shantytown of sex offenders under the Julia Tuttle Causeway is fast becoming a public-safety and health crisis
    The year: 2020. The place: Under the Julia Tuttle Causeway. Population: 500 homeless sex offenders living in a shantytown created with the help of state and local officials. There's an outbreak of tuberculosis in the camp, which the felons leave each day to work.

    The pollution in the bay has worsened as make-shift toilets flush into the once turquoise waters.

    Meanwhile, the courts are still trying to decide if state and local laws went too far.

    It may seem like a far-fetched scenario -- 500 men, including a smattering of women, living in tents and rotting wooden cabins under a bridge that links cosmopolitan Miami to tourist mecca Miami Beach. But it's not. Just three years ago -- after the Miami-Dade Commission passed its ordinance barring convicted sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet from schools, parks and even bus stops -- there were only three sex offenders forced to live under the bridge. They could find no affordable housing anywhere else that met the 2,500-foot buffer.

    Population swells

    Today, there are almost 70 felons.

    At that rate, South Florida could find itself with hundreds under the bridge in a few years -- and that includes Broward, where a couple dozen cities have buffers, too. The effort to protect children is fast becoming a public-safety and health crisis -- another pox South Florida does not deserve.

    Who's to blame?

    • The Florida Legislature, which passed a 1,000-foot-buffer zone several years ago and then allowed cities and counties to go beyond that -- without making a distinction between true sexual predators and offenders who may have been convicted for other, lesser crimes, such as public exposure for urinating outdoors.

    • The state Department of Corrections, which has been sending felons with their ankle GPS tracking devices to live on a state-owned spit of sand under the bridge once they finish serving their prison sentences.

    • Local governments, which went too far with zones that are unworkable.

    Buffer no protection

    The American Civil Liberties Union is planning to file a lawsuit. Ronald L. Book, chairman of the Homeless Trust, now admits he was wrong to support the 2,500-foot buffer, and that a smaller buffer would still protect children and find a suitable place for felons to live without becoming a global embarassment for South Florida.

    Buffers are wrongly based on the premise that there's a relationship between residency and recidivism. But there's no evidence that's so. The Iowa County Attorneys Association, prosecutors dealing with a 2,000-foot buffer in Des Moines, noted in 2006 that a buffer ''does not provide the protection that was originally intended,'' and that it's too costly to enforce.

    The prosecutors noted, too, that most sex crimes against children are committed by relatives -- not strangers in a park.

    Children deserve every protection, and loitering restrictions in parks and school zones are one way to keep predators at bay. GPS devices are another way to ensure felons are not straying.

    But state and local governments can't continue to dump people under a bridge and pretend this community is safer for it.



     

    The `witchhunters` are often the witches
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 30.05.2009
    Link to this news item: [00139]
     
    Refer in comments to news item no. 00139 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm. I`ll send it along to the person who sent this.
    --------------

    About the writer
    Jill King Greenwood can be reached via e-mail or at 412-321-2160.

    By Jill King Greenwood
    TRIBUNE-REVIEW
    Pittsburgh, PA
    Saturday, May 30, 2009

    Buzz up!


    A legislative aide to Sen. Jane Orie, a former prosecutor who has championed state legislation to safeguard children, was fired Friday after the Attorney General's Office charged him with sexually propositioning a child online and suggesting the two dress up as animals and have sex.

    Alan David Berlin, 40, who was paid $57,340 a year to do legislative services for Orie, used the Internet screen name "alan_panda_bear" and propositioned the 15-year-old boy several times this month, Attorney General Tom Corbett said.

    Berlin of Carlisle was suspended without pay and benefits Thursday, said Russ Faber, the Senate's chief clerk. Shortly after Corbett's announcement yesterday, Orie said Berlin was fired. She would not comment on the criminal case.

    "I was shocked and appalled," Orie said in a statement that noted she supports the attorney general's investigations of child abuse and sexual assault cases, including the work of the Child Predator Unit.

    Court records did not indicate whether Berlin had an attorney. He was arrested Thursday on charges of unlawful contact with a minor, attempted sexual exploitation of children and solicitation to commit sexual abuse of children, among other offenses.

    A district judge in Harrisburg jailed him under $250,000 bond and scheduled a preliminary hearing for June.

    In profiles posted on Internet sites used for networking among furries, or people who dress as animals, Berlin identified himself as Alan The Panda with interests in baking, board games, classical music, fine dining, movies, travel, wine -- and diapers. The cartoon panda on his Pounced.org page wears a diaper.

    In that profile, Berlin confesses his screen identity is "not the most original name, but it suits me. I'm not a complicated person." He notes he has "a good job where I am well respected," and that he holds a bachelor's degree in sacred music. "I have a deep personal faith in God which I sometimes question," he wrote.

    "I am looking for a babyfur to be my mate and companion in a long-term committed relationship," he wrote. "I've been thinking quite a bit lately about where I am in life and what I'm looking for." The site said he was single, seeking a male ages 20 to 25 -- someone who can "enjoy being babied."

    Michael Sarfert, chief counsel for Orie, said Berlin did not work on any of the anti-child predator legislation in Orie's office.

    Orie, a McCandless Republican, has sponsored several bills to strengthen Megan's Law and Jessica's Law, and is sponsoring legislation this session to implement the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act and require use of GPS to track sexually violent predators and repeat offenders.

    Corbett cautioned parents to be especially alert about monitoring their children's Internet use as the start of summer vacation nears.

    "Predators know that more young people will be online during the summer and many will be home alone for long periods of time," he said. "Parents should stress that Internet predators will use whatever they can to attract the attention of children, from offers of gifts like video games or digital cameras, to things like dressing up in animal costumes or shopping for sexy underwear."

    Berlin proposed traveling to the boy's home in Harrisburg to have sex with him in the backyard while his parents slept inside, Corbett said, and requested nude photos of the teen. He suggested a meeting between the child and another adult, and offered to secure a hotel room if he could take pictures of the sex acts, Corbett said.

    The boy's parents became concerned when they discovered sexually graphic messages on their son's computer and contacted investigators with the Child Predator Unit, which began an investigation on Tuesday.

    Senate records indicate Berlin was hired in March 1993 and worked for Senate Marjority Leader Dave Brightbill, R-Lebanon.

    Berlin's online LinkedIn account listed him as a research analyst with the Senate who once worked as director of music at First United Church of Christ in Carlisle. On the LiveJournal social networking site in 2008, he wrote that the church fired him.

    Orie is a former Allegheny County assistant district attorney and worked in a unit handling sex crimes. She served in the state House before winning her Senate seat in a 2001 special election. In 2007, the Senate Republican caucus elected her as majority whip.

    Orie initially sponsored the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which aims to establish federally mandated national standards to strengthen sex offender registration and notification, in the 2007-08 session, but it failed to gain momentum. She has reintroduced it as SB 428, which is pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    Since January 2005, agents with the attorney general's Child Predator Unit have arrested 214 men from across Pennsylvania and as far away as Texas, Florida and Kentucky, Corbett said. The 39 arrests this year represent a nearly 40 percent increase compared to the same period last year, Corbett said.

     

    More Texas Voices PR!
    By sent by Mary Sue Molnar <marysueintx@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 30.05.2009
    Link to this news item: [00138]
     
    Please refer in comments to News item no. 00138 and send to marysueintx@yahoo.com and to Ms. Lee, whose email is at the bottom of the story. Way to go, Texas Voices!
    --------------
    On the predator list? It’s even harder to find a job
    New details on employers could hurt sex offenders’ hiring chances even more
    By RENÉE C. LEE
    Houston Chronicle
    May 29, 2009, 7:08PM


    A Rosenberg man who has been out of work for several months says that since the state recently added new information to its revamped online sex offender registry, it’s been more difficult for him to get a job.

    Employers, who might have been willing to give the 25-year-old registered sex offender a chance, now refuse to hire him because they don’t want their business name and address listed on the registry, said Gordon, who asked that his last name not be used to protect his privacy.

    The Texas Department of Public Safety added employment, school and occupational license information to offenders’ profiles about six months ago as part of a $1.2 million redesign of the online registry, which includes a new e-mail notification feature. DPS officials said states are required to post such information under federal law.

    Making the information available to the public has struck a chord with registered sex offenders and their advocates who say it’s unnecessary and poses another hardship for offenders who want to be productive citizens. Crime victim advocates, however, argue the information is an another tool to protect the community.

    “The more information, the more empowered the community is to enhance the safety of their families and children,” said Andy Kahan, the director of Houston Mayor Bill White’s Crime Victims Assistance office. “As long as the public uses the information prudently and not take any negative action, then the information will be helpful.”

    Mary Sue Molnar, a founder of Texas Voices, a sex offender advocacy group, said more information means less safety if sex offenders can’t find work or lose their jobs. She said she gets e-mails daily from offenders and their loved ones asking for help.

    “This is not keeping the public any safer,” said Molnar, whose son is a convicted sex offender. “It’s a feel-good law. It’s a tremendous problem. We want them to reintegrate into society and lead productive lives, and they can’t do that when they don’t have jobs.”

    High risk, low risk
    She said state and federal laws should distinguish between dangerous and non-dangerous sex offenders. She said many sex offenders pose no risk to the community. Some are low-risk offenders who were in consensual relationships and the offender didn’t know the victim was under age. In some cases, they are married to the victim and they have children. Having their employer and school information online can be devastating to their families, she said.

    Gordon, who is listed as a moderate risk on the state’s registry, agrees with Molnar. He is serving eight years of probation after accepting a plea deal on aggravated sexual assault of a child charges in 2004. He said he had a consensual relationship with a teenager who said she was 19. He believes only dangerous sex offenders should have employer and school information posted on the registry.

    Gordon, who lives with his parents, said he is up front with employers about his criminal history and has had other jobs since his conviction. He said he follows all the requirements of his probation, including sex offender treatment. All he needs now is a job.

    “It’s been very hard,” he said. “That’s the only thing holding me back.”

    The information posted on the registry is required under the Adam Walsh Act signed by President George W. Bush in 2006. The act established a national sex offender registry and states were given three years to implement the law. The state attorney general has the authority to issue guidelines in interpreting and implementing the law.

    In addition to finding a sex offenders’ personal and criminal information, the public also can now sign up for an e-mail service. The service will notify them when changes are made to a specific offender’s record or when a change is made to the record of an offender who resides in a certain ZIP code.

    DPS spokeswoman Tela Mange said state officials thought it would be a good tool for people who want to track of sex offenders in their neighborhoods.

    Kahan said he likes the instant notification because sex offenders tend to be transient and change residence frequently.

    renee.lee@chron.com


     

    TEXAS VOICES FIGHTS EXPANDED REGISTRY
    By posted by Mary Sue <marysueintx@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 17.05.2009
    Link to this news item: [00137]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00137, and send to Mary Sue Molnar and marysueintx@yahoo.com
    Also, send an email to the lawyer who wrote this good article!
    ---------------
    May 17, 2009 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Texas' Expanding Sex Offender Registration Requirements

    Article provided by Joe D. Gonzales & Associates. Please visit our Web site at www.joegonzales.com

    Sex offender registration statutes are not a recent occurrence; for almost twenty years, Texas has required some form of registration for those convicted of certain sex-based offenses. In 1991, the Texas legislature passed the first -- of what would become many -- sex offender registration laws, this one requiring those convicted of incest, sexual assault or indecency to register with the state.

    While this initial foray into sex offender registration may have gone somewhat unnoticed, the issue received the full attention of the state in 1993, with the abduction, rape and murder of 7-year-old Ashley Estell. In response, the legislature pushed through Ashley's Law, which required all sex offenders to register for a period of years after their sentences -- for some violent sex offenders, the law required registration for life.

    Since the passage of Ashley's Law, the legislature has revisited the sex offender registration issue often, each time adding new crimes for which registration is required or increasing the scope of information that must be included in the registry.

    Piece by piece, the sex offender registration law evolved, until today most sex offenders face lifetime registration requirements. Under the current regulations, sex offenders must report their address, birth date, height, weight and race to local authorities and must keep an up-to-date photo on file. This information is also available to the public, via a number of searchable Web sites. Moreover, Texas' sex offender registration laws may soon become even more stringent, despite the efforts of a number of civic groups.

    The Impact of the Adam Walsh Act

    Passed by Congress in 2006, the Adam Walsh Act is a federal law that sets minimum standards for public registries at the state level, including who must register and for how long, as well as what portion of the registered information is made public. The Act was signed on the 25th anniversary of the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh, the son of John Walsh, host of the television program America's Most Wanted.

    Under the Adam Walsh Act, states are required to set up a tiered system of registration requirements based on the severity of the underlying crime. Beginning with Tier I -- the least serious crimes -- offenders are required to register for 15 years and must update their status annually. Tier II crimes require registration for 25 years and status updates every six months, while Tier III crimes -- the most serious -- require registration for life. Those convicted of Tier III offenses must update their status every three months.

    In Texas, the Adam Walsh Act would require the state to take a step backward in its policy toward juvenile offenders. The Act requires certain juveniles -- as young as 14 years old -- to register as sex offenders for life. At one time, Texas had a similar mandatory registration law, but relying on the opinions of prosecutors and defense attorneys alike, the state now relies on the discretion of judges in individual cases.

    Texas Voices

    In the opinion of at least one civic group, Texas' sex offender registration laws are already too severe, even before the sweeping changes promised by the Adam Walsh Act. The group includes hundreds supports of those convicted of sex offenses or placed on sex offender probation of sex offenders who believe that the existing registration laws do not work to keep the children of Texas safe because they fail to separate sexual predators from non-violent, non-dangerous offenders. The group believes that the law should distinguish, for instance, between an 18-year-old high school senior who foolishly had sex with his freshman girlfriend and a serial rapist. Since, in Texas, anyone under the age of 17 cannot legally consent to sex with an adult, both situations are treated as rape crimes.

    Through monthly meetings and an expanding outreach effort, Texas Voices is working to convince lawmakers that the sex offender registration laws should be rewritten to better focus on those offenders who pose a risk to the public, especially children. According to a study conducted by the US Department of Justice, only 5 percent of sex offenders were arrested for another sex crime within three years of their release from prison.

    As evidence of the trouble with sex offender registration laws, Texas Voices can point to the case that started it all, at least in Texas: the rape and murder of Ashley Estell. Prior to the passage of Ashley's Law, authorities convicted a man named Michael Blair of the crime, at least in part because of a previous conviction for a sex offense.

    Long after his conviction, Blair maintained that he was innocent of the crime. In 2008, DNA evidence cleared Blair, pointing instead to a man who died ten years ago. In this case, at least, the sex offender registration laws that were designed to protect children such as Ashley would have failed; in fact, it was knowledge of Blair's previous offense that may have cost him more than a decade of his life.
     

    Lynn Mass City Council Seeks to Block S.O. Halfway Houses
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 14.05.2009
    Link to this news item: [00136]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00136 and send them to alexm60@fastmail.fm. Also see Action Item 0048. Also see the URL´s below and the contact information for the church, the Lynn City Council and the two newspapers publishing these articles.
    -------------------------------------
    Lynn church backing sex rehab idea
    By David Liscio / The Daily Item
    Lynn, Mass.
    May 13, 2009

    LYNN - A church in the city\'s exclusive Diamond District is behind a plan to establish a halfway house for Level III sex offenders in Lynn.

    City Councilors on Tuesday learned the rudimentary details, which include a request by the controversial LifePoint Church to the Police Department for information on the feasibility of and local restrictions related to siting such a facility.

    The matter was brought before the Ordinance Committee after Council President Timothy Phelan submitted three proposed ordinances aimed at halting the sex offender rehabilitation initiative.

    Ward 3 Councilor Darren Cyr, the committee chairman, described the idea of bringing Level III sex offenders to Lynn for rehabilitation as appalling. \"There\'s an uproar in the community,\" he said. \"I find it offensive that anybody would even suggest we open such a facility.\"

    Level III sex offenders are those convicted of the most serious sex crimes and most likely to offend again upon release from prison, based on definitions contained in Massachusetts law.

    Cyr said Lynn is home to schools, churches, daycare centers and Little League teams, all of which would be threatened by the presence of sex offenders. According to council records, Robert Eggerman, representing the LifePoint Church near the corner of Atlantic Terrace and Ocean Street, made the request for information, prompting Phelan to pen a letter in opposition to any such plan.

    A public hearing on the three ordinances proposed by Phelan was scheduled for June 9, which allows time for the Planning Board to separately discuss one of the ordinances that requires a zoning change.

    Phelan has proposed that it be made unlawful for any adult criminal Level III sex offender to establish residency or any other living accommodation within 1,500 feet of property on which any school, licensed daycare facility, or public or private school is located. The 1,500-foot buffer would also apply to all city and state public parks and playgrounds or recreational facilities. Measurements would begin at the property line, not at the school or other building.

    Registered sex offenders who reside on a temporary or permanent basis within 1,500 feet of any school, park, daycare or playground following passage of the proposed ordinance would be considered in violation. As a result, the sex offender would be required within 30 days of receiving written notice of non-compliance to move from those living quarters to a new location - but not within the 1,500-foot buffer zone.
    The first day following the 30-day notification period would be considered a violation if the sex offender has not moved and be subject to a $300 non-criminal fine. A subsequent offense would bring another $300 fine and the sex offender\'s parole or probation officer would be contacted, as would the state\'s Sex Offender Registry Board.

    The proposed ordinance requiring a zoning change would increase the minimum parking requirements for group homes, sober houses, halfway houses and similar institutions.

    The third proposed ordinance would simply prohibit sex offender halfway houses from operating within the city.

    Life Point Church has made headlines since arriving in the city, stemming from neighborhood complaints about trash, loss of green space, parking and the absence of a permit to operate its Lynn City Mission food pantry.

    The Daily Item was unable to reach Eggerman for comment Tuesday evening.

    http://www.thedailyitemoflynn.com/articles/2009/05/13/news/news01.txt


    Thursday 14 May 2009
    Sex offender rehab house idea draws Lynn council president\'s fire


    By David Liscio / The Daily Item

    LYNN - The City Council\'s Ordinance Committee today is expected to discuss a proposal to establish a halfway house in Lynn to assist in the rehabilitation of Level III sex offenders.

    The plan has already incited damning criticism from City Council President Timothy Phelan, who wrote a letter to Councilor Darren Cyr, chairman of the Ordinance Committee.

    According to Phelan, Level III sex offenders are deemed \"substantially likely to offend again\" and represent a threat to the safety of the children and residents of Lynn. A halfway house for sex offenders would also decrease property values, he said.

    As a result, Phelan has vowed to take action against the plan. He has submitted three draft ordinances to the Ordinance Committee and requested that these documents be put on the agenda as well as set down for public hearings.

    The measures would define Level III sex offenders and place restrictions on where they can live in the city, based on proximity to schools, day care centers, parks and playgrounds.

    The drafts also address with penalties the failure of any sex offender to register when entering the city, first with a non-criminal fine of $300. A subsequent offense for failing to register would bring about the fine and notification to the person\'s parole or probation officer as well as to the state\'s Sex Offender Registry Board. \"I find this possibility reprehensible and outrageous,\" Phelan said.

    http://www.thedailyitemoflynn.com/articles/2009/05/12/news/news02.txt
     

    RSOL´s Alice Benson in the News
    By posted by Marge <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 08.05.2009
    Link to this news item: [00135]
     
    In comments, respond to News Item 00135, and send comments to thesnappy1@gmail.com, with copies to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    Congratulations Alice Benson in New Mexico!!!!
    --------------------
    KOB.Com - KOBTV, Channel 4
    Albuquerque, New Mexico
    05/06/09

    The Bernalillo County sheriff is blasting an unusual letter that offers to help hundreds of Albuquerque-area sex offenders.
    A group wants to provide emotional support along with help finding housing and jobs.

    Some convicted sex offenders say they can't escape punishment for their crime because they have to appear on public sex offender websites. Many claim they can't get work or find a place to live because of the stigma.

    But that's where the group "Citizens for Change" is stepping in. The group is now offering to help sex offenders find housing and employment, along with emotional support.

    East Mountain resident Alice Benson is sending out the letters. Her late husband was a pastor who counseled a sex offender, and she plans to continue his work.

    She says the group is working to reform public registries. For instance, Benson says only violent sex offenders or serial pedophiles should be required to appear on public websites.

    She says if someone molested a child years ago and has been crime-free for years they should be taken off the site.

    Other members say public shame isn't the best way to keep the public safe. They say that can be done by successfully re-integrating sex offenders back into society.

    Sheriff Darren White says the group is offering sympathy to the sex offenders, almost like they're victims.

    "If this is an inconvenience for them, too bad. It pales in comparison to what they have done to their victims," Sheriff White said.

    Benson says of the 500 letters sent out, about 20 people have expressed interest in learning more about the group
     

    Washington Area Principal Cleared of Child Porn
    By Mary <rsolvirginia@comcast.net>
    Posted on 20.04.2009
    Link to this news item: [00134]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00134, and send to the above email (rsolvirginia@comcast.net) with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    Mary also points out that if this poor man had accepted a plea ¨bargain,¨ he´d be on a registry for life! BEWARE PLEA BARGAINS!
    Alex
    -------------------------------------------------
    My Students. My Cellphone. My Ordeal.

    By Ting-Yi Oei
    Sunday, April 19, 2009
    Washington POST

    The Channel 4 Newsbreak was meant to shock: "High school assistant principal in Loudoun County arrested for child pornography," announced WRC's Jim Vance. "Details following the Olympics."

    That was last Aug. 20. The assistant principal was me. And the story on the late evening news that night was how many people who knew me -- and countless others in the Washington area who didn't -- learned that I was the subject of a prosecution that over the past year has turned my life upside down and ruined my reputation and my career. Although all the charges against me were recently thrown out of court, my experience is a warning for all educators who find themselves trying to negotiate the slippery terrain where rapidly advancing technology intersects with risky adolescent behavior.

    My ordeal began in March of last year, when a teacher at my school, Loudoun County's Freedom High, told me about a rumor that students were sending nude pictures of themselves to one another on their cellphones. We've all heard a lot about "sexting" lately, but a year ago the phenomenon was new to me and, I'd venture to say, to most school officials. Because administrators' first concern is our students' safety and well-being, it was my responsibility to look into the matter.

    I called a student I thought likely to have such a picture into my office. In the presence of the school's safety and security official, he quickly admitted that he did. He pulled out his phone and showed us an image of the torso of a woman wearing underpants, with her arms crossed over her breasts. Her head was not in the picture. The 17-year-old student claimed not to know who the young woman was or who had sent him the photo.

    I immediately took the picture to the principal, who instructed me to transfer it to my office computer in case we needed it later. Being unfamiliar with camera features on cellphones, I asked the school's technology resource teacher for help, but he didn't have an immediate solution. The student then said that he could text the picture to my cellphone. That left the problem of getting it to my computer, whereupon the boy said that I could send the picture to my school e-mail address.

    In hindsight, of course, he could have sent it directly to my computer himself. But it never occurred to me that my actions could be regarded as suspect: I was conducting a legitimate school investigation with children's welfare in mind, and I did so in the presence and with the full knowledge of other school officials.

    I interviewed more students with the security specialist, but we found no more pictures and were unable to identify the woman in the photo. We concluded that she probably wasn't a student at the school. I reported our findings to the principal and assumed that the matter was closed.

    I left the building quickly that day -- the start of spring break -- to join my wife, Diane, at a doctor's office to discuss her upcoming surgery for a potentially malignant tumor. I told her about the sexting photo, but we had other things on our minds. When I returned to school two days after break ended, I confronted a new problem: The boy with the photo on his cell was now in trouble for having pulled a girl's pants down in class (another teen phenomenon known as "flagging"). I informed his mother that I was suspending him, and in the discussion I also told her about the earlier incident. She was outraged that I hadn't reported it to her at the time. She called me at home that night at 10 p.m. And again at 7 a.m. The next morning, agitated and demanding that the suspension be revoked and threatening to involve an attorney. I told her as calmly as I could that the suspension was for the deliberate act of pulling down the girl's pants. A couple of days later, after an appeal hearing with the principal and me, she shouted at me, "I'll see you in court!"

    I was concerned about her anger, but I'd dealt with many outraged parents before and knew how emotional they could get when they heard bad news about their children's behavior.

    I wasn't worried when a few days later, two sheriff's investigators came to school. They said that they were investigating a parental complaint and asked me whether I knew anything about photos being sent around on cellphones. I told them about our investigation and volunteered to show them the one photo it had turned up. I couldn't find the file where I'd saved it on my computer but then remembered that it was still on my cell. Good thing I'd kept it there, I thought at the time. I didn't know how to retrieve it (I'd never used the photo functions), so I handed the phone to one of the investigators. They didn't tell me that I was under investigation, nor did they confiscate my cell.

    The police later learned the identity of the students involved in the sexting, although they never told me that directly. The person in the photo, who turned out to be a 16-year-old at Freedom, later apologized for having lied to me, and the father of the boy who took the picture called to apologize as well.

    Then, a full month later, in May, I was charged with "failure to report suspected child abuse." I was stunned. I swiftly contacted the Loudoun Education Association, told them everything, and got a lawyer. A few hours later the school system placed me on paid administrative leave.

    I took some comfort in the fact that the charge appeared baseless: Who would have thought that photo constituted child abuse? Virginia law and school policy require that certain offenses -- having drugs or weapons on school grounds, physical violence that causes injuries, bomb threats -- be reported to law enforcement. But this incident didn't fit into any of those categories. Nor could I see how peers taking consensual photos of each other would constitute child abuse, especially since we hadn't even been able to determine that there were minors involved. Moreover, even if the sexting could somehow have been considered child abuse, I'd done what I was supposed to do by law, which was to tell "the person in charge of the institution," I.e., my principal, about it.

    In the summer, I got word that Commonwealth's Attorney James Plowman was dropping the "failure to report" charge. But then he reneged and threatened that if I didn't resign, I would face child pornography charges. Still, no indictment came in July, the "failure to report" charge was dismissed, and I went back to work.

    I heard a rumor three weeks later that I'd been indicted. I contacted my lawyer, who left messages with prosecutors and said that if it was true, I wanted to turn myself in. Diane, concerned when we heard nothing back after two days, developed chest pains and shortness of breath, and I rushed her to the emergency room on the night of Aug. 19. She was still in the hospital after a night of observation when I phoned her the following morning with the devastating news that I was under arrest.

    Aug. 20 was the first day for teachers to report back to school. An hour into the morning, the school's police officer called me out of a meeting. In my office, he told me that he had to arrest me. I was unnerved and started trembling so badly that I couldn't button my shirtsleeves. After letting me call Diane, the officer led me out to his police car, handcuffed me and drove me to the county jail. Several hours later, I was released on my own recognizance.

    How had this happened to me? The same day, The Washington Post ran a story online, accompanied by a huge mug shot of me. Within a few hours, the Web site BadBadTeacher.Com had also posted a photo and article. The next morning, after breakfast, a local Fox News reporter showed up at our door with an accompanying sound truck. Microphone in hand, she knocked and asked me to talk. Shaken, I closed the door. The witch hunt was on in full force.

    I was furious that the sheriff's department, by its own admission, had never even investigated the original incident. No one interviewed the principal until after my lawyer demanded that they do so. They'd simply taken the word of a disgruntled parent. Deputy Commonwealth's Attorney Nicole Wittmann also admitted publicly that there was no new information relating to the pornography charge. "We just feel very strongly that this is not someone who should be in the Loudoun County school system," she said, a sentiment she repeated in the final court hearing.

    Anger wasn't my only emotion. The anxiety and sleeplessness I'd felt after the first charge worsened. So did the sense of isolation. For two years, I'd shared my cancer experiences with a colleague as he suffered from the disease. I was crushed when he told me later that he'd asked twice about contacting me but had been discouraged from doing so. But Diane kept me going, along with friends, family and my Quaker community. People I hadn't heard from in years offered support.

    Yet I also encountered doubt and skepticism. A friend of decades inquired whether there was something I wasn't telling him. Another told me how years before, he'd unquestioningly supported a colleague facing a similar charge, only to find that his trust had been betrayed. "You wouldn't do that to me again, would you?" was the unspoken question. Still, once reassured, both stuck with me, attending hearing after hearing.

    Although I felt pressure along the way to cave and accept a deal, I absolutely refused to do it. My resolve only strengthened after the prosecutor's office upped the ante with two additional misdemeanor charges.

    On March 31, I was on the road with my wife when my lawyer called. I pulled, appropriately enough, into a church parking lot to hear the news: A judge had dismissed all the charges. All I could think was, "Hallelujah!"

    And so my legal ordeal is done, but I still ask myself: Did anyone benefit from all this? I have to put the pieces of my life and career back together. My wife and I were terrorized by a baseless prosecution, lost all our savings and were forced to borrow huge sums of money to pay for my defense. The students involved probably could have put this ill-advised sexting adventure behind them a long time ago. Instead, they had to wonder for months whether they'd have to testify in court and bring attention to themselves and their families. And a meaningful discussion about sexting and what schools, parents, the community and law enforcement can do about it has been sidetracked for more than a year by a prosecutor who should never have brought charges in the first place.

    Looking back, I'm not surprised by the students' behavior. But I struggle to understand how my actions in performing my job could have been so badly misconstrued. It also disturbs me that, in our legal system, the truth can apparently get in the way of "justice." I can no longer look at the power of prosecutors and our justice system the way I once did.

    As for moving forward, that's easier said than done. I remember myself four years ago, when I helped open Freedom High School, and I think about all that I've missed over the past year. I missed last year's graduation. I missed watching our girls' basketball team win the state championship. I missed the camaraderie of colleagues. I missed doing the job I love -- working with young people and watching them grow.

    This June, the first class to go through all four years at Freedom will graduate. I hope to be there with the students as their assistant principal. But it will be a bittersweet event.

    Ting-Yi Oei has been a Northern Virginia teacher and school administrator for more than 30 years.




     

    Ga. Senator Demands Change in S.O.Law
    By Kelly <gasoem@gmail.com>
    Posted on 19.04.2009
    Link to this news item: [00133]
     
    Comments to this should refer to News Item 00133 and be sent to the above email.
    ----------------------------------------

    Wednesday, April 08, 2009
    Senator irked at failure to fix sex offender law
    While bill stalled, judge enjoined law banning sex offenders from church work

    THE DAILY RECORD
    By R. Robin McDonald, Staff Reporter

    When a federal judge last week halted enforcement of Georgia's law banning sex offenders from volunteering at churches, one state lawmaker could easily have said, “I told you so.”

    Sen. Seth Harp, R-Midland, said U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper “has shown eminent wisdom” in concluding that registered sex offenders had suffered irreparable injury because the law's lack of clarity has forced them to stop participating in a wide range of church-related activities.

    “The sex offender law that we enacted [in 2006] was too far-reaching,” said Harp, who is vice chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a former county prosecutor and a former member of the U.S. Judge Advocate General Corps. “The bottom line is that it was bound to come to the courts and fail.”

    While praising Cooper, however, Harp chastised state House Republicans, and Majority Leader Jerry Keen, R-St. Simons, in particular, for killing a Senate bill intended to correct broad constitutional problems with the current sex offender statutes—including the provision that Cooper enjoined. Harp said Keen—who, beginning in 2006, authored amendments that have made Georgia's sex offender statutes arguably the toughest in the nation—“is not a lawyer and refused to listen to lawyers.”

    When the Senate sent the bill containing proposed constitutional fixes to the House in early March, House members ignored it, then substituted their own version which gutted the Senate measure, Harp said. The House version of the bill also failed to pass.

    “Those of us who really and truly are trying to protect children of the state are frankly horrified at what we got back from them,” he said. “It was almost like 'Alice in Wonderland.'”

    Keen did not return calls for comment or requests on Friday and Monday placed through his aide, Sally Fox. “As you well know, we had a lot going on here with the last few days of the session last week,” Fox said in an e-mail sent Monday to the Daily Report. “Unfortunately, Rep. Keen is unavailable today as he is dealing with personal matters.”

    Last month, shortly before Cooper handed down his order, Keen told The Brunswick News in his district, “We've got a lot of people who are well-intentioned, but the changes they've recommended weaken the [sex offender] bill. I think there's a general misunderstanding of the law as it currently is. Some people are talking about fixes where we don't have a problem.”

    Since 2006, more than a dozen separate legal issues have been raised in seven state and federal cases in Georgia challenging the law's constitutionality.

    With the enactment of tough, new amendments to the sex offender statutes on July 1, 2006, the majority of people already on the state sex offender registry whose residences and work had complied with state law suddenly found they were no longer in compliance and must move or risk as long as 30 years in prison, according to an expert for the Southern Center for Human Rights who testified in Cooper's case.

    Amendments passed in 2006, 2007 and 2008 bar sex offenders from living or working within 1,000 feet of schools, churches, parks, gyms, swimming pools, day care centers or school bus stops and from performing volunteer services at churches.

    Three times, the Supreme Court of Georgia has determined that portions of the law are unconstitutional and cannot be enforced.

    In 2007, Georgia's high court ruled that sections of the law requiring sex offenders to move even though they owned the property where they were living in order to comply with new restrictions was unconstitutional.

    Last October, the Supreme Court found unconstitutional another provision of the law that required homeless offenders to register where they lived but failed to tell them how, lacking an address, they could comply.

    In November, the high court struck down as unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment a third provision mandating a life prison sentence for sex offenders convicted twice of failing to register with authorities within 72 hours of changing their addresses.
    Cooper's March 30 injunction was based on his determination that the church volunteer ban also would fail a constitutionality test.

    “Many class members were ordered to stop participating in religious activities by parole officers, sheriffs' deputies and other law enforcement personnel, while others were deterred from participating in such activities by the statute's apparent breadth and penalty of 10-30 years in prison,” Cooper noted in his order.

    Religious activities in which sex offenders participated that have been labeled a violation of state law include singing in the adult choir, playing piano, reading in a church service, cleaning the church kitchen, serving on church committees, preparing food for the homeless, audio recording services, attending adult Bible study, setting up for church events and speaking to the congregation during services, according to the order.



    In his order, Cooper also concluded that allowing people on the state's sex offender registry “to continue to participate in their faith communities will further public safety by providing support, stability and a grounded sense of right and wrong” and that both the pardons and paroles board and the corrections department “recognize that encouraging people to be involved with faith-based programs will reduce recidivism” making an injunction “in the public interest.”



    The case, Whitaker v. Perdue, was filed June 20, 2006, on behalf of more than 11,000 people on the state's sex offender registry who would have been forced by the 2006 amendments to surrender their homes and jobs in order to comply with the new statutes. Lead plaintiff Wendy Whitaker has been on the sex offender registry since she was convicted, at age 17, of engaging in consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old schoolmate.



    In his order, Cooper also reaffirmed an earlier decision to allow the suit to proceed as a class action. His March order established several sub-classes to challenge the church volunteer provision; any provision that would apply to individuals convicted prior to July 1, 2006 (before the harsher residency and employment restrictions on sex offenders were enacted); and a provision barring sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school bus stop.



    Harp said that even before Cooper issued his order, he and a number of Senate colleagues had realized that, as the number of cases challenging the sex offender statute on constitutional grounds grew, “We had a very severe problem with the constitutionality of the law. A significant portion was being challenged and probably would fail.”



    Harp said that at the beginning of the 2009 legislative session, he went to Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and volunteered to “take this beast and try to correct it and try to have a law that is enforceable and will protect families and children in Georgia.” With Cagle's assent, Harp said he called a series of meetings that included representatives of the state's sheriffs, county prosecutors and the criminal defense bar, as well as the offices of the governor, lieutenant governor and state attorney general. Keen and his staff were also invited to participate, Harp said, but “They did not. … We had everybody at the table except Mr. Keen and his staff.”



    Harp said that on March 3 the Senate passed the resulting bill, Senate Bill 157, “which we thought would pass constitutional muster” and save the state “a tremendous amount of money” that would otherwise be spent unsuccessfully defending the troubled laws in court.



    But Harp said that when the Senate bill was sent to the House in early March, “They sat on it.” As the 2009 legislative session began to wind down, Harp said the House Judiciary Committee substituted its own version, which gutted the Senate bill.



    “The only issue they addressed was something that already had been declared unconstitutional,” Harp said. “They ignored the advice of the attorney general, the governor's staff, myself, the district attorneys and the sheriffs. … I would expect the courts will make us pay dearly for this pious bit of posturing.”



    “I think you need to ask him [Keen] if he thinks there is a Constitution of the United States and a Bill of Rights,” Harp added. “His comes out of the King James version of the Bible, maybe Leviticus.”



    Asked why the House substituted a truncated version of the Senate bill and stripped out many provisions that sought to remedy issues under constitutional challenge and why no House members or their staffs participated in meetings hosted by Harp, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Richard M. Golick, R-Smyrna, replied with an e-mailed statement that said, in part:



    “[A]s I committed to Sen. Harp publicly during consideration of SB 157, the House was (and still is) committed to addressing the entire remaining balance of issues during the balance of the year in order to be assured that we have a strong, common sense and comprehensive reform bill for the General Assembly to consider next session. There was a concern that a hurried work product on this important subject matter would increase the likelihood of long-term unintended consequences. …



    “The House wanted this issue to move forward, and we assumed that others did as well.



    “That said, the House is committed to a very focused study in the interim and for action early in the 2010 Session in partnership with interested members of the State Senate.”



    Golick did not reply to a follow-up request to clarify some of his written comments.



    Russ Willard, a spokesman for Georgia Attorney General Thurbert E. Baker whose office is defending the existing law, said this week that Baker's staff “has been open and willing to meet with anyone in the legislature on this issue” and has met with representatives of the governor's office, the state House and Senate, state district attorneys and sheriffs.



    “Our office has not opined on either side of whether the statute is constitutional or not,” Willard said. “It is our duty to defend validly enacted statutes. And that we are doing.”



    With regard to the federal injunction, Willard said, “We continue to talk to our clients about the ramifications of the court's order, but we're not making public at this time what our thoughts on the matter may be or what actions we may take subsequently.”



    Gerald R. Weber Jr., an attorney with the Southern Center who is representing the sex offender plaintiffs in the case before Cooper, said that Harp's bill proposed changes in the current law that would have addressed issues raised in pending lawsuits, including the federal class action, that challenge the state sex offender law. “We have testified in support of the bill,” Weber said. “It fixes a multitude of problems. We commend Sen. Harp for taking this on. It's not a popular thing to do.”



    Weber also noted, “Georgia's sex offender law has had more constitutional setbacks than any other sex offender law in the country… . Each session, there are revisions that sometimes fix some problems but always add new ones. It's either one step forward and two steps back or two steps forward and one step back. We're never quite reaching the goal line.”



    Weber also called the current law “so onerous it may actually impair public safety rather than enhance it. It casts such a giant net that it treats all people on the registry alike when there is a dramatic difference between a sexual predator who clearly needs all kinds of provisions and [class action plaintiff] Wendy Whitaker who had consensual sexual relations with a 15-year-old when she was 17… and now, decades later, is haunted by this law… .



    “The sad reality is that the politics of the issue make it difficult for the General Assembly to fix this law,” he said.



    Augusta attorney David E. Hudson, who is representing the state's sheriffs in the class action, said that Cooper's ruling did not surprise him. “I thought issues raised by the plaintiffs were serious questions … that warrant the court's consideration,” he said. “The sheriffs' point of view is they want to enforce the law as they are told to do so. If the court upholds it, they are ready to enforce it. If the court strikes down all or part of it, they will abide by that. The sheriffs' position in all this is, 'Someone tell us what to do, and we'll do it.'



    “The sheriffs don't make the law. They don't interpret the law. They depend on the legislature and the courts to instruct them on what they can and cannot do.”



    Hudson said that he thought it “made eminent good sense for the Legislature to address these questions if it could, and, if possible, take them out of the court system. … I thought it was a very worthwhile project to undertake.”



    Hudson said the House's failure to pass Harp's bill “comes as a disappointment to me in this regard. … A large sum of money has been spent by the state and others in litigation costs. During the entire time, enforcement of the statute has been largely shut down. … It just makes common sense that the Legislature would do everything that it could to address these issues. Otherwise they forfeit ultimately what the law will be to a federal judge.”

    Staff Reporter R. Robin McDonald can be reached at Robin.McDonald@IncisiveMedia.com

     

    Judge postpones S.O. Registration 100 Years!
    By Posted by Fima <estrinyefim@gmail.com>
    Posted on 18.04.2009
    Link to this news item: [00132]
     
    Comments should refer to News item 00132 and be sent to Fima at the above email, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    -----------------------
    Judge takes stand against sex offender registry
    Waupaca case raises underage-consent issue
    By Dan Wilson, Post-Crescent, May 4, 2006
    Waupaca County, Wisconsin

    A Waupaca County judge has ordered convicted sex offender Sam Roloff's name to be added to the state's sex offender registry, but not until nearly 100 years have passed.

    Circuit Judge Philip Kirk said the list, which now numbers more than 18,000 people, is rendered useless when it includes people like Roloff who engaged in consensual sex with underage parties.

    "It's diluted," he said this week. "It has lost the purpose for which it was designed. It should apply to people like the David Spanbauers (who molested and killed children) or priests who abuse children, but it gets applied to consensual sex because it was outside the age requirement."

    The law includes a "Romeo and Juliet" clause that allows a judge to exempt a defendant from registration if the defendant is 19 years old or younger and the victim is within four years of age. It does not recognize legal consent for underage people, even when they willingly engage in sex, because experts point out that juveniles don't have the maturity or judgment to consent.

    That's the heart of the debate that has pitted Kirk against the state attorney general's office and a state appeals court, both of which are trying to force Kirk to put Roloff on the sex offender registry. Roloff was 20 when he had sex with four girls, all between the ages of 15 and 17.

    Roloff, of Waupaca, was convicted of three felonies last year under a plea agreement. The plea deal included a joint recommendation of six months in jail and an unspecified term of probation. As a convicted sex offender, Roloff also should appear on the state's sex offender registry.

    Kirk, however, doesn't think Roloff should be on the registry because the girls willingly participated in the sexual acts, some of which were videotaped by one of the girls. Those under the age of 17 cannot legally consent to sex even if they willingly participate.

    "This was the first case to come along that provided a vehicle to have this issue addressed," Kirk said. "It's pushing the legal, judicial envelope."

    Kirk viewed the videotape before the Nov. 7 sentencing.

    "I was aghast at the behavior of all parties," Kirk said, according to the sentencing transcript. "There was no way to separate, in terms of culpability, that of these four teenage girls.

    "I think that the voluntarism of the parties' behavior is an appropriate consideration for sentencing purposes. This was a 'Girls Gone Wild' home video made by the girls. They produced it; they starred in it."

    Kirk refused to impose a sentence on the felony charges so that Roloff would not become a registered sex offender. Instead, he placed Roloff on probation for four years and ordered him to serve six months in jail on the misdemeanors that were part of the original set of charges.

    The state attorney general's office intervened by securing a court order from the 4th District Court of Appeals, Madison, that forced Kirk to complete the sentencing. At a second sentencing hearing April 21, Kirk placed Roloff on probation for two years and 200 days on the felony charges and ordered him to register on the sex offender list.

    But the judge added a twist. Kirk stayed the sentence for 100 years, effectively keeping Roloff off the sex offender registry for life.

    "The sex offender registration is a death knell for anybody," Kirk explained.

    A person remains on the list for 15 years after they complete parole or probation. Convictions on first- and second-degree sexual assault carry mandatory lifetime registration. The state Department of Corrections lists 28 offenses that require registration upon conviction.

    The attorney general's office plans to appeal Kirk's sentence, although officials there declined to comment. Waupaca County Dist. Atty. John Snider also declined to comment, saying only "the matter is being pursued at the appellate level."

    Although Roloff is not on the sex offender registry, the girl who made the videotape is registered. She was convicted of sexual exploitation of a child, and a different judge placed her on probation for four years and ordered her to register as a sex offender.

    Kathleen Lhost, executive director of the Sexual Assault Crisis Center of the Fox Cities, said the statute should be revisited. Lhost, an attorney, also served on the bench as Outagamie County court commissioner.

    "Once you are on that list it has the potential of ruining your life because employers look at it," she said. "I think it is a problem because it doesn't distinguish between someone who makes a mistake with a younger girl who is factually consenting and someone who is aggressive and forcing himself upon people in a more violent way.

    "I am sure that is what Judge Kirk is trying to do, to force the issue so the Legislature looks at it again and returns some discretion to the judges."

    Roloff's attorney, Tom Johnson, said cases like Roloff's are all too common.

    "The issue isn't the statute's existence, it is the indiscriminate use of the designation sexual predator," Johnson said. "There isn't any discretion. It is either on or off. You demonize them. When are we going to wake up as a society and acknowledge that teens are sexually active?"

     

    Sex Offender Law Goes Too Far!
    By posted by Marge <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 14.04.2009
    Link to this news item: [00131]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00131 and send to the above email address, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    -------------------------------
    Sex Offender Law Goes Too Far

    McClatchy-Tribune News Service
    (Reprinted from the Sacramento (CA) BEE)

    Published: Monday, Apr. 13, 2009 - 5:13 am
    The following editorial appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Friday, April 10:

    States are facing a July deadline to track sex offenders under a misguided federal law that casts too wide a net and is too harsh toward juveniles.

    The Adam Walsh Act - named for a 6-year-old boy abducted and murdered in 1981 - makes it a federal felony for a convicted sex offender to fail to reregister after moving to a new state. It also raises the penalties in many states for offenders who never registered.

    The law approved by Congress in 2006 is an effort to monitor more effectively an estimated 100,000 sex offenders who are not living where they registered. Many states, including Pennsylvania, already have sex-offender registries modeled after New Jersey's first-in-the-nation "Megan's Law."

    But states are finding the new federal law too cumbersome and costly to comply with. Of the 20 or so states that have submitted plans to Washington, none has been deemed in full compliance. Many others have asked the Justice Department for an extension of one or two years.

    States that don't comply with the law risk losing some of their federal crime-prevention grants. Some state officials say the loss of grant money would be far cheaper than the cost of meeting all the new requirements for tracking offenders. California estimates that implementing the new law would cost the state at least an extra $38 million.

    Pennsylvania is still reviewing its options, said Chuck Ardo, a spokesman for Gov. Ed Rendell. The state should ask for a delay, to give Congress more time to address numerous concerns with the legislation.

    For example, the law requires juvenile sex offenders age 14 or older to be on the registry - possibly for life - with their identities publicized. This provision flies against state laws that generally protect the identities of minors charged with crimes. And it ignores the data showing that juveniles are less likely than adults to commit another sex crime later in life.

    Advocates for victims say the law could deter families from coming forward to report abuse, for fear of stigmatizing a youthful offender well into adulthood.

    The national law is an overly broad response to high-profile, but relatively rare, cases in which a sex offender is released from prison, relocates to a new state, and preys on another victim. The vast majority of child sexual abuse cases don't result from "stranger danger." More than 90 percent of child victims are harmed by people known to them, most often people in their family.

    The new requirements also raise an issue of illegally punishing parolees retroactively. In some states, sex offenders were told they would need to register for 10 years upon their release from prison. Now, they find out they could be on a registry for life.

    States should base the monitoring of offenders on an individual's particular circumstances, such as his likelihood to commit another offense or his amenability to treatment. The federal government shouldn't force states to lump the worst criminals into a broad pool for tracking with others who don't pose the same danger.

     

    Obama Picks Judge Who Struck Down S.O. Law
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 10.04.2009
    Link to this news item: [00130]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 00130 and be sent to above email address.
    --------------------
    JUDGE WHO STRUCK DOWN S.O. REQUIREMENTS NOMINATED FOR FEDERAL COURT OF APPEALS BY OBAMA

    President Obama has chosen as a first Federal Appeals Court nominee, Judge David F. Hamilton, who in 2008 struck down an Indiana law requring registered sex offenders to surrender personal information, including internet addresses. It was noteworthy that the Indiana Attorney General did not appeal the decision. Senior administrators said Judge Hamilton´s nomination was meant to send a message about the direction Obama seeks for Federal court decisions this year. For more information on the Hamilton choice, see the New York Times article, the URL for which is:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/us/politics/17nominate.html?scp=1&sq=judge%20hamilton,%20sex%20offenders&st=cse
    --------------------------------------------------------------
    The decision is summarized in this excellent report below from sexoffenderesearch.blogspot.com, the full url of which is:

    http://sexoffenderresearch.blogspot.com/2008/06/in-indy-judge-strikes-down-sex-registry.html


    6-24-2008 Indiana:

    INDIANAPOLIS - A federal judge has ruled that a recently-passed state law to monitor the computer habits of sex offenders long after they have served their sentences is unconstitutional.

    U.S. District Court Judge David Hamilton in Indianapolis ruled Tuesday in favor of the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit that was brought April 3 by the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana.

    The ACLU had challenged as unconstitutional a law the Legislature passed this year, Senate Enrolled Act 258. It was supposed to take effect July 1 and would have required convicted sex offenders, who already have to sign the state's sex-offender registry, to also provide authorities with their email addresses and Internet usernames.

    Offenders also would have had to sign a consent form allowing police to search their computers or other Web-ready devices at any time, and to install software that monitored such activity, the law said.

    The ACLU sued on behalf of two convicted sex offenders, one in Marion County and one in Scott County. It named all 92 county prosecutors as defendants.

    In a 52-page ruling issued late today, federal judge Hamilton ruled that the new statute, as written, is unconstitutional.

    "The new law forces an unconstitutional choice upon these plaintiffs. They must choose now between committing a new crime by refusing to consent and giving up their Fourth Amendment rights to privacy and security in their homes, their 'papers,' and their effects," Hamilton wrote. "The unprecedented new law, however well-intentioned it may be, violates the Fourth Amendment rights of the plaintiff class, who have completed their sentences and are no longer on probation, parole, or any other kind of court supervision."

    Hamilton issued a declaratory judgment stating the consent to search requirements may not be applied to convicted sex offenders.

    The state could appeal the ruling to the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. ...News Source... by Courier-Press Staff Reports




    =========================================

    Attorney General Steve Carter says Appeal not Prudent
    on a Law Recently Declared Unconstitutional by a Federal District Court


    (INDIANAPOLIS, IN) - Attorney General Steve Carter will not appeal a federal district court’s ruling that a new law requiring registered sex offenders to consent to the unlimited search of their computers is unconstitutional.

    "The court found the statute's authorization of unlimited searches of home computers without a warrant or probable cause to be unconstitutionally broad,” said Carter. “As we strive to create a safer online environment for our kids, we must identify more targeted investigative approaches and the attorney general’s office will work with legislators to do so in the session that convenes in November. We are all dedicated to protecting children from predators, but we must do so within the constitution.”

    Additionally, Carter cites the need to balance the cost to taxpayers of an appeal. At this point in the controversy, taxpayers are responsible for thousands of dollars of attorney fees that will have to be paid to the American Civil Liberties Union.

    “If we take the matter to the Court of Appeals and lose, that amount could approach $100,000 and the case would not be resolved when the legislature convenes in November. Legislators still would not have any further judicial guidance on how to modify the language that has been struck down” added Carter. “The better course is for the Attorney General’s Office to consult with legislators over the next few months to develop safeguards against predators that pass constitutional muster.”

    Last month, United States District Court Judge David Hamilton issued an opinion stating that the new law, set to become effective July 1 was unconstitutional. In the Opinion he writes, “The unprecedented new law, however well-intentioned it may be, violates the Fourth Amendment rights of the plaintiff class, who have completed their sentences and are no longer on probation, parole, or any other kind of court supervision.”

    Carter praised the other provisions of the new law enacted by the legislature that remain in effect. Those include the requirement for registered sex offenders to provide email addresses and Internet usernames to the Registry. Another provision makes Indiana the first state in the nation to ban registered offenders from using the same social networking sites that children use. The new statute makes it a felony if an offender is found using such sites
     

    MO. S.Court Considers S.O. Case
    By Renate <gvr123@aol.com>
    Posted on 08.04.2009
    Link to this news item: [00129]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00129 and send to Renate at the above email, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    --------------------
    Complete URL to read this Associated Press (copyrighted) story is:

    http://www.kmox.com/pages/4156944.php?

    MISSOURI SUPREME COURT CONSDIERS CHALLENGE TO SEX OFFENDER LAW
    KMOX News Radio, St. Louis, MO (Associated Press story)
    April 7, 2009

    Once again, the Missouri Supreme Court is considering a challenge to ´sex offender´ laws. ll ´sex offenders´, some from out of state, whose offenses were before creation of the Missouri registry, and some with misdemeanors which were not posted on the registry until 2000, have challenged the Missouri Registry. The state attorney general opposes their claim.
     

    Native Americans Criticize S.O.Laws
    By posted by Marge <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 06.04.2009
    Link to this news item: [00128]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 00128 and be sent to Margie at the above email address, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    -----------------
    CHOCTAW NATIVE AMERICANS PROTEST S.O. LAWS
    published in KTEN.COM, Channel 10 in N. Texas & S.E. Oklahamoa

    Oklahoma City, April 6, 2009

    Native Americans who urinated in public decades ago, still forced to register. Choctaw leaders say this is wrong.

    This site does not allow us to print the full story here.
    Go to

    URL
    http://www.kten.com/Global/story.asp?S=10133720
     

    Military Discriminates Against S.O.s
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 05.04.2009
    Link to this news item: [00127]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 00127, and this should be cross referenced to Action Item No.

    Military.Com stated that US Army Policy is now to discriminate against sex offenders in housing and other matters. Read the article
    ¨Zero Tolerance Against Sex Offenders.¨ The article is copyrighted in such a way as to forbid it´s reprinting here. Go the the URL:

    http://www.military.com/news/article/marine-corps-news/zero-tolerance-for-sex-offenders.html

    We urge RSOL participants to write both the secretaries of the army and the navy - see action item No. 0044.
     

    US Chief Justice Blocks S.0. Release
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 04.04.2009
    Link to this news item: [00126]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item NO. 00126 and be sent to Alex at the above email.
    ------------------
    Comment: RSOL Participants should contact the attorney general and Obama´s staff to complain. What was meant by ¨change¨ if there is no change at all on these repressive policies? Alex
    ------------------
    April 3, 2009

    US chief justice blocks release of sex offenders

    MARK SHERMAN Associated Press Writer

    WASHINGTON (AP) - Chief Justice John Roberts has granted the Obama administration's request that the Supreme Court block the release of certain sex offenders who have completed federal prison terms.
    The federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, had invalidated a law that allowed the indefinite commitment of "sexually dangerous" prison inmates.

    Roberts, in an order Friday, says as many as 77 inmates can continue to be held at a prison in North Carolina at least until the high court decides whether to hear the administration's appeal of the ruling by the federal appeals court.

    The Justice Department said the sex offenders could have been released as early as next week without the court's intervention.
    "That would pose a significant risk to the public and constitute a significant harm to the interests of the United States," Solicitor General Elena Kagan wrote in court papers filed Friday.
    It is possible, however, that state laws that allow civil commitments of sex offenders could be used to re-imprison the men.
    The administration is appealing a ruling of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that Congress overstepped its authority when it enacted a law to allow the indefinite commitment of some sex offenders.

    The challenge to the law was brought by four men who served prison terms ranging from three to eight years for possession of child pornography or sexual abuse of a minor. Their confinement was supposed to have ended more than two years ago, but the government determined that they would constitute a risk of sexually violent conduct or child molestation if released.

    A fifth man, who also was part of the legal challenge, was charged with child sex abuse but declared incompetent to stand trial.
    Civil commitment was authorized by the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which President George W. Bush signed in July 2006.
    The act, named after the son of "America's Most Wanted" television host John Walsh, also establishes a national sex offender registry, increases punishments for some federal crimes against children and strengthens child pornography protections. Those provisions were not affected by the ruling.

    The administration is arguing that the law does not violate the Constitution and was well within Congress' power.
     

    Great Class Action Decisions in Georgia
    By posted by Kelly <gasoem@gmail.com>
    Posted on 31.03.2009
    Link to this news item: [00125]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 00125 and be sent to the above email, with a comment to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    A GREAT RULING IN TEXAS
    ---------------
    Judge overturns ban on sex offenders volunteering at churches
    Effort to overturn strict Georgia prohibitions moves forward
    By BILL RANKIN
    contact him at: brankin@ajc.com

    The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

    Monday, March 30, 2009

    A federal judge on Monday allowed a class-action case seeking to overturn Georgia’s tough sex offender law to go forward. The judge also barred enforcement of a provision that bans offenders from volunteering at churches.

    U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper rejected attempts by the state to declare the class-action suit on behalf of 16,000 sex offenders to be unmanageable. Instead, Cooper allowed the lawsuit to proceed in “subclasses.”

    Recent headlines:


    Legislator in dispute via e-mail with target of bill
    Book delves into UGA controversies
    Homeowners pack county offices to get taxes lowered
    • Metro and state news These include offenders seeking to overturn a provision banning them from living within 1,000 feet of a designated school bus stop; offenders who want to volunteer at places of worship; and offenders who were convicted before the law’s passage on July 1, 2006, but were put on the sex offender registry.

    Georgia’s sex offender law is one of the toughest in the nation. It prohibits most offenders from living or working within 1,000 feet of places children congregate, such as schools, parks, swimming pools and churches.

    Also Monday, Cooper granted a preliminary injunction that prohibits the state from enforcing a provision in the law that bans offenders from volunteering at churches.

    “Allowing plaintiffs to continue to participate in their faith communities will further public safety by providing support, stability and a grounded sense of right and wrong,” Cooper wrote.

    Lawyers representing the plaintiffs presented evidence from several ministers and others who work with sex offenders about the restorative powers of faith and volunteering in faith communities, Cooper said.

    Gerry Weber, a lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights, which filed suit on behalf of the plaintiffs, applauded the ruling.

    “Georgia’s sex offender law has suffered more legal setbacks than any such law anywhere in the country,” he said. “This order should send a clear message to the General Assembly that it’s time to fix this law.”

    -----------------------
    ARTICLE No. 2
     

    Great News from Texas!!!
    By posted for Mary Sue Molnar <marysueintx@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 27.03.2009
    Link to this news item: [00124]
     
    Refer to News Item 00124, and send to Mary Sue, and a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm. Also being posted as an Action item because of it´s importance.

    MARY SUE AND TEXAS VOICES: Keep giving them hell!!!!!!
    RSOL folks - please watch this tv clip and emulate Texas Voices!
    Alex
    --------------------
    This was shown on Channel 12, KSAT, in Texas the week of March 22.
    Go to URL:

    http://www.ksat.com/video/19008568/index.html
     

    Vigil for S.O. Who Froze to Death
    By posted by Marge <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 23.03.2009
    Link to this news item: [00123]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 00123 and be sent to the above email, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    ------------
    THOMAS PAULI has been remembered. But the comments to this TV station were vicious, hateful, so full of venom it is hard to imagine such people! We urge all RSOL participants to go to this URL and leave your own comments.

    The full URL is:
    http://www.wwmt.com/articles/vigil_1360483___article.html/held_saturday.html


    Vigil Held for Sex Offender who Died of Hypothermia

    March 22, 2009
    GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (NEWSCHANNEL 3 WWMT-TV) - A candlelight vigil was held Saturday night to mourn the death of Thomas Pauli.

    Authorities say he died of hypothermia in January after two downtown shelters wouldn't let him inside. The shelters say they were just abiding by the law.

    Pauli's past criminal record kept him out, the 52 year old man was a sex offender.

    "The law states they can't reside within 1000 feet of a school," said Rev. Ralph Collins of Mel Trotter Ministries.

    Marge Palmerlee of Degage Ministries says it's the wording she'd like to see changed.

    "Staying at a mission is not actually residing, it's just staying overnight," said Palmerlee.

    Pauli wasn't turned away from Mel Trotter Ministries that night but Reverend Collins knows the law well.

    "If they're caught they're arrested," said Rev. Collins.

    Several downtown shelters are within 1000 feet of a school and legally they're forced to turn sex offenders away.

    "They're trying to have safety for kids and I understand that, but the way it is now it's there has to be a better option," said Palmerlee.

    A hundred people gathered Saturday night night to silently remember Thomas Pauli. Silently reminding people that even though it's warmer out now there's bound to be a similar situation next winter.

    The group walked five blocks without saying a word. Holding signs and candles to remember a man they say shouldn't have died that cold January night.

    "Just a quiet, respectful way of remembering his life and having the spotlight on a situation a lot of people tend to forget about," said Palmerlee.

    Saturday nights vigil ended in the 600 block of Division, it's where Pauli's body was found back in January.
     

    Georgia Reforms S.O. Laws
    By posted by Kelly <gasoem@gmail.com>
    Posted on 22.03.2009
    Link to this news item: [00122]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 122 and send them to Kelly at the above email, with copies to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    Alex´s Comment: Kelly Piercy is certainly NOT sitting on his hands! This is fantastic work by a truly amazing man. Please let him know how valuable his work is by your comments.
    -----------------
    http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/251/story/658109.html

    Ga. considers changes to sex offender law
    By GREG BLUESTEIN - Associated Press Writer --

    ATLANTA --
    Three years after adopting one of the nation's stiffest stances on sex offenders, Georgia lawmakers are rethinking some of the crackdown's toughest provisions.

    After complaints from civil rights groups and round after round of costly court challenges, powerful Georgia lawmakers are looking to soften some of the very parts of the law that incited the greatest debate.

    Changes to the 2006 law could allow some offenders to petition the legal system to get off the registry, allow others to volunteer at churches and clear the way for disabled and elderly offenders to be exempt of the strict residency requirements.

    The revisions, which already have cleared the Senate, are aimed at addressing some of the most vocal critics who challenged the rules in court. They have won the support of sheriff's groups, defense attorneys and some of the sex offenders who so vocally criticized them.

    "I think they start to create a rational law that can move in the direction of creating public safety," said Kelly Piercy, who was convicted of child pornography charges in 1999. "They are actually bringing this legislation back to its noble intent."

    But the most stirring of changes still could face a backlash from the House lawmakers who supported the measure three years ago as a way to protect Georgia's children from the state's 16,000 sex offenders.

    "I've said since the day we passed the bill that we knew that this was a pretty big change and there were some things we needed to revisit, but I'm not on board with all the changes," said House Majority Leader Jerry Keen, the law's sponsor.

    He wouldn't elaborate on what parts of the proposal concerned him, but he did say he would fight any changes that could cripple the law.

    "I'm for anything that makes it easier to administer the rules, but I'm not in favor of anything that could weaken the overall purpose of the law."

    The law, which supporters say is among the nation's toughest, was passed in 2006 at the urging of Republican leaders who vowed it would prevent the state from becoming a "safe haven" for Georgia's sex offenders.

    Shortly after it took effect, civil rights groups challenged a provision that banned offenders from living, working or loitering within 1,000 feet of just about anywhere children gather. They claimed it rendered vast areas of Georgia off-limits to offenders.

    They also have targeted other portions of the law, with at least eight challenges that have been resolved or are pending in state and federal court.

    State Sen. Seth Harp, R-Midland, said his proposal aims to address those concerns.

    "I want it every bit as harsh on the dangerous predators, but I don't want it so broad as to treat some people who aren't sexual predators like they are," Harp said.

    One change would allow "low risk offenders," such as those convicted of statutory rape, to petition the courts to get off the registry after completing their sentence. The law has been criticized by judges for treating the most egregious offenders, such as child molesters, the same as those convicted for having consensual sex with an underage partner.
     

    Fix S.O. Registry: Atlanta Constitution
    By sent by Kelly Piercy <gasoem@gmail.com>
    Posted on 18.03.2009
    Link to this news item: [00121]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 00121, and send to the above email address, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    Alex´s note: Again, one of the South´s most important newspapers takes a bold stand for sex offender reform!
    ----------------------------------
    THE ATLANTA CONSTITUTION
    OUR EDITORIAL BOARD'S OPINION

    Our Opinion on SB 157: (SB 157 is a proposed Georgia law to reform the sex offender registry requirements there)

    Fix registry

    Wednesday, March 18, 2009

    Once legislators realized how passionately voters revile “sex offenders,” they began to search for those offenders everywhere — even where they don’t exist — to make sure they are punished and stay punished.

    As a result, an increasing number of criminals on the state’s sex-offender registry never committed a sex crime. State law makes anyone convicted of kidnapping or false imprisonment of a minor a sex offender. So if someone robs a Dairy Queen and detains a 16-year-old employee, that criminal is forever a sex offender.

    Inclusion on the sex-offender registry is a life sentence; those on it cannot live near schools, churches, swimming pools, school bus stops, day care centers, parks, rec centers or skating rinks; or work near schools, churches or day care centers.

    Recognizing their mistake, legislators are trying to amend the law to remove non-sex crimes from those requiring registration.

    While helpful, that doesn’t go far enough. Under current law, a 17-year-old who had sex with a willing 15-year-old classmate could be put on the registry for life as a child abuser. The General Assembly should limit the registry to truly dangerous offenders, such as rapists and child molesters.

    Across the state, police officers waste time and money confirming the whereabouts of “offenders” who pose little threat to anybody. If the registry listed only serious offenders, it would become a more useful tool to law enforcement.

    Senate Bill 157, sponsored by Sen. Seth Harp, does make many sensible changes. It recognizes that ailing offenders in nursing homes and hospices can be removed from the registry since they pose no threat. It also creates a system hereby homeless offenders can register and stay within the law. That’s important, because by denying offenders the right to live in so many places, the law itself creates homelessness.

    In the past few years, Georgia’s sex-offender registry has faced a series of major court challenges. The state has lost every challenge, which isn’t surprising considering the law grew out of political opportunism, not thoughtful research. It’s time to fix this law once and for all. Harp’s bill is a fine beginning, but it needs to go further.

    — Maureen Downey, for the editorial board

     

    S.O. Law Must Be Changed!
    By Francie Baldino <reformsolaw_mi@att.net>
    Posted on 16.03.2009
    Link to this news item: [00120]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 00120 and be sent to the above address wtih a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    --------------
    Oakland Press
    Oakland County, Michigan
    March 15, 2009

    Sexual offenderlaw must be changed
    by Francie Baldino

    It is obvious that our society is extremely concerned over the well-being of our children and protecting them from sexual predators and exploitation. It is of the utmost importance.

    But it is also very clear that the laws that have been implemented to do so have had unintentional and extremely damaging effects and consequences.

    I am speaking of the many young people whose lives are being destroyed by having to register as sex offenders after engaging in consensual sexual activity with a boyfriend or girlfriend reasonably close in age.

    Age of consent guidelines are vital to society and serve many purposes. They protect children from sexual predators. They act as a deterrent to teen sex.

    These boundaries are important. But there are clear-cut, essential differences between pedophiles and sexual activity between teens two, three or four years apart in age. The penalties imposed on these teens for violating these boundaries should be fitting for the circumstance and the act, but when teens engage in consensual sexual activity, it is grossly excessive, ruthlessly cruel and socially counterproductive to punish them by jail time, sex-offender registration and removal of the teen from their home, families and schools.

    In a perfect world, teens would not engage in sexual activity at such early ages, but sadly, this is not the case. Too many young people are being persecuted by having to carry a title that groups them with truly mentally ill individuals (rapist and pedophiles) for the rest of their lives.

    It sets them up for failure. Finding a job is virtually impossible for these teens (many now adults) called “offenders.”

    If someone you know has been adversely affected by this over reactive legislation, e-mail reformsolaw_mi@att.net. For information, visit www.reformsexoffenderlaws.org.

    Francie Baldino

    Royal Oak

     

    Sex Offender Law in NY too Harsh?
    By posted by Margie <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 12.03.2009
    Link to this news item: [00119]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 00119 and be sent to the above email address, as well as the alexm60@fastmail.fm, and to the journalist mentioned below. The Rev. David Hess is an RSOL signatory, who has been with us from the start! Thanks for your good work, David.
    alex
    ---------------
    Sex Offender Law Enforcement Begins in a Year in East Rochester
    WHAM TV, Channel 13, Rochester, NY
    Reported by: Patrice Walsh
    Email: pwalsh@13wham.com

    Sex Offender Law Too Harsh?

    (East Rochester, N.Y.) - Sex offenders in East Rochester have been notified that they cannot live within 2,000 feet of places where children congregate such as schools and playgrounds.

    Vicki Garritano doesn't believe sex offenders should live in East Rochester at all.

    When asked if she believes in second chances, she said, “Not that kind of crime, no, no reason to have a sex crime against a minor."

    Garritano supports the new residency law for sex offenders.

    She said, "People will say they won't commit crimes near where they live. I don't believe it, it's the safety of our children. They come first, our rights come first. They gave up their rights when they committed a bad crime.”

    Four registered sex offenders live in the village. Two have families and have lead law-abiding lives.

    Advocates who fight for better laws for sex offenders say that forcing them to move would disrupt their stable lives and could cause them to repeat their crimes.

    The Rev. David Hess said, "They just feel, ‘What's the use? I'm going to be punished if I do good or bad!'"

    Hess advocates for better laws to ensure the rights of sex offenders.

    "We cannot excuse it," he said. "I think the last thing I or anyone else would want to do is excuse it. What we want to do is promote safety. This law doesn't promote safety."

    East Rochester Mayor Jason Koon said the village has only received one or two complaints about the law. He said it will be enforced beginning in one year.

    The American Civil Liberties Union calls the law unfair, ineffective, and unconstitutional.

    Similar laws are being challenged across the country.

    The residency law will stand for now, but the state could and pre-empt it with a different law.
     

    AWA Would Harm Iowa
    By posted by Mary <rsolvirginia@comcast.net>
    Posted on 12.03.2009
    Link to this news item: [00118]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item 00118 and send to the above email address, as well as alexm60@fastmail.fm, and to the author of this article, who is legislative director of the Iowa ACLU - Marty Ryan,
    marty.ryan@aclu-ia.org
    ----------------------------------
    New rules for sex offenders might be worse
    By MARTY RYAN • March 6, 2009

    A problematic issue facing the Iowa General Assembly this year is the possible implementation of Title I (Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act) of the Adam Walsh Child Protection Act of 2006. In a nutshell, this federal act requires states to "substantially" comply with its provisions or lose up to 10 percent of federal funding from Byrne Memorial Grants.

    A Byrne Grant is named after a police officer killed in the line of duty while protecting a drug-case witness in New York City. Congress named these grants in his memory, and the grants are specifically earmarked for eradicating drug-dealing offenses. The funds have nothing to do with sex offenders.


    The Adam Walsh Act contains statutory requirements that states must enact to receive 100 percent of the state's allotment of Byrne Justice Assistance Grants. States that don't "significantly" comply will have their grant awards cut by up to 10 percent. No one really knows what "significant" means. In any case, compliance with this act will cost more than the 10 percent grant money that could be lost through noncompliance. The grants are temporary, but changes to Iowa law will be permanent and cause long-term problems.

    Many political people passionately, but erroneously, believe that the Adam Walsh Act is the answer for getting rid of Iowa's 2,000-foot residency restriction for sex offenders. This emotional response keeps the same people from seeing the many flaws in making this exchange. Sex offenders have difficulty finding a place to live. Under the provisions of the Adam Walsh Act, sex offenders will have difficulty finding employment, locating a place to live (based upon enhanced notification requirements), furthering their education, and focusing on rehabilitation.

    The Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act requires sex offenders to provide the name and address of any place where the sex offender is an employee or employer, and this includes self-employment, volunteer work, transient work, etc. Although the act does not require the employer's name appear on the public Web site, it does require the employer's address. The cost to counties verifying this information will be burdensome at a time when government is trying to cut costs. Iowa law does not require registration nor verification of employment information.

    Sex offenders attending school - and this applies to all students, college level, high school, and yes, grade school - must register in the jurisdiction of the school, as well as the jurisdiction where the student resides. Although Iowa law does require students attending a post-high school educational institution to register in the jurisdiction where they attend school, as well as their residential address, there is no such requirement for students in high school or elementary school.

    License-plate numbers of all vehicles owned by a sex offender must be part of the information required for registration. This requirement includes the vehicles owned by the sex offender, but driven by a spouse, teenage child, mother-in-law, grandparent, etc. Iowa has no such requirement.

    This act would be retroactive. Iowans who have completed their 10-year registration process without incident may have to begin the process all over again because of the nature of their crime. They could be required to now register for life.

    The safety of children was overlooked as Congress enacted this legislation. Sex offenders complying with current Iowa law may be forced to go underground to survive. A report by the Fiscal Service Division of the nonpartisan Iowa Legislative Services Agency cites U.S. Department of Justice statistics that, in Iowa, 2008 data indicate that "approximately 98 percent of minor victims knew the offender."

    Focusing limited resources on federally mandated sex-offender registration would be both costly and ineffective.

    It is admirable that policymakers want to undo the damage done by the 2,000-foot residency restriction. The Adam Walsh Act is simply more bad policy based on emotional response. It selfishly enacts a false sense of security for adults, when Iowa should be finding better ways to educate and protect our children.

    MARTY RYAN is the legislative director of the ACLU of Iowa. Contact: marty.ryan@aclu-ia.org
     

    WITCH HUNT - Film Opens in CA
    By posted by Shelly <axldogrox@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 02.03.2009
    Link to this news item: [00117]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 00117 and be sent to the above email address.
    The You Tube clip of this excellent new film, Witch Hunt, is

    http://ktffilms.com/trailer.html

    WE URGE RSOL PARTICIPANTS TO VIEW IT and to send comments to the film makers!
     

    Sex Panics: Bad Law, Junk Science
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 28.02.2009
    Link to this news item: [00116]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0016 and be sent to the above email address. Also, send comments to the writer, JoAnn Wypijewski at her email - jwuyp@earthlink.net.

    Alex` Comment: Ms. Wypijewski has written many excellent articles over the years - she was one of the first to expose and castigate the sex offender hysteria.

    The URL for this article, to read online, is
    http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090316/wypijewski

    -------------------------------
    Carnal Knowledge
    By JoAnn Wypijewski
    THE NATION
    March 16, 2009
    February 25, 2009

    JoAnn Wypijewski reported extensively on the Shanley case in Legal Affairs (September/October 2004).

    Sex panics make for bad law. It could be said that they make for bad science, too, except that what has driven some of the most notorious legal cases to emerge from such panics has been more a masquerade of science, a belief tricked out in the language of medicine and social science to distract from the mumbo jumbo at its core. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is set to be the latest arena to test that belief, taking up the admissibility of "dissociative amnesia," or "repressed memory," in a case that some powerful interests no doubt hoped was as settled as the grave.

    Behind the scrim of boom times there was always debt and sex--and the intimate economy of panic and desire.

    The petitioner is Paul Shanley, a once famous "street priest" who became infamous in the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, was tried in 2005, convicted and sentenced to twelve to fifteen years in prison. Because the media, particularly the Boston Globe, were central to the allegations and the frenzy that provided the context, it has always been difficult to see the case plainly. But because justice, as opposed to its many stand-ins, is blind, imagine yourself or one you love as the defendant at the bar.

    In October 2004 Dr. Daniel Brown, a Boston psychologist, took the witness stand in a pretrial hearing at Middlesex Superior Court and offered what would become the state's only foundation for its prosecution. There was no evidence in the case, just a claim that depended entirely on faith. Dr. Brown was in the courtroom to give it the imprimatur of science.

    The accuser asserted that from the age of 6, in 1983, he had been raped and otherwise indecently assaulted by the defendant for three years in a busy church on Sunday mornings. Each assault, it was alleged, instantly erased his memory of what had just happened, so that the boy re-approached the defendant in a state of innocent unknowing, to be assaulted again, to forget everything again and again, and then move on in life without the slightest inkling of the experience until twenty years later, when it all came back to him.

    Dr. Brown had appeared as a certified expert in courtrooms for years, stating that the mind's capacity for such "massive repression" was generally accepted as demonstrable fact in the psychological professions. That was always false. By 2004, however, as compellingly detailed in documents now before the Supreme Judicial Court, the literature in major scientific publications questioning the validity of repressed memory was weighty. Many of the therapists whose work Brown recommended had been disgraced, stripped of their licenses and revealed as dangerous frauds in successful malpractice suits.

    Brown's own testimony had been rejected as unreliable by courts in New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Nevertheless, he was the expert favored by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and defense counsel offered not a single study or witness to rebut. Almost fifty years of research on memory and trauma, involving 120 studies and more than 14,000 people with documented experiences of rape, sexual abuse, torture, death camps, war or other horrors, reveals no evidence of repressed memory--that is, an inability to remember that cannot be explained by ordinary forgetting, infantile amnesia, intoxication or brain injury. Ignorant of that record, Judge Stephen Neel ruled that "the theory of repressed memory is generally accepted by the relevant scientific community." Thus, it was deemed admissible to buttress the criminal allegations.

    When prosecutors first brought those, in 2002, there were four complainants, all friends or acquaintances, who reported identical experiences of sexual abuse, immediate memory loss and instantaneous remembering within a few days of one another. This quadruple "recovery" of memory began when one of them read an article in the Globe.

    Although, as initially charged, the defendant was a man who had had "unnatural sexual intercourse" with four small children in the same period, at the same time on Sundays, in the same circumstances for years, there was never any physical evidence. No blood, no rips, no teary eyes or flushed faces or even dishevelment among the boys. None of the many people who were in the church every week when these crimes were supposedly happening, including the mother of one of the boys, ever noticed a thing. No one saw any of the boys alone with the defendant. No one corroborated essential details of their stories; in fact, many witnesses, including the accuser's mother-in-law, who was also on the scene every week, contradicted them.

    Ultimately the DA dropped three men from the case, their shaky claims further burdened by mental illness, gambling, drug use, prison time and prior statements of being raped by family members. The last man standing had been in the Air Force and was a newly married fireman at the time of trial. Under oath he re-remembered some of his "memories" differently. The prosecution's expert witness, a confederate of Dr. Brown called Dr. James Chu, testified that this was perfectly consistent with dissociative amnesia. Every contradiction in the accuser's story, like every problem in his past, was only further proof of sexual abuse and of his sincerity.

    Dr. Chu's testimony revealed the leap of faith at the heart of repressed memory belief. "There are patients who report no amnesia," he said, "and I don't know whether they in fact have no amnesia or that they just haven't yet remembered something that they forgot." Defense counsel floundered in the face of this purported scientific expertise. Dr. Chu admitted that the concept of the brain erasing all knowledge of a traumatic event until some mysterious mechanism unlocks the deep freeze of memory "doesn't make a lot of intuitive sense." He was relying on the stories patients told him, the symptoms from which a therapist can "construct meaning," as Dr. Brown had put it, and the studies based on people's self-reporting, without controls, methodological standards, error rates; in other words, without scientific validity.

    In the absence of effective cross-examination or an informed defense, though, Dr. Chu's testimony conferred the aura of a scientific benediction. Use your "common sense," the prosecutor told the jury; believe the expert, believe the victim. She hadn't proved a thing, but the jury believed them.

    Almost no one in the press questioned the "science." Scandal had been so profitable. After Roderick MacLeish Jr., a personal injury lawyer who brought a civil case on behalf of the four accusers, held a dramatic PowerPoint press conference in 2002, the Globe pronounced the priest "depraved" and went on to collect its Pulitzer for retailing MacLeish's most inflammatory claims. The immense documentary record on Shanley never supported them, so the Globe's reporters (and others from The Advocate to the New York Times to Vanity Fair) either never analyzed the documents independently or misrepresented them. Nor did they submit their interviews to the most basic checks of rational skepticism.

    Shanley had had sex. He'd had sex with hustlers and teenagers and other men. And he, a priest, had lied about it. That anyone else might be lying, or confused, or seeking attention, or wanting money, or needing an explanation for the mess of a life only muddied up a good gothic tale. When the church defrocked Shanley and, against its attorneys' advice, settled the civil case, paying the accuser, Paul Busa, $500,000 and paying the troubled friend whose claims had set off the chain reaction of recovered memories, Gregory Ford, $1.4 million, it handed down one more pretrial guilty verdict. "Even if Shanley didn't rape those kids," went the common line, "he did something." Nobody knew, amid all the monster-making, that the DA had offered Shanley a deal: plead guilty and avoid prison. He refused.

    When the Supreme Judicial Court hears arguments in May, it will consider the issues that, without the impedimenta of panic and prejudice, always made this a case about due process and equal treatment under the law. Shanley's new lawyer, Robert Shaw Jr., is not asking the court to divine Busa's veracity or even to determine that the hypothesis of repressed memory is, finally, true or false. That, he asserts, is the function of scientific research. To date, the research shows that the hypothesis is unproven. And so long as it is unproven, it is inadmissible in court. Shaw argues that Shanley had ineffective counsel on this and other matters, and he is seeking a new trial.

    This will be the first time a Massachusetts court fully considers the scientific, evidentiary basis for repressed memory. The Commonwealth is behind the curve. Since 1998 state courts have been dismissing repressed memory as junk science, and prosecutions based on it have become rare. In 2007 an Indiana court rejected Dr. Brown's testimony as misleading, and a federal judge threw out a $1.75 million verdict in a case that hinged on Brown's expertise. In a 2006 amicus brief, dozens of pre-eminent social science researchers stated, "Decades of research and scientific debate have clarified over and over again that the notion of traumatic events being somehow 'repressed' and later accurately recovered is one of the most pernicious bits of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry." Which is why Massachusetts matters beyond the fate of one man. People who may not believe in God or aliens believe in repressed memory, with no more justification and maybe less. The source of that belief is by now a tangled web, but one of its strands leads back decades to liberals and do-gooders, feminists and therapists in Massachusetts. Their ideas ruined hundreds of lives, and their acolytes, who cheered Shanley's conviction and were rewarded for abetting it, ought to be disabused of the pretension that they served something other than faith-based justice.


     

    Fantastic Film: Witchhunt
    By posted by Kelly <gasoem@gmail.com>
    Posted on 27.02.2009
    Link to this news item: [00115]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 00115 and be sent to kelly at the above address. We also urge people to contact the filmmakers and the journalist to congratulate them on getting out some real facts for a change!
    ---------------------
    Local film looks at faulty child molest cases
    By Bruce Newman


    Mercury News
    S.F. Bay Area, Silicon Valley, CA

    Posted: 02/26/2009 06:25:04 AM PST

    They even made a documentary about their struggle — which mirrors the struggle of so many indie filmmakers. Rather than premiere their film at last year's Cinequest, the annual San Jose festival, they held out for the prestigious Tribeca and Toronto events.

    Eventually, "Witch Hunt" was rejected by Tribeca, a moment indelibly preserved in their short film, when the color can be seen draining out of Nachman's face. In despair, she told her husband that no one was paying attention to "Witch Hunt" — a look at wrongful convictions that sent several Bakersfield residents to prison on child molestation charges.

    'These people were in prison for 20 years, and nobody paid attention to them,' " she said he reminded her. Why would she expect a movie about the case to come out quickly just because she wanted it to?

    A lot has gone right since that day a year ago, and now the documentary is set to become the toast of the current Cinequest, which opened Wednesday night. Following successful screenings at the American Film Institute festival in Los Angeles, and last September's Toronto International Film Festival — the most prestigious showcase in North America — "Witch Hunt" will have its local premiere at the California Theatre, which seats more than 1,000 people.

    "We rarely put documentaries in that theater," says Cinequest director of programming Mike Rabehl. "But I'm telling people if there's one thing you have to see, it's this movie." Several of the people who spent years in jail, and members of the legal team from Santa Clara University's Northern California Innocence Project who worked to get one of them out, are expected to attend the screening at 4:30 p.m. Saturday.

    Children's testimony

    Hardy and Nachman had learned of the molestation cases as news producers at KNTV, the San Jose-based affiliate for NBC, and had won a local Emmy for their stories about work the Innocence Project did on behalf of John Stoll. He was one of more than 30 people arrested during the 1980s in Kern County, most of them working class people charged with molesting their own children.

    Between 1983 and 1987, a total of 37 people were convicted. Of those convictions, 34 were reversed. Rick and Marcella Pitts were sentenced to a total of 749 years in prison. Jeff Modahl, accused of molesting his young daughter, was sentenced to 48 years. Brenda and Scott Kniffen were convicted of hanging their children from hooks, beating and then sodomizing them.

    The convictions were based on the testimony of children, most of whom later recanted. The children had been asked leading questions by social workers and sheriff's deputies, a report issued by the California Attorney General's Office said. "It's unimaginable what these people went through," says Kathleen (Cookie) Ridolfi, executive director of the Northern California Innocence Project, "unimaginable what the authorities allowed to happen."

    Stoll, convicted on 17 counts, served 20 years before the Innocence Project got his conviction overturned, the lawyers putting most of the cost on their credit cards. "We knew this man was innocent,'' says Ridolfi. "How could we not?"

    Stoll is the film's eloquent spokesman for the fallibility of the criminal justice system, but he was initially skeptical that either the lawyers or the filmmakers would stick with the project. For years, he says, "Nobody ever talked to us. Nobody had ever given us a chance to say, 'This is nuts. We didn't do this stuff.' "

    The personal damage

    The documentary is less an investigation of the cases — although there are a few lurid details, such as charges of devil worship that hit the front pages in Bakersfield at the height of the hysteria — than an examination of what those who were falsely accused went through. Most lost not only their freedom, but also their children. Many of the children are in the film, now grown and suffering from emotional and psychological problems related to feelings of guilt about what happened because of their testimony.

    "I think the people we interviewed really wanted somebody to validate the pain that they went through," Nachman says, "and the movie did that for them."

    Stoll eventually received a $700,000 settlement from the state for his 20 years behind bars. During the lengthy gestation of "Witch Hunt," Nachman gave birth to two children. She was eight months pregnant with one of them when she got a voice-mail message from Pearl Jam's lead singer, Eddie Vedder. For months, she had been sending him notes, asking to use the band's emblematic song, "The Long Road." Nachman recalls jumping up and down so much that her husband finally had to ask her to think of the baby.

    The filmmakers also pursued Sean Penn for two years, trying to get him to donate his services as the film's narrator. They received so many e-mails from a mutual friend encouraging them to "keep the faith" that they named their production company KTF Films.

    Then one day in 2007, they received a call inviting them to come to Marin County to screen the film for Penn, but got stuck in traffic and arrived just as the screening was ending. Penn emerged from the screening room and, according to Nachman, said, "I'm in." The actor showed up in Toronto to see the film with a festival audience, and hugged Stoll when he saw him.

    For all the good feelings the film has generated toward its subjects, it doesn't undo the damage or bring back the lost years. "It's nice to hear people say, 'You deserve this,' " Stoll says. "But to be quite frank, they can believe what they want about me, and I don't particularly care. When people have thought about you what people have thought about me, you learn to say, 'I don't really give a damn what you think.' "

    Contact Bruce Newman at bnewman@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5004.
     

    S.O.Reg. Stigma Too Much For Young
    By posted by Marge <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 23.02.2009
    Link to this news item: [00114]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 00114 and be sent to marge with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    --------------

    URL
    http://www.tennessean.com/article/20090204/OPINION01/902040395/1008

    SEX OFFENDER REGISTRY STIGMA TOO MUCH FOR YOUNG
    Editorial
    The Nashville Tennessean
    Feb. 4, 2009

    Tennessee's top law-enforcement officials want juveniles convicted of sex crimes to be named on the state's public sex-offender registries, a notion that is likely to have broad popular support.

    But the repercussions of such a plan, which must be approved by the legislature and the governor, may far outweigh the benefits.

    The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation will ask lawmakers to introduce the bill as part of a move toward state compliance with the Adam Walsh Act, named for the famous case of a young boy slain in 1981.

    A portion of Tennessee's federal law enforcement funding will depend on whether the state decides to add offenders under age 18 to the sex offender database.

    It is unfortunate that money should enter into a painful decision such as this, because there certainly are valid points on both sides of the argument. Dangling the prospect of federal dollars during a recession only obscures a discussion that should be held on actual merits of the plan.

    It is easy to see why many want the offenders made public. Young offenders might be able to blend in with a crowd of kids, where an adult offender could not.

    But being able to shun the offender does not make the offender's will to commit abuse go away. To do that, the offenders need court-ordered counseling and treatment programs — especially when the sex offenders are not yet of an age when brains and emotions are developed enough to make mature decisions. Virtually all young sex offenders were themselves abused, and their criminal behavior is a result of that experience.

    For treatment to work, those youths need some expectation that they will not be forever branded and outcast.

    Convicted individuals, whether guilty of sexual or other offenses, will go on committing crimes if they have no one to turn to. They will be sent to prison and, when the system cannot hold them any longer, they will get out and repeat the cycle.

    Throwing kids, even those who have done terrible things, into the center of a fearful public with a letter on their forehead is little better than locking them into a cell with adult criminals. And hoping they will simply go away and trouble no one ever again is unrealistic and dangerous.

    The TBI hopes not only to get the bill passed, but to gain a one-year extension on the April deadline for federal funding. Their energies might be better spent working with the juvenile justice system to see that underage sex offenders get counseling as quickly as possible, and that their progress is well-monitored by trained professionals.

    The state's sex-crime laws are intended to protect innocent people from harm; stigmatizing troubled young people when there is a chance to turn them around only exposes other innocent people to further crimes later.

    It is hoped that "protect'' is the key concept here, and not "punish." If retribution is the overriding motivation, the cycle of abuse is likely to continue.

     

    Feds Say S.O. Registries Unreliable
    By posted by Marge <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 23.02.2009
    Link to this news item: [00113]
     
    refer in comments to news Item No. 00113, and send to marge at the above email, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    --------------
    URL
    http://www.examiner.com/x-536-Civil-Liberties-Examiner~y2009m2d2-Sex-offender-registries-are-unreliable-inaccurate

    Feds say sex offender registries are unreliable, inaccurate
    by J.D. Tuccille, Civil Liberties Examiner
    Feb. 2, 2009

    Much has been written -- for good reason -- about the tragic cases of people whose lives have been ruined by being classified and registered as "sex offenders" for consensual youthful liaisons with partners just a few months younger than the law allows. But is this the price we pay for immunizing ourselves against the real predators: rapists and adults who stalk actual children? A recent federal report suggests that the answer is "no." As efficient as the system is at registering youthful lovers, it's just that inefficient at tracking actual criminals.

    Genarlow Wilson famously served over two years of a ten-year sentence for having consensual oral sex with a girl two years his junior when he was 17. His sentence was ultimately overturned as cruel and unusual, but many people across the country still face registration and harsh restrictions for similar "transgressions." As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorialized:


    But Wilson is not the only young offender caught in a maze of draconian sex laws. Many young people are trapped on the state sex offender registry for nonviolent and consensual sex acts as teens.

    The registry is a prison sentence in its own right, fencing even low-risk offenders off from most of society. Georgia law bars offenders from living or loitering within 1,000 feet of schools, day care centers, parks, rec centers or skating rinks. Last year, the General Assembly added churches, swimming pools and school bus stops to the list, and, for the first time, placed limits on where offenders could work. Now, sex offenders can't hold jobs near schools, child care centers or churches.

    Some states have now moved to pass "Romeo and Juliet" laws to ease the consequences for young people who fall afoul of arbitrary age cut-offs, but people still remain on sex offender registries, with all that entails, for petty reasons. The harsh, often life-long restrictions of the sex-offender registries are supposed to buy us some security, even if a few innocent people get ground up in the machinery from time to time. So, how much security are we getting from those registries?

    Not so much, say the feds. According to a report (PDF) from the Office of the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Justice:

    We found that the registries that make up the national sex offender registration system – the FBI’s National Sex Offender Registry (NSOR) and the state public sex offender registries accessed through OJP’s National Sex Offender Public Registry Website (NSOPR) – are inaccurate and incomplete. As a result, neither law enforcement officials nor the public can rely on the registries for identifying registered sex offenders, particularly those who are fugitives.

    Specifically, the states have not entered records on approximately 22 percent of their registered sex offenders into NSOR and have not identified sex offenders who have failed to maintain a current registration. We also found that states do not consistently enter information into NSOR such as social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and vehicle identification numbers.
    The NSOR is a centralized federal database of sex offenders available for use by law-enforcement agencies, whilet he NSOPR is a publicly available portal that searches state databases. Separately maintained, they're equally unreliable.

    The not-even-good-enough-for-government-work status of the sex offender registries as of the beginning of 2009 is especially relevant because the federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act requires all U.S. states, territories and tribes to have functioning, accurate and accessible registries by July 27, 2009 -- just a few months away. The registries are to be used to track offenders and to prosecute people convicted of sex crimes who fail to register or to keep their registration current if they move from one state to another or even from one address to another within a state. Inaccurate registries mean a hobbled ability to track offenders.

    It could also, potentially, mean legal liability for those who do comply with the law but whose records spiraled into some black hole in the system. Bureaucratic incompetence could end up resulting in prison time for people who have made every attempt to keep their noses clean and their registrations current. Some of those people will be "criminals" whose crimes consisted of sleeping, as teenagers, with their boyfriends or girlfriends. Others will be people who committed real crimes but are trying to get their lives together.

    Either way, public safety isn't being enhanced in any obvious way by the sex-offender registration system.

     

    Nightmare Not Over for Many Exonerated
    By posted by Marge <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 23.02.2009
    Link to this news item: [00112]
     
    Refer in comments to news item no. 00112 and send to Marge at the above email address, and a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    --------------
    Those cleared by DNA tests struggle to be free
    Johnny Briscoe was exonerated by DNA tests in 2006, but even after his release, he felt he could only leave home with a "witness" someone to vouch for his whereabouts at all times. "It is my job to convince everyone I didn't do this," Briscoe says.

    URL: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-01-27-exonerated_N.htm


    By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY
    Jan. 29, 2009

    ST. LOUIS — Johnny Briscoe thought his nightmare was over in the summer of 2006 when, after 23 years of proclaiming his innocence, he finally walked out of a Missouri prison.
    DNA evidence lifted from a cigarette butt should have stripped away any doubt that another man — not Briscoe — had raped and robbed a woman in her suburban St. Louis apartment on Oct. 21, 1982. Yet Briscoe's exoneration, featured by national news organizations, did notfully free him from the persistent doubts of acquaintances and family members about his innocence, or from the emotional scars seared by more than two decades in prison.

    "Rape," says Briscoe, 54. "Now, that's a provocative word. When I try to explain it, it's a bitter pill."

    Nearly 90% of the 227 people cleared by DNA evidence since 1989 were convicted of some of the most heinous sex crimes, according to the Innocence Project, which helps inmates prove their innocence through DNA testing. DNA — present in blood, semen and body cells — can be particularly useful in solving sex crimes and often is the most definitive way of determining innocence.

    Yet not even DNA washes away the lasting stigma that shadows once-convicted sex offenders who are cleared by genetic testing, and the criminal justice system that wrongly jailed them offers little help. Briscoe's plight is part of a silent struggle for a rising number of exonerees. After high-profile releases from prison, they often fend for themselves.

    FIND MORE STORIES IN: Internet | Texas | New Jersey | St. Louis | Missouri | Chicago | Princeton | Center | Northwestern University | N.J.-based | Innocence Project | Briscoe | Dallas-area | Wrongful Convictions | Jerry Miller | Centurion Ministries | Rob Warden
    Most states did not account for the exonerated when officials started re-entry programs for the hundreds of thousands of offenders released in the U.S. each year. Most are ineligible for basic benefits, such as counseling and job training, that states give guilty offenders when they re-enter society.

    Despite legislative campaigns to get the wrongfully convicted financial help to compensate for the years lost in prison, 25 states still don't do so. In states that do, the money or services often are offered only if the exonerated waive their right to sue. Such lawsuits seek monetary damages for wrongful convictions and compensation for time in prison.

    The burden of re-integration into society is heavier for wrongly convicted sex offenders than for other exonerees, says Sim Platek, a New Jersey social worker who counsels exonerees, including those wrongfully convicted of sex crimes. "The shame of it goes deeper than any other shame," he says. "Very rarely do you see people fully recover from this immediately."

    Charles Chatman, 48, a Dallas-area man freed last year after 26 years in prison, tells of his "shame" in dealing with family members, many of them women, after his wrongful conviction — and even his exoneration — for aggravated rape.

    Other exonerees, such as Jerry Miller, 50, of suburban Chicago, carry court papers as commonly as driver's licenses to prove to potential employers and others that their convictions were overturned. Miller was convicted in the 1981 rape and kidnapping of a Chicago woman and spent 24 years in prison. He finished his sentence before being exonerated. In 2007, a year after his parole, he was cleared by DNA testing of the victim's clothes.

    Illinois officials required him to register as a sex offender and attend counseling after his release but before his exoneration.

    "My picture was on the Internet," he says of the required photo on the public sex offender registry. "I thought prison was bad. But (outside) I was like the scum of the earth." Illinois officials have since removed him from the state's database.

    James McCloskey, founder of Centurion Ministries, a Princeton, N.J.-based group that works to free the wrongfully convicted, describes the stigma as "a tremendous barrier."

    "When you hear the word 'rape,' " McCloskey says, "it scares the bejesus out of people."

    'Seed of doubt'

    Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Chicago's Northwestern University, says the indignities many exonerees suffer can be mind-boggling.

    "There are people out there totally exonerated, absolutely innocent who get notices that they need to register as sex offenders," Warden says.

    Platek says it is not unusual for some, after long periods in prison and protracted struggles to win exoneration, to exhibit symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. Others, he says, slip into depression, abuse drugs and alcohol or have paralyzing flashbacks to their time in prison.

    Among states that provide compensation, 10 also offer some tuition, health care or job-search counseling. The Innocence Project and its affiliates are pushing for uniform compensation laws and urging social service agencies to help exonerees.

    In Texas, for example, a group of defense lawyers got a local clothing store to give shirts, pants and jackets to exonerees who leave prison with no street clothes. Most were wrongfully convicted of sex crimes, and many scramble after their release to find shelter, health care and jobs.

    Even when they find work, stability can be elusive. One 58-year-old Centurion Ministries client, cleared of rape in 2006, was hired by a New Jersey food store about two years ago, McCloskey says.

    A prison guard who visited the store recognized the former inmate, and word spread among other workers that the business had hired a sex offender.

    As a result, McCloskey says, the former inmate was transferred to another store 70 miles away, then fired. Rather than sue the employer and call more attention to himself, he looked for a new job.

    "There is always that stigma, that seed of doubt that follows these guys," McCloskey says.

    Miller says he "dreaded" Halloween 2006 after his release from prison because, as a registered sex offender, he could not interact with children. On Halloween, he says, he felt humiliated when three police officers arrived to ensure he was complying.

    "I was told that if I answered the door, I would be arrested," Miller says. "So, I cut off the lights and sat there by myself. That was pretty tough."

    'He was still incarcerated'

    When Johnny Briscoe came home July 19, 2006, time had rearranged the streetscape of his hometown St. Louis and dramatically altered his family.

    Close relatives, including his father, had died while he was in prison. His son, Donyea — 2 when Briscoe was convicted — was 25. "I couldn't believe it," says Briscoe, a carpenter and handyman.

    For months after his release, Briscoe spent most of his time in the tiny, upstairs bedroom of his mother's house. He arranged the room much like his prison cell — everything within arm's reach.

    "He was acting like he was still incarcerated," says his sister, Ruth Briscoe. "I think he was more scared being out than being in (prison)."

    Briscoe, a soft-spoken man with an easy smile, felt secure enough to leave home only with a "witness." He believed he needed a companion, usually Ruth, to vouch for his whereabouts and to help him avoid encounters — no matter how innocent — that could leave him vulnerable to accusations.

    When he did go out, he didn't go far. And he was always back by 10 p.m. "I didn't want to fall into any traps," he says of the sexual assault charges levied against him more than two decades earlier.

    In that case, a victim whom he had never met, in a part of town he had never visited, picked him out of a police lineup. Mistaken identity by witnesses and victims is one of the most common factors in wrongful convictions, the Innocence Project says.

    He was included in the lineup after another man who later was implicated in the crime — an acquaintance of Briscoe's — identified himself to the victim as "John Briscoe."

    The false identification started a chain of events that ended in Briscoe's 1983 conviction and 45-year prison sentence. For about five months, he was in a cell next to the acquaintance, Larry Smith.

    After suspecting Smith's possible connection, Briscoe confronted Smith outside their cells one day. "He denied it," Briscoe says.

    Smith is serving a life sentence for a separate sexual assault at the same apartment complex involved in Briscoe's case. Smith was identified in 2006 in the same DNA tests that excluded Briscoe.

    Although the DNA evidence points to Smith, J.D. Evans, St. Louis County's first assistant prosecutor, says the testing was not conclusive enough to support formal charges against Smith.

    "For a year and a half (after being released), I was really paranoid," Briscoe says.

    His ex-wife, Lynette Briscoe, 54, and Donyea also felt uneasy. Lynette, who divorced Briscoe 10 years into his prison term, says she was "angry" he was convicted and she was left alone. Even she was not convinced of her former husband's innocence.

    Neither was Donyea. Ruth says her nephew came to her after Briscoe's release. "He didn't know how to talk to (his father)," she says. "He was more comfortable asking me, 'Do you think he did that?' "

    Since then, Johnny Briscoe says he and his son rekindled a relationship denied 23 years ago. Lynette Briscoe, who never remarried, is seeing her former husband again. "Our life was taken away from us," she says, and a "chapter was never closed."

    Other family members remain distant. "They believe that he's still a convict," Ruth Briscoe says.

    "I just leave it be," her brother adds. " I can't change it."

    No simple answers

    Briscoe's attorney, Burton Newman, says his client is trying to regain a sense of normalcy.

    Briscoe is suing St. Louis County and four county police officers for his wrongful conviction rather than accept state compensation of $36,000 for every year spent in prison.

    It could take months to resolve the lawsuit, but he's now comfortable enough to go shopping and run errands alone.

    Yet his search for full-time work has been a bust. Applications for about a dozen positions have gone unanswered. The sour economy is a factor, but Briscoe suspects many prospective employers are turned off by his background. On each employment application, he says he has acknowledged the conviction and the circumstances of his exoneration.

    To improve Briscoe's chances of getting work, Newman recently advised him not to admit to the conviction, arguing that it has been wiped away by exoneration. Exonerations clear criminal records, but it often takes time to update the system. Some wait months for pardons.

    For Briscoe, there is no simple way to deal with questions about his past. "It is my job to convince everyone I didn't do this," he says.

    Jessie Burnley, Briscoe's 80-year-old mother, has no trouble defending her son. She carries a news clipping of his release — frame and all — to show anybody who asks. "I take it to church, everywhere, to tell (people) that my son is innocent," she says.


     

    Women S.O.s Increasing in Texas
    By posted by Kelly <gasoem@gmail.com>
    Posted on 23.02.2009
    Link to this news item: [00111]
     
    Refer to News Item 00111 and send comments to Kelly and to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    ------------------------
    Child sex cases involving women are on the rise in Texas
    URL - http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-femalemolester_23met.ART.State.Edition1.4c0c27d.html

    February 23, 2009
    By WENDY HUNDLEY / The Dallas Morning News
    whundley@dallasnews.com

    The number of women serving time in Texas prisons for having sex with minors has increased more than 36 percent in the last five years.

    "Up to five years ago, we didn't talk about this," said Keith Durkin, a criminologist and researcher at Ohio Northern University. "Our culture is becoming more aware that women can and do commit these offenses."

    Collin County has its share of cases.

    Last month, as a Collin County jury deliberated whether a 40-year-old Allen woman was guilty of having sex with two teenage boys, two other young men came forward with similar accusations against her.

    Rather than wait for a verdict, Regina Bowling pleaded guilty to two counts of indecency with a child and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

    Bowling is one of a growing number of women in Texas and nationwide accused of committing sex crimes against minors. So far this year, at least six Collin County women charged with having sex with minors – including Bowling – are either being prosecuted or have already had their cases adjudicated.

    Still, Durkin and other experts in the field believe society has been slow to view women as sexual predators, though that is beginning to change.

    "We're biased to perceive women as nurturing ... so we don't perceive them as sex offenders," said Dr. Julia Hislop, a Virginia psychologist and author of Female Sex Offenders: What Therapists, Law Enforcement and Child Protective Services Need to Know.

    Studies suggest that female sex offenders often have a history of depression and anxiety. In addition, like many of their male counterparts, women abusers also may have been sexually abused as children.

    Durkin said teenage boys are ideal victims of such crimes because they're less likely to complain and, if they do, their outcries "may be dismissed as teenage fish stories."

    Teacher's aide Nancy Torres was 29 when she was arrested three years ago by Frisco police on suspicion of having a sexual relationship with a male teenage student. The relationship began in May 2006 when the victim was a 14-year-old middle school student and lasted about four months, according to police documents.

    Torres, who is scheduled for a plea hearing Thursday, is charged with sexual assault and having an improper relationship with a student.

    She could not be reached for comment.

    If she goes to prison, she'll probably be enrolled there in the state's treatment program for female sex offenders, one of the first of its kind in the country.

    Most of the women convicted of sex crimes against minors have had relationships with men their own age but abuse children for their own emotional needs, said Anne Mooney, supervisor of the prison treatment program, which launched in October 2000.

    She said that unlike male sex offenders, who often seem to lead outwardly normal lives and have families and stable jobs, women convicted of these crimes often have chaotic lives, marked by substance abuse, frequent moves and erratic employment.

    And Mooney said that most female offenders are emotionally immature and are drawn to the intensity that often marks adolescent relationships.

    "They'll say, 'He acted older. He didn't act his age,' " Mooney said. "What they're really saying is that they're acting like I act. The offender is developmentally immature."

    Elizabeth Marian Young was 41 in 2005 when she was arrested on charges of having sex with a 16-year-old high school student. The Frisco resident, who could not be reached for comment, pleaded guilty earlier this month and was placed on 10 years' probation for child sexual assault.

    The teenage victim initially denied the two were having sex and told police that he and Young had a special relationship, "one that nobody would understand." But during the interview, he later broke down, threatened to harm himself, and had to be taken to a mental health treatment center, documents show.

    Mooney agrees with other experts who say society often trivializes the effect sex abuse has on its young male victims.

    "Often the women who have sexually abused them were women they turned to as role models and substitute mother figures," Mooney said.

    "That trust was violated. They'll often say, 'Why did she do that to me?' It makes a lasting impression on their view of women."

     

    Sen. Webb of VA Supports Broad Reform
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 22.02.2009
    Link to this news item: [00110]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 00110 and be sent to Alex at the above email.
    Alex Marbury`s Comment: Virginia RSOL participants should approach Sent. Jim Webb with proposals for changing the sex offender registry laws.

    URL for alternative news site version of this story from THE NATION
    http://www.alternet.org/story/126897/?page=entire
    ------------------------------------------
    America's Shame: Can Jim Webb Fix the Prison Gulag?

    By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation. Posted February 16, 2009.



    An unlikely senator takes on the cause of reforming America's overloaded and barbaric jails. Tools

    Our criminal justice system is broken. The U.S. represents 5 percent of the world's population but accounts for nearly 25 percent of its prison population. We are incarcerating at a record rate with one in 100 American adults now locked up -- 2.3 million people overall. As a New York Times editorial stated simply, "This country puts too many people behind bars for too long."

    But people who have been fighting for reform for decades are seeing new openings for change. The fiscal crisis has state governors and legislators looking for more efficient and effective alternatives to spending $50 billion a year on incarceration. At the federal level, there is reason to believe that the Obama administration and a reinvigorated Department of Justice will take a hard look at the inequities of the criminal justice system and work for a smarter and more effective approach to public safety. Finally, there are Congressional leaders -- none more prominent than Senator Jim Webb -- who understand that the system isn't functioning as it should and there is an urgent need for reform.

    Indeed advocates for reform couldn't ask for a better standard-bearer than Senator Webb. As a decorated former Marine and Reagan Administration official no one is going to slap him with the politically-dreaded "soft on crime" label that has stymied so many Democrats who have taken on this issue in the past. There is a "Nixon goes to China" quality to Webb's call for change -- a law and order man who described his reform effort as "an act not of weakness but of strength."

    As a journalist Webb wrote on the need for reform after visiting Japanese prisons and seeing a fundamental fairness and effectiveness that he recognized as lacking in the U.S. criminal justice system. As a Senator he's held hearings which have highlighted racial disparities in sentencing, the staggering costs of incarceration and effective and cost-efficient alternatives, and a futile and racially biased drug policy.

    Now Senator Webb is poised to establish a commission with a broad mandate to examine issues like drug treatment, effective parole policy, racial injustice, education for inmates, reentry programs -- the myriad of issues intertwined in wasteful, ineffective criminal justice policies. Look for him to lay out that mandate with specificity in the coming weeks, and make an aggressive push to bring this issue to the forefront in both Congress and the media, much as he was able to do with the GI Bill.

    Webb sent me an e-mail saying, "I feel very strongly about the need to put the right people behind bars. But we're locking up the wrong people too often all across our country. Mental illness isn't a crime. Addiction isn't a crime. We need to make sharp distinctions between violent offenders and people who are incarcerated for non-violent crimes, drug abuse and mental illness. We must raise public awareness about the need for criminal justice reform and find viable solutions. My staff and I are finalizing proposed legislation that could be introduced in the next two weeks to establish a national commission that will take a comprehensive look at where our criminal justice system is broken and how we can fix it."

    While it's critical that Senator Webb is raising these issues at the national level where they have received so little attention, Marc Mauer, Executive Director of The Sentencing Project, points out that 90 percent of the U.S. prison population is incarcerated in state prisons and only 10 percent in federal prisons. Mauer said there is a growing awareness at the state level that our drug and sentencing policies have "gotten out of hand" and that the fiscal crisis presents an opportunity to do something about it.

    "The fiscal crisis gives governors and legislative leaders the opening to do what many of them have known should be done for some time, but [they] didn't have a political comfort level to do it," Mauer said. "Now they can talk about issues like excessive sentences for drug offenders, and too many people being sent back to prison for technical violations of parole."

    One legislative reform effort is occurring in Senator Webb's own Virginia -- a state that abolished parole in 1995 and is second only to Texas in number of executions. This session, a bill will be taken up that would allow prison officials to release non-violent offenders 90 days before their sentences are up. This would primarily be achieved by offering drug treatment programs at the beginning of an individual's incarceration rather than only at the end. (Which begs the question -- if we are truly serious about rehabilitation of inmates why are we only offering addicts treatment for a disease at the end of a sentence?!) Upon successful completion of the treatment program these individuals would be eligible for early release. The legislation also provides for more non-violent offenders to be sent to community-based programs or be monitored electronically rather than incarcerated.

    A similar program was undertaken in Washington state and a four-year study of 2,600 inmates released early showed significant cost savings and no negative consequences in terms of recidivism. Mauer said the coalition rallying around the Virginia proposal is diverse and particularly encouraging in what has traditionally been a "tough on crime state."

    Other states taking action on criminal justice reform include: Michigan which is addressing re-entry issues and shifting resources to parole officers and community-based programs; Kansas cut parole revocations by 50 percent in a two-year period by increasing oversight of parole officers and using alternatives to incarceration such as increased drug testing and electronic monitoring; California issued a court ruling this week that the state must address its failure to provide adequate health and medical services in prisons by reducing the population by a third -- nearly 55,000 persons -- through "shortening sentences, diverting nonviolent felons to county programs, giving inmates good behavior credits toward early release, and reforming parole."

    Now is also a hopeful, unique moment in New York state where the top three political leaders all support real reform and there is a chance to repeal the wasteful, ineffective, and unjust Rockefeller-era drug laws -- after thirty-five years! This week I moderated a panel -- cosponsored by The Nation, the Correctional Association of New York, and The New School's Center for New York City Public Affairs -- of government officials and reform leaders working to downsize prisons, reform probation and parole, and provide effective community-based prisoner reentry programs. The Correctional Association of New York is leading the "Drop the Rock" campaign that includes an Advocacy Day in Albany in March.

    Greg Berman, Director of the Center for Court Innovation -- a non-profit think tank in New York -- said, "The question is: can we come up with meaningful, cost-effective responses to non-violent crime that do not rely on incarceration? Drug courts, mental health courts and community courts -- the so-called 'problem-solving courts' -- all show enormous potential. Most criminal cases are not complicated in a legal sense, but they are committed by people with complicated lives. Scratch the surface and you find addiction, mental illness, joblessness, etc. These problem-solving courts are linking offenders to drug treatment, counseling, job training in lieu of incarceration. But unlike some rehabilitation efforts in the past, they are requiring participants to return to court on a periodic basis to ensure accountability. There is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that this approach can change sentencing practice -- dramatically reducing the use of jail, for example -- while also reducing both substance abuse and recidivism."

    Despite a fiscal crisis which has caused at least forty states to make or propose cuts in vital services like education and health care -- and ample evidence of the effectiveness of alternatives to incarceration -- the battle for reform on the state level is still a difficult one.

    "It's far from a done deal that this will automatically lead to prison reductions," Mauer told me. "One option is to say let's reconsider sentencing policies, reduce the population, close prisons and save money. The other choice is to say let's cut out alternatives to incarceration, community-based drug treatment, and other programs, and you can see those cost savings very quickly. I think that would be a shortsighted way to go but it's going to be tempting for a lot of legislators to think about doing that. I think that's the battle that is going to be fought in different states."

    That's why the effort of Senator Webb and his colleagues at the federal level is so critical. They can galvanize support for repealing unjust policies like those that treat a low-level user of crack the same as a major drug dealer, or five grams of crack the same as 500 grams of powder. They can ensure that we use needed federal dollars for public safety in smart and effective ways. For example, the Second Chance Act to provide job training, drug treatment, and other re-entry programs was passed with broad bipartisan support in 2008 but no funds have been appropriated. Finally, with Senator Webb's commission, we can begin the process of transforming our criminal justice system so that prisons are reserved for violent offenders and other vital resources are used to support alternatives like drug treatment, effective parole policies, education, and reentry programs.

     

    S.O. Arrested for Myspace page
    By Tonia posted this <toniat@sbcglobal.net>
    Posted on 14.02.2009
    Link to this news item: [00109]
     
    Comments should refer to news item 00109 and be sent to the above email address.
    The URL to see the whole article and leave comments there:
    http://www.kmov.com/localnews/stories/kmov-stlouis-news-090210-sex-offender-myspace.3ba53d6.html
    -------------
    Convicted sex offender arrested for operating Myspace

    Tuesday, February 10, 2009
    KMOV TV, Channel 4, St. Louis, Mo.


    Police busted a convicted sex offender for operating a Myspace web page.

    Captain Brad Wells of the Madison County sheriff's office said it doesn't appear Kruckeberg used the site for anything illegal.



    "It's not illegal to have them but they have to let law enforcement know of those emails addresses or internet sites they maintain which would include Myspace or Facebook or any social networking sites," he said.



    Kruckeberg's mother, told News 4 her son, who lives with her outside of Bethalto, was convicted 4 years ago over an incident with an underage girlfriend.



    Unaware of the new law, she said her son's Myspace page was used to post a picture of the daughter from that relationship.



    "He didn't do anything illegal on Myspace. He doesn't get in there to talk to or find bad stuff. To me putting a picture of his daughter he was proud, I was proud you know."



    But that pride is being quickly erased by the reality that this tough new Illinois law could put her son in prison for three years.
     

    First Federal Commitment of S.O.
    By posted by Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 14.02.2009
    Link to this news item: [00108]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 00108 and be sent to the above email address.
    ----------------------------
    URL - for complete article and comments in the Globe:
    http://www.sdp123a.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=681&Itemid=1

    Maine sex offender first in US to be committed by federal court
    by Milton J. Valencia
    Boston Globe Staff (MA)
    02.13.2009 : Fri

    A Maine man with a history of sexual assaults on teenage boys was ordered held by a federal judge yesterday as a sexually dangerous person, making him the first person in the country to be successfully committed by a federal court, according to US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan's office.

    Jeffrey Shields, a 47-year-old from Bath, was committed under the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, the first law that allows federal commitment for sexually dangerous offenders. US Judge Patti B. Saris issued her ruling after a 10-day trial in September that showed Shields had groped teenage boys on multiple occasions and that he had suffered sexual abuse himself as a child.

    The judge's ruling means Shields will be held indefinitely under the jurisdiction of the US attorney general's office and receive sexual offender treatment. Once he has undergone treatment, he can petition the court to prove he is no longer a risk to reoffend. Where Shields will be held has yet to be determined.

    After serving several state prison terms, Shields was convicted in federal court in 2002 of possessing child pornography, and federal prosecutors sought to have him committed after his release from prison in 2006.


    One of his lawyers, John G. Swomley, said yesterday that he was disappointed with the judge's ruling, noting that a 12-member jury that was created in an advisory role declared that while Shields had a mental illness, it could not conclude by a unanimous decision that he would be likely to reoffend.

    "The jury that heard the case couldn't reach a decision, and if 12 good citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts couldn't decide he was sexually dangerous, it's disheartening that a judge did and could," he said.

    Swomley said he also plans to appeal the ruling on grounds that the child protection act is unconstitutional, saying a federal judge in the Fourth Circuit in North Carolina - the only other place in the country where such cases are heard because of the availability of prisons with sexual offender treatment programs - has ruled that the federal government does not have the authority to commit people as sexually dangerous. Swomley said the constitutionality of the act has not been challenged in Boston because this is the first time someone has been committed.

    Christina DiIorio-Sterling, a spokeswoman for the US attorney's office in Massachusetts, would not comment on Swomley's plan to appeal.

    Under the child protection act, Saris had to decide not only that Shields had a mental illness or disorder, but also that he was likely to reoffend. The judge based her decision on Shield's history of abuses: fondling a 13-year-old boy and other teenagers, sexually assaulting a 9-year-old in a bathroom, and assaulting a 6-year-old boy outside a school, among other offenses.

    Saris also stated that Shields has failed in sexual offender treatment before, pointing out that he once said that a 12-year-old he groped was a prostitute rather than a victim.
     

    First Indication US Congress considers SO Law Reform
    By Mark <constitutionalfights@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 10.02.2009
    Link to this news item: [00107]
     
    Comments should refer to news Item No. 0107 and be sent to the above email.

    Alex`s Comment: I urge everyone to write the New York Times and say a major omission in the article was that there is a national movement by those who support the rights of offenders, to reform these laws on the grounds that they violate Constitutional rights.
    ------------
    Effort to Track Sex Offenders Draws Resistance
    NEW YORK TIMES
    front page
    Feb. 9, 2009
    by Abby Goodnough and Monica Davey

    An aggressive federal effort to keep track of sexual offenders is at risk of collapse because of objections from states and legal challenges from sex offenders and others. The effort, approved by Congress three years ago, requires all states to adopt strict standards for registering sex offenders and is meant to prevent offenders from eluding the authorities, especially when they move out of state.

    An estimated 100,000 sex offenders are not living where they are registered, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which collects the data from the states and provides it to the United States Marshals Service and other federal agencies. But officials in many states complain about the law's cost and, in some instances, contend their laws are more effective than the federal one. The states also suggest that the federal requirements violate their right to set their own policies and therefore may be unconstitutional, at least in part.

    Despite a looming July deadline, no state has been deemed compliant with the law, and some are leaning toward ignoring major requirements. As a result, one of the toughest child-protection initiatives in the nation's history is languishing.

    "We support the intent, and I'm sure every one of my attorney general colleagues supports the intent," said Mark J. Bennett, the attorney general of Hawaii. "But we believed we couldn't follow every single provision because, legally and practically, some of the provisions didn't make sense."

    Some sex offenders and civil liberties groups have also taken court action to block the law's provisions. In Ohio, a man convicted 15 years ago of "gross sexual imposition" involving a teenage girl is challenging the requirement that he remain on the state's registry of sex offenders for the rest of his life, instead of the 10 years previously required by Ohio law. (4000 Ohioans have filed legal suits against the law)

    Members of Congress say they may try to address some of the problems with the law. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said through a spokeswoman that he planned "to determine whether revisions and improvements can strengthen compliance, and then to quickly make whatever changes may be needed."

    Other lawsuits have challenged the requirement that adults whose crimes were committed before the law's passage appear on public registries for longer than they had been led to expect. Some lawyers say that amounts to changing an offender's penalty after the fact, a potential constitutional breach.

    There are also concerns that the law does not take into account the individual circumstances of each sex offender, including the likelihood of committing more crimes. Instead, it lumps all offenders into broad levels of dangerousness based on the crime for which they were convicted, allowing, the law's critics say, the worst offenders to blend in with less threatening ones.

    States can ask to extend the July deadline for one or two years, and officials at the Justice Department, which oversees state compliance with the law, said they had granted seven such requests. According to the Justice Department, 20 states have sent materials for review, though in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Andrew J. Harris, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Massachusetts, the department said in December that only Arizona, Idaho, Louisiana and Ohio had tried to fully comply.

    States that do not fully comply stand to lose part of their federal crime prevention grants. But the grants have shrunk in recent years — they currently range from $281,000 to $1.1 million a year, based on a state's size — and many states have calculated that losing the money would be far less expensive than meeting the law's requirements.

    Most states overhauled how they monitor offenders in the 1990s, after federal initiatives like Megan's Law created general requirements for registering offenders and making information about them public. Many states complain that the new federal law disrupts and even clashes with their own carefully created policies for managing sex offenders.

    "It's this point in history where states have had many years of developing systems that they feel are working pretty well, and they look at this as a bit of a step backwards," said Mr. Harris, who studies sex offender laws.

    Some top state law enforcement officials said they supported the law in spirit but were shocked by the statutory changes it demands, which some estimated would result in an utter rewrite of their state criminal codes.

    "It would shut the justice system down to do this," said Buddy Caldwell, the attorney general of Louisiana, a state whose effort to comply with the law last year was rejected by the Justice Department as inadequate. "And to be quite honest with you, it's bordering on the ridiculous."

    In California, officials have estimated that even an "incomplete list" of costs to meet the federal act would be more than $38 million for efforts that include additional records checks, more frequent reporting to local law enforcement agencies and reclassifying current offenders.

    The legal backlash has also been widespread.

    In Nevada, which passed sweeping legislation in 2007 meant to bring the state into compliance, the public defender's office in Clark County filed suit on grounds that the juvenile requirements went too far. The case is pending in the State Supreme Court. In a separate Nevada case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, a federal district judge invalidated the state's attempt at compliance in September on the ground that it violated constitutional protections against retroactive laws.

    The judge also found that the law violated both the constitutional right to due process, because it did not give sex offenders notice of changes to their registration status, and the contracts clause of the Constitution, because it changed the terms of plea agreements. Compliance in Nevada is delayed while its appeal is pending.

    In Florida and other states, some federal judges have found that the federal government does not have the authority to punish sex offenders who fail to register as required under federal law. These judges have ruled that under the commerce clause of the Constitution, such punishment is the responsibility of the states, not the federal government. The rulings are under appeal.

    Concerns over the retroactive requirements of the law set off thousands of legal challenges in Ohio, which has tried unsuccessfully to comply, passing legislation in 2007 that included provisions requiring many offenders to stay on the state's registry longer than expected.

    Many such offenders were originally told that they would be on the registry for 10 years, but will now be on it for life. They include Mr. Coey, the convicted offender who has asked a court to block the requirement, and who, with help from the Ohio Justice and Policy Center, earlier succeeded in fighting a residency restriction barring him from living within 1,000 feet of a scho
     

    NEW MEXICO - S.O. Laws Ineffective
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 10.02.2009
    Link to this news item: [00106]
     
    Comments should mention they are responding to News Item 0106, and be sent to me - I`ll send it along to the New Mexico RSOL affiliate, CFC New Mexico.
    Alex`s Comment: Right on, Lloyd and others in CFC NM!
    --------------------------
    Sex Offender: Registry Laws Ineffective


    By Joline Gutierrez Krueger
    Journal Staff Writer
    ALBUQUERQUE NEW MEXICO JOURNAL
    Feb. 9, 2009

    He rushes into the conference room at his office, all smiles, arms full of data, head full of talking points, ready to explain what he says is the idiocy of legislation that would add more heft to the state's sex offender registry laws.
    It's hard to find someone who champions the causes of convicted molesters.
    But here he is, the rapid-fire voice of reason and rights for the men and women on the New Mexico Sex Offender Registry.
    Because he's one, too.
    When he shuts the conference room door, he closes the connection between the two worlds he has had to straddle since his conviction 21 years ago for sexual assault.
    His employees on the other side don't know they work for a registered sex offender.
    Only once in the more than 10 years his construction business has been in operation has a client discovered his past.
    His neighbors might suspect, he says, thanks to the frequent visits by Bernalillo County sheriff's deputies who check up on him with the dramatic, overwrought flair of a SWAT callout. I'm not using his name to protect his livelihood and, he says, his life.
    Yet, last week, he sat in the Roundhouse ready to speak out publicly against House bills 24 and 433, both which seek in varying degrees to make sex offenders provide phone numbers, pager numbers, e-mails, screen names and any other "electronic identities."
    Currently, sex offenders are required to register their names, addresses and where they work.
    The hearing was postponed, but he expects to be back in the Santa Fe glare when the issue resurfaces, likely this week.
    "It takes a lot for me to do this," he says with the animated cadence of a driven, and perhaps anxious, man. "But I've got so much to lose if I don't get involved."
    He has lost too much already, he says, because of a youthful indiscretion.
    He was 16. The girl was 12.
    "We were both kids," he says. "It was just touching, not rape, not something criminal. I am not a danger to the community."
    He turned 18 by the time his case had meandered through the Texas system. He has never since been charged with another sex crime.
    There are lots of people like him on sex offender registries who have "offended" once and never again but who live from then on in the shadows of secrecy and shame, who long ago paid their debt to society but continue to serve a sort of endless prison term by remaining on ever-invasive — and, he argues, ineffective — sex offender registries.
    "The registry has been diluted, and nobody knows anymore who is dangerous and who is not," he says. "And you know what else? It isn't solving the problem."
    He points to several studies that suggest sex offender registries, enacted under Megan's Law, have not had the desired effect.
    "Despite wide community support for these laws, there is little evidence to date, including this study, to support a claim that Megan's Law is effective in reducing either new first-time sex offenses or sexual re-offenses," concluded one from the New Jersey Department of Corrections funded by a Department of Justice grant and released in December.
    Of the 195 men featured on the popular NBC series "To Catch a Predator," only five were registered sex offenders, concluded another.
    The stigma of being identified on a registry has led many budding offenders to shun the help they need lest a therapist turn them in, he says.
    Family members conceal a loved one's burgeoning deviance for fear that his or her name will go public — and thus so will the family's, he says.
    "To be put on one of these lists for years and years offers no hope," he says. "Where is the incentive for rehabilitation?"
    Yet proponents of Megan's Law and the even more draconian Adam Walsh Act continue pouring efforts into registries, such as the "electronic identities" bills now up for debate.
    "We need to do everything we can to ensure these predators are not living in secret," Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White, a major proponent of the bills, recently told KOAT Channel 7. "They know what they are doing, and, most importantly, we know what the Internet means to them."
    That, despite a 2008 ruling by Utah courts tossing out similar legislation, citing a violation of offenders' First Amendment rights to free speech.
    "We're at the point now when sex offender registries and laws are unconstitutional," our convicted sex offender says. "We're at the point where the only good a registry does is to make politicians look good, like they are doing something. And meanwhile we're wasting our time, needlessly destroying lives and not looking at real solutions to prevent sexual offenses."
    There are monsters out there, he knows. But he is not one of them. He knows.
    He has formed a group called Citizens for Change New Mexico, with a membership so far of 15 offenders and their families who want something better.
    None of them is ready yet to give their names.
    UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. You can reach Joline at 823-3603 or jkrueger@abqjournal.com.



     

    Debating Statutory Rape Laws
    By annonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 07.02.2009
    Link to this news item: [00105]
     
    Comments should refer to news item no. 00105 and be sent to the above email address.
    FROM ALEX MARBURY: This website, and this article, raise serious questions about the current statutory rape laws. The article is very long, including descriptions of many cases where young women, including teachers, are accused of sex with teenage boys - in some cases even when the women were raped by the youth. We invite people to comment. I have included this as a "news item" because of its connection with the previous news item about the Mass. state supreme court ruling on statutory sex among teens.


    URL to read the entire article
    http://www.moraloutrage.net/article.phpstory=200612211220271#comments
    ---------------
    "Child Sexual Abuse" Lunacy in Wisconsin
    Thursday, December 21 2006 @ 12:20 PM CST
    Contributed by: outrage

    From the editors of National Review, a dire warning to women who visit the Islamic world. "On October 13, Touria Tiouli, a Frenchwoman in town on business, stopped at a hotel bar in Dubai for a Coke. When she got up to leave, three men followed her out and offered her a ride to her hotel. She accepted; then they took her to a different part of town and gang-raped her. Tiouli reported the crime to Dubai police -who, naturally, arrested her. Since one of the men acknowledges he did have sex with Tiouli, but claims it was consensual, she is considered guilty of both adultery and making a false charge of rape, crimes punishable by up to 18 months in prison. According to the Daily Telegraph, 'Mme Tiouli claims that every lawyer she had contacted in Dubai has refused to help her.' Which is understandable, we suppose -after all, when was the last time a lawyer won a case, under Sharia, by defending a victim of gang rape?" (National Review, January 27, 2003, p. 10.)

    A woman is raped, and she's arrested and charged with two felonies! And her assailants are turned into her victims! But if you believe that such an outrage and travesty could only happen in the Arab-Muslim world, you couldn't be more wrong. And, obviously, you don't live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At least Mme Tiouli wasn't charged with "raping" the men who raped her. --By Michael Kuehl

    On April 7, 1997, Cassandra Sorenson-Grohall (a 28-year-old former teacher at an "alternative high school") was sentenced to 4-years in prison for having sex with a delinquent who initiated the liaison by raping her "while she visited him at his home" and then, apparently, sustained it by threats and manipulation.

    Large headlines the next morning on page 1B of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "Former teacher gets 4 years for having sex with student: 15-year-old boy apologizes for affair, say he started it." And a large black-and-white picture of a young thin woman with long curly blonde hair crying as she speaks in court: "Former MPS teacher Cassandra Sorenson-Grohall wipes away tears as she tells Judge Jeffrey Kremers how she did not end the sexual relationship she had with a student." (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 8, 1997, p. 1B.)


    "If Cassandra Sorenson-Grohall's 'dream' ended when she lost her teaching job for having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student," the piece begins, "her nightmare began Monday in a courtroom holding cell where she started a four-year prison sentence..."


    "After her attorneys, friends, mother, and victim spent nearly an hour pleading for mercy, Sorenson-Grohall apologized to her family, former colleagues and the boy she taught at an alternative high school." She wept 'as she read typewritten remarks while clutching a handkerchief that she held nervously throughout a sentencing nearly two hours long."


    Dutifully performing her assigned role in the "degradation ritual" called sentencing -lying, grovelling, tearfully expressing "remorse," acknowledging the depravity of her "crime," parroting the cliches of CSA victimologists, all with the hope of persuading a judge to sentence her to "only" 6-12 months in county jail rather than years in prison- she even obeyed the instructions of her lawyers and apologized to the delinquent who assaulted and tormented her. All for nothing, and nothing but an exercise in show trial melodramatics, gratuitous mortification, and futility.


    The ironies are priceless. The only assault was committed by the "victim" -her lawyer repeatedly called it "rape" and noted that the "child" might have been "waived" into adult court had she reported the attack- and she goes to prison for "second-degree sexual assault of a child."


    Tragically (and, given her fate, ironically), she decided not to report the crime for fear that her assailant might go to prison and become "more of a delinquent." As for the intrigue -which, according to psychologists, was not a "sexually-motivated crime but one manipulated by the 'victim'" (to quote from a letter she wrote me)- "I knew this was wrong yet I was not sure how to stop it without hurting him." Astonishingly, the same psychologists also concluded that she was not a "sexual predator," nor a "threat to society and children." She described her "crime" as a "mistake made out of overcaring and naivete."


    At sentencing, even the "victim" was pleading for "mercy" and "leniency" as he confessed to "starting it" by forcing himself on his teacher: "I just kind of started the whole thing. I'm sorry for what I did. I want to apologize to her family." Savor the irony, the sheer absurdity of it: a teenage criminal pleading for "mercy" for the woman he sexually assaulted. But, apparently, the honorable Jeffrey A. Kremers was as oblivious to such ironies as he was impervious to calls for leniency and simple fairness. 50 people wrote letters of support calling this "sex criminal" a "wonderful person."


    To judge and prosecutor, both CSA victimologists(?), the draconian sentence was based on two ludicrous assumptions: that a juveniile delinquent who forced himself on his teacher was incapable of consenting to subsequent intercourse with the woman he assaulted; and, secondly, that he was "traumatized" or seriously harmed by engaging in subsequent intercourse with the woman he raped.


    In this case, incongruously, the juvenile was old and mature enough to form the intent or mens rea to assault his teacher, and possibly mature enough to have been "waived" into adult court had she reported the assault -but not old and mature enough to legally consent to subsequent intercourse with the women he sexually assaulted. Put differently, he knew what he was doing, legally and morally, when he raped the woman -but he didn't know what he was doing when he engaged in subsequent intercourse with her. Had she "pressed charges," her assailant might have been prosecuted as an adult. But, fatefully, she chose not to inform the police, and thus he remained a "child" under the law.


    Consequently, a teenage criminal and rapist was treated exactly like a victim of rape and child molestation. Under the law, he was as much a "child," as much a "victim" and "innocent," as a 7-year-old boy or 9-year-old girl. Despite his age, his size, his criminal record, the rape of his teacher, the delinquent was blameless. In such cases, the adult is always 100% guilty and the "child" is always 100% innocent, regardless of the facts and circumstances.


    To this judge, apparently, indisputable evidence that this punk initiated the affair by raping his teacher was not even a "mitigating factor"! On the contrary, given his reasoning, it might have been an "aggravating factor." "Before sending her off to prison, Circuit Judge Jeffrey A. Kremers noted that the boy's remarks showed that he didn't fully understand what his former teacher had done. 'He doesn't think you did anything wrong,' Kremers said, 'He thinks it's all his fault'."


    Thus, in effect, Cassandra Sorenson-Grohall was upbraided by this judge because her "victim" initiated the affair by forcing himself on her and because she spared him the fate she would suffer by "deciding not to report the matter while handling it herself." Otherwise he would not have thought it was "all his fault" nor would he have pled for "mercy" for the woman he sexually assaulted.


    On the other hand, not only was the "first incident" not a "mitigating factor," it wasn't even a causative factor. It wasn't even relevant. "The focus here is not what happened in that first incident," said the judge, "but what happened after it." But if not for that "first incident," of course, nothing at all would have "happened." Moreover, it doesn't require much imagination, even for a man, to understand how a woman (5',5" and no more than 110-120 Ibs.) might be fearful of a criminal who raped her, a young man much bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than his de facto victim. But, obviously, far more imagination than that possessed by this detestable judge.


    So, in closing, a sentence of 4-years in prison was exigent to instruct the "child" on the gravity of his "victimization." Any retribution short of years in prison would fail to impress on this innocent the enormity of what his "former teacher had done" -done to him!


    And "moments later, as her dejected husband and mother gazed toward the floor, Sorenson-Grohall was escorted...to her holding cell" in handcuffs attached to a waist-chain and leg irons.

    To read the whole article go to
    http://www.moraloutrage.net/article.phpstory=200612211220271#comments
     

    Bias in Statutory Rape Case?
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 07.02.2009
    Link to this news item: [00104]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 00104 and be sent to the above email address.
    Alex's note: This is a very important ruling in a state with no Romeo and Juliet laws!
    Note: This article is copyrighted and may not be reprinted in full. For the article, go to this URL:

    http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/02/07/sjc_sees_possible_bias_in_rape_case/
    -----------------------------------------------------------------
    SJC sees possible bias in rape case
    Why charge only the boy? Judges bitterly divided on issue
    By John R. Ellement and Andrew Ryan
    Boston (MA) GLOBE, February 7, 2009

    A sharply divided Supreme Judicial Court said yesterday that a 14-year-old boy accused of statutory rape may have been a victim of gender discrimination because authorities charged him and not the three underage girls with whom he allegedly had sex.

    go to
    http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/02/07/sjc_sees_possible_bias_in_rape_case/
     

    Landlords who rent to SOs Threatened
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 04.02.2009
    Link to this news item: [00103]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 00103 and be sent to the above email address, and to the journalist's email listed at the bottom of the story.
    ----------------
    Davie law targets landlords renting to sex offenders
    Davie proposes jail, fines for those who 'turn a blind eye'
    By Susannah Bryan | South Florida Sun Sentinel (Miami, Fla)
    January 21, 2009

    DAVIE - Landlords beware.

    A proposed town law would allow property owners to be fined or jailed if they rent to convicted sex offenders and predators in violation of residency restrictions. The Town Council will take a final vote on the measure tonight.

    Davie requires a 2,500-foot buffer between where sex offenders and predators can live and places where children gather, like school bus stops and playgrounds. Under the new law, landlords in that zone who "turn a blind eye" may face fines up to $500 and/or 60 days in jail, said Assistant Town Attorney Tom Moss. Repeat violators could face fines of up to $1,000 and/or a year in jail.

    "We're not looking to run out and arrest landlords," Police Chief Patrick Lynn said. "The intent is to move offenders out of our area."

    Police officials in Davie, currently home to 48 registered sex offenders, say they are simply following the lead of Cooper City, Pembroke Pines and Weston.

    But landlords in those cities don't face jail time for violating the buffer zone law. They can, however, be fined up to $500 a day.

    So far, Weston has not fined any landlords, according to City Manager John Flint. But in 2007, Weston threatened to fine the grandparents of a sex offender $150 a day for allowing him to live in their home, located near an elementary school and bus stop. The city later settled the case and dropped the fine, allowing the grandson to remain as long as he was not convicted of any more sex crimes.

    Mancini, the attorney in that case, said laws targeting sex offenders don't make cities any safer. He holds out hope for a state law that would create a standardized rule that would apply anywhere in Florida.

    "The bottom line is this battle is going to rage on until the state comes in with a state law," he said. "There is no consistency anywhere."

    Davie's 2,500-foot buffer zone is similar to laws passed by cities across the state after pedophiles were charged in the separate murders of Jessica Lunsford and Sarah Lunde. The town's current ordinance applies only to sex offenders convicted after Oct. 1, 2004. The new law would apply to all sex offenders, regardless of their conviction date.

    Davie officials say the new law should help persuade property owners to do background checks.

    "It's not meant to be a trap for landlords," Mayor Tom Truex said. But "if you are a landlord, you should make some inquiries before you rent the property."

    Florida law requires all sex offenders and sexual predators to register with the state. It also requires police to notify a community when a sexual predator moves in, but does not mandate notification for sex offenders.

    Davie police will inform landlords if a sex offender has moved in, Chief Lynn said.

    But most landlords know when they are renting to a sex offender because the neighbors usually let them know, Police Lt. Wayne Boulier said

    "It's hard to say you didn't know it when the whole neighborhood said they told you about it beforehand," he said.

    Susannah Bryan can be reached at sebryan@SunSentinel.com or 954-385-7929.

     

    Homeless S.O. Dies of Exposure
    By Margie Furlong <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 29.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [00102]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No 00102 and be sent to the above email address, with copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm and to the reporter's email at the bottom of the story.
    Alex' Comment: This is what America is causing - another form of the death penalty.
    SEE IMPORTANT COMMENT SENT TO THE GRAND RAPIDS NEWSPAPER AT THE END OF THIS STORY - it's by a person who knew Mr.Paul at the shelter. The comment was sent by Joseph, who does not provide his email address! PLEASE provide email addresses so we may let you know when we print your comments! Alex
    ----------------------
    Grand Rapids, Michigan

    Man found dead in cold was turned away from shelters in past because he was sex offender
    by The Grand Rapids Press
    Wednesday January 28, 2009
    GRAND RAPIDS -- A man found dead on the streets Monday had tried in recent weeks to gain admittance to at least one of two Heartside missions, but was denied a bed because he is a registered sex offender.

    Officials say its possible Thomas Pauli might be alive today except for a state law prohibiting him from establishing a residence even for one night within 1,000 feet of a school, in this case, Catholic Central High, also located in the Heartside district.

    "It's heartbreaking. I have a hard time even talking about it," said Marge Palmerlee, executive director at Degage Ministries.

    Palmerlee said she had talked to at least two people who told her Pauli had tried earlier this month to secure a bed at one or both missions.

    Bill Merchut of Mel Trotter and Bill Shaffer of Guiding Light agreed that Pauli may have tried to gain entrance, but that their missions risk fines and loss of license if they admit sex offenders. They do not track everyone who applies for a bed, only those who are admitted, so while they were sure Pauli had not been admitted, they couldn't be sure if he had tried.

    They both decried a system where there are no exceptions to the so-called Megan's Law, which sets boundaries and restrictions for those on the list.

    "We have to follow the law, but ethically, it feels like we're responsible," said Merchut.

    Added Shaffer, "These men and women are clearly 'The Scarlet Letter' folks of our day. And where do they go? I have no answer."

    Pauli, 52, served 11 years in prison for a 1991 conviction in Grand Traverse County for second-degree criminal sexual conduct, state records show. He was released in 2003 and was required to register as a sex offender.

    Results of an autopsy are not yet available.

    -----------------------------------------------------------------
    COMMENT from a friend of Mr. Pauli's at the homeless shelter:

    sparrowhawk2 on 01/29/09 at 5:17PM
    I am a temporary resident of the Guiding Light Mission in downtown Grand Rapids. I came down here due to an alcohol problem having lost just about everything. It's not fun being down here, but it is not as bad as most people have been led to believe.

    There are a number of men who stay at both the Mission and at Mel Trotters who have criminal records. There are some who have problems with alcohol or drugs or both and there are some who due to job losses have no where else to go for the time being. There are a lot of good men down here who are in need of a second chance at getting their life back on track and some due to their criminal records are unable to find work.

    Mr. Pauli had a criminal record and he was a good man. He was a kind, considerate, and friendly type of guy who was softspoken. I did not know him very well nor did I know much about him, but he was a likable guy. He was a man who deserved a second chance at life, but never got it. He definitely did not deserve to die the way he did, but I don't believe his death was in vain even though it may appear to be. His death shows that there is a need for shelters for men who have criminal backgrounds such as Mr. Pauli's away from schools and parks in order for them to rebuild their lives.

    Mr. Pauli's death cannot be blamed on either Mel Trotters nor the Guiding Light Mission. Both shelters are located within 1,000 feet of a school and the laws have to be obeyed or the government will close them down. Where would the 200 or so men who now stay at the shelters go if they are closed?

    I do believe that only a very few people knew of Mr. Pauli's record. I never heard anyone say anything about him other than that he had an occasional problem with alcohol and that he was a nice guy. He stayed from time to time at both Mel Trotters and at the Guiding Light Mission. Until the recent edition of the newpaper, "Busted" came out which lists with photos and the recent arrests of those in the Grand Rapids area, in which Mr. Pauli's photo and offense was listed, no staff member at the Guiding Light Mission that I knew of knew of his record or he would have been denied staying there.

    Last Saturday, January 25th, Mr. Pauli stayed at the mission. I saw him leave Sunday morning and that was the last time I knew anthing had happened to him until someone at the mission Tuesday morning said he had died.

    Last Saturday also, there were a couple of "Busted" newpapers being veiwed by a number of the men who stay at the mission. Whether any staff member saw it I don't know, but no one said anything about it. Whether Mr. Pauli was turned away Sunday night, from what I heard no one saw him that day nor did he enter the mission later that day.

    My honest opinion is that due to the newspaper, "Busted" being viewed by those at the mission and possibly at Mel Trotters and his offense known, I truly believe that Mr. Pauli felt had no place to go. I doubt that even the police department could have helped him unless they arrested him and I don't believe he wanted anymore problems with them. I am also under the impression that he did not have any or enough money to rent a cheap motel room somewhere for the night and I believe he was totally out of options as to what to do.

    Last Sunday night was bitter cold and the only way he could survive was to stay moving. After having climed over the high fense with barbed wire in which he was injured, which would have been very difficult for anyone to do, I believe he accepted the fact he was done for and gave up hope.

    Where Mr. Pauli was found, he could have got into a van or car which were unlocked, but he still probably would have frozen to death, but at a much slower rate. I do believe he was kneeling when he died praying to the Lord and getting his life in order before death took him. I have the impression that he saw death before he kneeled and realized it was his time to go be with the Lord since he could have walked out on Division Street and made his way to St. Mary's Hospital about 1/2 mile away or to an ambulance company less than 1/4 mile away. I do know he has been to services at the mission and that he did know the Bible somewhat. He knew the way to God and I believe Mr. Pauli is with God as I write this.

    Who is to blame for Mr. Pauli's death? No one.
    The Guiding Light Mission or Mel Trotters cannot be blamed for their location near the school nor can the staffs of the shelters be blamed if they did not know of his past offense. The shelters again, have to obey the law or be shut down. The newspaper, "Busted," cannot be blamed for Mr. Pauli's death since they have a legal right to publish criminal offenses which is made public by law enforcement agencies.

    Mr. Pauli's death can be considered a wakeup call for the people of Grand Rapids to provide shelter for sex offenders in a safe remote area away from schools or parks. These men may have made some past mistakes in their lives which without question have had devasting affects on them, not to mention their victims, but some of these men like Mr. Pauli do deserve a second chance at a new positive life. None of them deserve to die in the way as Mr. Pauli did. Let us hope and pray that there will be no more deaths such as this.

    Lastly, there is a new organization in Grand Rapids which has slowly come into existence named, "The Second Chance Of Grand Rapids." This organization plans to help homeless men and women get back on their feet in areas not presently covered by existing organizations. It is the hope of this organization that there will be no more needless deaths like that of Mr. Pauli and that these men and women will once again become self supporting positive citizens of the community.





    E-mail the author of this story: localnews@grpress.com
     

    Court Overturns NY County S.O. Residency Laws
    By Kelly posted this <rrsol.corrcomm@gmail.cmo>
    Posted on 25.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [00101]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 00101, and be sent to Kelly at the above address, and a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    Alex´s Comment: Unfortunately, this ruling leaves in place the New York state law that allows probation officers to determine residency requirements for offenders. These can be terribly arbitrary at times. Better no residency rules at all - they have been shown to be totally ineffective, as well as harming the ability to find housing.
    ---------------------------------------------
    http://lohud.com/article/20090123/NEWS03/901230420/-1/SPORTS

    LOHUD.COM
    Dobbs Ferry, NY
    Jan. 23, 2009
    by Steve Lieberman

    A state Supreme Court judge sitting in Rockland today invalidated Rockland's law restricting where sex offenders can live.

    Justice William Kelly, in an eight-page decision, found that state has specifically taken the responsibility for sex offenders.


    Kelly also wrote the state law specifically empowers local probation officers to decide where sex offenders can live without any borders. He also cited a similar decision banning residency boundaries in New Jersey by a judge in the Garden State.

    Kelly nullified Rockland's 2007 law. As the first decision on the pre-emption issue, Kelly's ruling becomes precedent and could nullify 80 similar laws across the state that establish some boundaries in which sex offenders cannot live.

    In Rockland, for example, sex offenders were prohibited from living, working, and loitering within 1,000 feet of schools, day care centers, libraries or any facilities.

    Kelly's decision would dismiss misdemeanor charges against up to 13 sex offenders living in prohibited areas.

    Kelly ruled in a case involving Monsey residents Yoel Oberlander and Betzalel Dym, both of whom were charged in August 2007 with violating their probation and the county law.

    Oberlander's lawyer, David Goldstein, raised the legal arguments. He said the 1,000 feet or any boundary is arbitrary and meaningless as far as protecting the public.

    "The state law of letting probation officers use their discretion is more effective," Goldstein said. "The county law was an over-reaction with a nebulous 1,000-foot magical line."

    He said Kelly's decision on the pre-emption issue has implications statewide and could overrule other residency laws.

    County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef said he would await County Attorney Patricia Zugibe's recommendation on whether to appeal. Vanderhoef said the county law is not workable and the state needs to take control of the issue and set standards.

    The county has 30 days to file an appeal.

    Zugibe said today she had not formulated a position yet and was reviewing Kelly's decision. She said that while Kelly's decision seems solid on the law, she said other judges could decide differently on similar cases before them.

    "This is one court's decision," she said. "I can't be so presumptuous to know what other judges will be doing."

    Rockland Legislature Ed Day, R-New City, who sponsored the county law, said today that he's disappointed in the decision but stands by the law.


     

    Mandatory Life Sentence for 1st time Offenders
    By posted by Margie <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 18.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [00100]
     
    Comments should be refer to News Item No. 00100, and be sent to the above email address, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    Alex´s comment: Outrageous! Where will it end? Illinois participants, write your legislator and oppose this madness!
    -----
    Mandatory Life Sentences Proposed in Illinois for First Time Sex Offenders
    by Luke Duecy
    CHICAGO DEFENDER
    Jan. 14, 2009

    SUMMARY of copyrighted article:
    Ryan´s Law, named a child murdered and raped years ago, evidently by someone committing his first sex offense, would mandate life sentences in Illinois for all first time sex offenders.

    URL for this article
    http://www.chicagodefender.com/article-2983-ryanrss-law-would-pu.html

     

    Brave New World: Chip Implants in S.O.s
    By posted by Margie <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 18.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [0099]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 0099 and be sent to Margie above, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    From Alex: Well, the Orwellian future is upon us. We will all be under surveillance all the time soon - with chips under our skin like so many animals.
    -----------------

    KOMO TV
    Olympia, Washington
    Jan. 14, 2009

    Lawmakers consider implanted chips for tracking sex offenders
    By Luke Duecy
    OLYMPIA, Wash. --

    Lawmakers are considering a controversial bill that would outfit sex offenders with a surgically-implanted device that tracks their movement.

    The devices would replace the ankle bracelets that are currently used to track offenders. The bracelets have been criticized as a lacking device as offenders have successfully removed them in the past before disappearing off of the radar.

    "(The devices would) be a little more difficult to take off," said Rep. Maralyn Chase, D-Edmonds.

    Chase is among a handful of lawmakers are looking into radio chips that can be planted under the skin. Some of the designs are no larger than a grain of rice.

    The radio chips would allow police to track an offender from a sex offender using the same technology used at the Tacoma Narrows bridge toll.

    "Right now, we get a postcard at home every few weeks saying we have a sex offender moving into the neighborhood. But unless you know where they live and what they look like how are you going to have protection?" said Chase.

    The Department of Corrections admits even with the current devices, officers often lose signal. DOC officials also note that no tracking device can prevent crime.

    "It certainly is not prevention. It certainly is not 100-percent," said Anna Aylward with the state DOC.

    The bill is currently in committee.

    If passed, the bill would allow the state to hire the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs to determine whether chip implants would be more effective.

    Similar technology is used to track criminals in the U.K. and school children in Japan.

     

    ONLINE PREDATOR THREAT OVERBLOWN
    By posted by Chris <rsolnc@gmail.com>
    Posted on 17.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [0098]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 0098 and be sent to Chris above, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    ----------

    New York TIMES
    Online Threats to Children May Be Overblown
    By BRAD STONE
    Published: January 13, 2009
    The Internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all.

    A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.

    The findings ran counter to popular perceptions of online dangers as reinforced by depictions in the news media like NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series. One attorney general was quick to criticize the group’s report.

    The panel, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, was charged with examining the extent of the threats children face on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, amid widespread fears that adults were using these popular Web sites to deceive and prey on children.

    But the report concluded that the problem of bullying among children, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults.

    “This shows that social networks are not these horribly bad neighborhoods on the Internet,” said John Cardillo, chief executive of Sentinel Tech Holding, which maintains a sex offender database and was part of the task force. “Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons.”

    The 278-page report, released Tuesday, was the result of a year of meetings between dozens of academics, experts in childhood safety and executives of 30 companies, including Yahoo, AOL, MySpace and Facebook.

    The task force, led by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, looked at scientific data on online sexual predators and found that children and teenagers were unlikely to be propositioned by adults online. In the cases that do exist, the report said, teenagers are typically willing participants and are already at risk because of poor home environments, substance abuse or other problems.

    Not everyone was happy with the conclusions. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, who has forcefully pursued the issue and helped to create the task force, said he disagreed with the report. Mr. Blumenthal said it “downplayed the predator threat,” relied on outdated research and failed to provide a specific plan for improving the safety of social networking.

    “Children are solicited every day online,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “Some fall prey, and the results are tragic. That harsh reality defies the statistical academic research underlying the report.”

    In what social networks may view as something of an exoneration after years of pressure from law enforcement, the report said sites like MySpace and Facebook “do not appear to have increased the overall risk of solicitation.”

    Attorneys general like Mr. Blumenthal and Roy Cooper of North Carolina publicly accused the social networks of facilitating the activities of pedophiles and pushed them to adopt measures to protect their youngest users. Citing studies that showed tens of thousands of convicted sex offenders were using MySpace, they pressured the networks to purge those people from their membership databases.

    The attorneys general also charged the task force with evaluating technologies that might play a role in enhancing safety for children online. An advisory board composed of academic computer scientists and forensics experts was created within the task force to look at technologies and ask companies in the industry to submit their child-protection systems.

    Among the systems the technology board looked at included age verification technologies that try to authenticate the identities and ages of children and prevent adults from contacting them. But the board concluded that such systems “do not appear to offer substantial help in protecting minors from sexual solicitation.”

    One problem is that it is difficult to verify the ages and identities of children because they do not have driver’s licenses or insurance.
     

    California Officials Urge Jessica´s Law Be Changed
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 15.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [0097]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 0097 and be sent to the above email address. The journalist´s email is at the end of the story. Send him your comments, too.
    ---------------------------

    Los Angeles Times
    Jan. 14, 2009
    by Michael Rothfeld


    URL -
    http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-offenders14-2009jan14,0,1944251.story


    There's no evidence Jessica's Law works, California officials say

    A state board says tight residency limits on sex offenders have driven
    many to homelessness, which could propel them back into crime. The state
    spends $25 million housing some of the offenders.

    By Michael Rothfeld
    January 14, 2009

    Reporting from Sacramento -- A state panel is urging the governor and
    legislators to change "Jessica's Law," saying its restrictions on where
    sex offenders can live are counterproductive and calling the nearly $25
    million a year spent to house them a poor use of taxpayers' money.

    The residency restrictions, passed by voters more than two years ago in
    Proposition 83, have never been shown to prevent new crimes and may
    reduce public safety, the panel says.

    Since 70% of voters approved the initiative, "the availability of
    suitable housing has plummeted," the state's Sex Offender Management
    Board said in a report sent to lawmakers this week.

    The state previously had more modest residency limits that applied only
    to certain sex offenders. Jessica's Law expanded the restrictions to all
    sex offenders and greatly reduced the locations where they could reside.

    Barring sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of schools, parks
    and other areas where children gather has driven many into homelessness,
    an unstable situation that can propel them back to crime, according to
    the board.

    State corrections officials say they find housing and pay rent for about
    800 who are on parole, but they cannot house them all; the number of
    homeless sex offenders on parole is 12 times as large as it was when the
    law was passed.

    "It seems unwise to spend such resources as a consequence of residence
    restriction policies which have no track record of increasing community
    safety," board members wrote.

    Proposition 83 expanded both the categories of sex offenders included
    and the limits on where they could live.

    Scott Kernan, undersecretary for adult operations at the California
    Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said his agency is
    discussing plans to scale back its housing of sex offenders, some of
    whom have their rent paid by the state for several years while they are
    on parole, to a shorter period such as 60 or 90 days.

    "I don't know that we can continue to pay long-term for sex offender
    housing in the current fiscal situation," Kernan said.

    He said the housing, often in motels or halfway-house settings where
    multiple sex offenders live, was always meant to be transitional. But
    with the passage of Jessica's Law, he said, many have been housed for
    longer because they have little money and their families' residences may
    fall in a prohibited zone.

    And Kernan said some local officials have created extra barriers -- for
    example, creating parks on highway medians to make certain neighborhoods
    off-limits.

    The Sex Offender Management Board was created in 2006, with 17 members
    to be appointed by lawmakers and the governor. It includes state and
    local officials from law enforcement, judicial and social services
    backgrounds.

    It has advocated for the state to focus on the offenders who pose the
    highest risk and to use practices -- such as treatment -- that have been
    shown to work. The state does not provide treatment while offenders are
    in prison. Jessica's Law makes little distinction between high- and
    low-risk offenders, addressing all of them equally with lifetime
    residency restrictions and satellite tracking.

    State lawmakers can alter the initiative with a two-thirds vote. Robert
    Coombs, a spokesman for the board's chairwoman, said the members found
    it infeasible to call for abolishing the residency restrictions, given
    the sweeping voter approval of Proposition 83. He said state and local
    officials have the power to interpret the law to allow more housing for
    sex offenders, but the board believes that the likelihood of legislators
    fixing the problems in more comprehensive ways -- at least in the short
    term -- is slim.

    "I can't imagine a policymaker who would put their name on something
    that says we want to make it easier for sex offenders to find housing,"
    Coombs said. "Even though it's a strong public safety concept,"
    lawmakers would be setting themselves up for political attack.

    Responding to the criticism that residency restrictions have no benefit
    to public safety, state Sen. George Runner (R-Lancaster), an author of
    the initiative, said, "I do believe the general public would say a child
    molester should not live across the street from a school."

    Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a strong supporter of Proposition 83, has
    said he is open to revisions but has not suggested any.

    Jeanne Woodford, a former state corrections secretary under
    Schwarzenegger, said the residency restrictions should be abolished. She
    said many states are reexamining their handling of sex offenders in
    light of studies showing that there is little utility in registration
    requirements and other laws the public has supported to keep track of
    them.

    "The bottom line is, this is really what happens when we allow our
    emotions to get the best of us, as opposed to dealing with the facts,"
    she said.

    michael.rothfeld@latimes.com
     

    ALL CALIFORNIA PAROLED S.O.s on GPS
    By posted by Marge <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 14.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [0096]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0096 and be sent to the above email address, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    NOTE: Because the copyright of this news show does not allow it, we cannot print the text in full. Go to the URL
    http://www.news10.net/news/story.aspx?storyid=53178&catid=2

    ALL CALIFORNIA PAROLED SEX OFFENDERS ON GPS
    Some 6622 paroled sex offenders in California must wear global positioning system units, attached to their bodies, at all times. When the device goes off, the parole officer is alerted that the person has come within a forbidden distance of a school or park or playground. The article also shows that defense lawyers oppose the measure as extremely costly and invasive.
    From NEWS 10 ABC TV, Sacramento, CA, Jan. 12, 2009
    by Mark Hedlund
    --------------------------------
    CALIFORNIA
     

    ONLINE SEX OFFENDER INFO MUSHROOMS!
    By posted by Mary Sue Molnar <marysueintx@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 13.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [0095]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0095 and be sent to Mary Sue at the above email, with a copy to Alexm60@fastmail.fm, and also to the journalist, John Gramlich, jgramlich@stateline.org.

    NOTE from Alex: This article includes the MOST UP TO DATE SUMMARY of state laws concerning online information for ¨sex offenders,¨ as well as excellent commentary by RSOL Texas Voices coordinator Mary Sue Molnar and others. It also shows the continuing growth of the sex offender registries, with about 675,000 now forced to publicly register. In all states except Maine, this includes information about residency, and in most states, now it includes information about employment, with some states adding many other features.

    THE COMMENTS ARE ALSO INCLUDED AFTER THE STORY - MANY ARE VERY, VERY GOOD (including some by RSOL participants)

    THE URL to see this story is
    http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=367676
    ----------------------------------

    Monday, January 12, 2009
    STATELINE.ORG
    (A national state-by-state news service, based in Washington,D.C.
    from the nonprofit
    Pew Center on the States

    ONNLINE SEX OFFENDER INFORMATION GREATLY EXPANDS
    By John Gramlich, Stateline.org Staff Writer

    Arizona parents who want to find out whether a suspicious e-mail has been sent by a registered sex offender now can check the sender’s e-mail address against the state’s database of convicted molesters.

    Utah residents can sign up for e-mail alerts to notify them when a sex offender moves into their neighborhood.

    Wisconsin’s online registry provides maps to let users know exactly where the closest sex offender lives.

    And in Texas, the state’s sex offender registry — which includes more than 54,000 people — now features information ranging from offenders’ work addresses to their nicknames and even shoe sizes.

    The four states are among more than two dozen that quietly have added a wide range of new services — and new categories of information — to their online registries of convicted molesters. All 50 states have publicly searchable sex offender registries, which are accessible through a national database kept by the U.S. Justice Department, a Web site that averages 2.3 million page views a day.

    STATE SEX OFFENDER DATABASES GROW

    All 50 states have online sex offender registries, which are publicly searchable databases of offenders and their crimes. A Stateline.org analysis, conducted in December, found a broad range of new details being listed in the registries, ranging from where sex offenders are employed to the e-mail addresses and online identifiers they use. Below is a state-by-state comparison of which information and services are included on the sites.
    NOTE - Go to the website for the complete information - it is truncated here.
    URL is http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=367676
    Ala. • • • • • • 10,474
    Alaska • • • • 2,304
    Ark. • • 8,656
    Ariz. • • • 14,559
    Calif. • • • • 115,542
    Colo. • • • • • • 10,314
    Conn. • • • 5,081
    Del. • • • • 3,268
    Fla. • • • • • • 50,393
    Ga. • • 16,365
    Hawaii • • • 2,750
    Idaho • • • 3,191
    Ill. • • • 20,138
    Ind. • • • • • 9,928
    Iowa • • • • 5,045
    Kan. • • • • • • 6,593
    Ky. • • • 7,258
    La. • • • • • • • 13,000
    Maine • 3,229
    Md. • • • 5,107
    Mass. • • 10,603
    Mich. • • • • • • 43,613
    Minn. • • • 14,714
    Miss. • 5,189
    Mo. • • • • • • 7,021
    Mont. • • • • 1,790
    Neb. • • • 2,869
    Nev. • • • • 6,312
    N.H. • • 4,038
    N.J. • • • 12,353
    N.M. • • • • • 2,354
    N.Y. • • • • • • 27,639
    N.C. • • • • ** 11,968
    N.D. • • • 1,176
    Ohio • • • • • • • 17,504
    Okla. • • • 10,702
    Ore. • • • 15,323
    Pa. • • • • • 10,900
    R.I. • 1,551
    S.C. • • 11,091
    S.D. • • 2,531
    Tenn. • • • 12,126
    Texas • • • • 54,402
    Utah • • • • • • 6,197
    Vt. • 2,508
    Va. • • • • • 15,261
    Wash. • • • 20,178
    W.Va. • • • 3,360
    Wis. • • • • 20,596
    Wyo. • • • • • 1,341
    **North Carolina provides phone alerts as well as e-mail alerts
    Sources: Stateline.org reporting and National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, December 2008


    The new features come as states approach a July deadline to comply with the Adam Walsh Act, a 2006 federal law intended to crack down on the estimated 674,000 registered sex offenders in the United States. The law was named after the murdered 6-year-old son of “America’s Most Wanted” host John Walsh, who was informed by police in Florida on Dec. 16 that his son’s killer was identified after more than 25 years.

    The Adam Walsh Act requires all states to adopt the same minimum standards for registering and tracking sex offenders, including the information they post online. Under the law, states must include where sex offenders work and go to school, the cars they drive, the aliases they use, the crimes they have committed and more.

    The law also calls for some juvenile offenders as young as 14 to be included in online registries, though many states so far have balked at that provision, arguing that juveniles should not be singled out publicly.

    Many state lawmakers, corrections officials, advocacy organizations and members of the public have criticized the Adam Walsh Act, questioning its costs, demands and whether aspects of it do more harm than good. The posting of new information about sex offenders also has drawn criticism. Blogs and other Internet forums have buzzed as visitors voice frustration over the trove of details now available to anyone at the click of a mouse.

    “The Justice Department says it’s there simply for information and not for punishment. If they were in our shoes, I think they’d reconsider,” said Carlos Robles, 32, a registered sex offender in Austin, Texas. Robles — who received probation for engaging in consensual sex with a 16-year-old when he was 20 — said nonviolent and low-risk criminals should not be included on the Texas registry.

    States are under pressure to comply with the Adam Walsh Act by July — or lose 10 percent of their share of funding under a federal grant program that pays for state and local police programs. No states have been deemed compliant with the Adam Walsh Act yet, though they can apply for a pair of one-year extensions.

    At least 13 states last year and 12 states in 2007 passed laws authorizing the collection of new information from sex offenders, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Some states passed the laws on their own, while others did so specifically to meet federal Adam Walsh Act demands, NCSL said.

    While some of the new laws stipulate that the collected information can be posted only on internal law enforcement Web sites, many states are adding some of it to their public registries as well, in accordance with Adam Walsh Act requirements. Wyoming, for instance, is among a dozen states where residents can view license plate numbers or vehicle descriptions of the cars driven by registered sex offenders.

    A Stateline.org analysis of all 50 state sex offender registries, conducted in December, found:
    All states include information about the crime committed by each sex offender or, in some cases, general information about the victim. New York, for example, includes whether sex offenders committed their crimes against family members.

    At least 29 states provide mapping to show exactly where sex offenders live. Some states offer significantly more information on their maps. Washington state shows where sex offenders live in relation to schools, day care centers and other places where children gather.
    At least 19 states allow users to sign up for e-mail or other alerts to inform them when sex offenders change status, including when they move. North Carolina allows residents to sign up for telephone alerts as well.

    At least 18 states list information about where registered sex offenders are employed, though details vary by state. West Virginia, for example, posts only the city and county in which offenders are employed, while Virginia provides the name of the employer and the company’s address.
    At least 12 states post information about the cars sex offenders drive, such as vehicle make and model or license plate.

    At least five states — Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Michigan and West Virginia — allow users to search for sex offenders by their online identifiers, such as e-mail address or instant messenger screen name.
    Those who support the surge in new online information say it can help law enforcers, parents and other members of the public keep a watchful eye on sex offenders, including many who are described as sexual predators and have used the Internet to commit their crimes.


    Supporters say states like Delaware — where each sex offender’s profile includes a phone number to contact the police agency responsible for monitoring the offender — are innovators that provide useful information that can be helpful for reporting and even deterring crime. Other states that allow users to provide tips directly to police through their sex offender registries include Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin.

    In Connecticut, state Rep. Mike Lawlor (D), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is pushing for the state to include more information in its sex offender profiles, including whether victims are male or female, an adult or a minor and an acquaintance of the offender or a stranger.


    “On Connecticut’s registry, only the technical name and number of the crime of conviction is listed, which is meaningless to citizens hoping to make decisions about the risk of a nearby offender,” Lawlor recently wrote in an opinion piece published in the Hartford Courant.

    But the expansion has generated resistance from civil libertarians, privacy groups and a small but growing number of advocates for sex offenders who say some of the new information could subject former offenders to harassment or even violence. Media reports in recent years also have tied sex offender suicides to the public registration requirements they faced.


    Critics say some online information, such as the size of offenders’ shoes in Texas, serves no reasonable law enforcement purpose.

    “I’m just curious, how is that keeping us safe?” said Mary Sue Molnar, who helped found Texas Voices, a support group for registered sex offenders in Texas. Molnar said one recent change to Texas’s registry — the posting of offenders’ places of employment, in accordance with the Adam Walsh Act — has caused law-abiding offenders she works with to lose their jobs.


    Battles over the Adam Walsh Act and similar state-level laws are playing out in state and federal courts around the country. Most have focused on whether the act’s requirements can be applied retroactively to those who committed their crimes before such laws were approved. Legal experts say few major cases have challenged the new information being included in online registries.

    Leonard Sharon, a criminal defense attorney in Maine who has defended sex offenders, said it could be difficult for lawyers to win lawsuits asserting sex criminals’ right to privacy. “Your right to privacy is restricted once you’ve been convicted,” he said.

    Meanwhile, a crucial undercurrent in the debate over the expansion of online sex offender information has been whether the information itself is reliable. A December report by the inspector general of the Justice Department found that public sex offender registries run by the states are “inconsistent and incomplete.”


    “The public,” the report said, “cannot use the state information…as a reliable tool to identify all registered and non-compliant sex offenders in their communities.”

    Moreover, if state Web sites inaccurately list firms that employ sex offenders, companies could be “stigmatized or potentially jeopardized by vigilante responses, however infrequent they may be,” said Wayne Logan, a law professor at Florida State University who has studied sex offender laws.


    Another twist is that not everyone who is listed on state sex offender registries is a sex offender, according to Kristen Anderson, director of case analysis with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which monitors 57 sex offender registries, including those of the states and overseas territories.

    Fourteen states include non-sex criminals in their registries, including arsonists and drug offenders, Anderson said. She said she did not know which 14 states because some information submitted to her organization from the states is provided anonymously.


    But perhaps the most contentious aspect of the Adam Walsh Act — its requirement that states add some sex offenders as young as 14 to their publicly accessible registries — appears no closer to being resolved, even with the law’s rapidly approaching deadline. Logan some some states have a “principled objection” to posting personal information about young offenders online.

    While many states have included some juvenile offenders in their online registries for years, Logan said, those offenders usually were convicted as adults. The Adam Walsh Act, by contrast, would include those convicted in special juvenile courts for aggravated and other serious sexual crimes.


    Many states are wrestling with whether to adopt that requirement. Wisconsin, for instance, has collected information from 1,900 people who committed their crimes as minors, said John Dipko, a spokesman with the state Department of Corrections. But the details are published only on the state’s internal Web site for law enforcement — not on the public registry.

    “Our statute does not give us authority to do that,” Dipko said.

    COMMENTS POSTED AFTER THE STORY IN STATELINE.ORG

    -----------
    Wake up people
    By Steven Berlandi on Jan 13, 2009 11:27:05 AM


    Very good article. I would like to mention first that few sex offenders are predators. Few will repeat. Also all the hype created by a few heinous crimes has made something that is so harmful that what ever good could come out of it has been lost. The registry has anyone and everyone on it. The only way we can understand as common everyday people. People who really don't understand the laws and unless have been place in a situation involving either being a victim of a sex crime or prosecuted for one. We as the general public are at a loss what to do or think. We have been told so many things about sex offenders. One is that they always repeat. If this is so then why are there 647,000 on this registry that we think we need to know every time they breath. One would think they would be already back in jail for life.

    Many point out that information somehow is power. Ok I will give you that one. But what happens to this power? What do we do with it? The original idea was so we would know who the predators were. The ones most likely to offend again. Good idea. Now that we have 647,000 registered sex offenders nation wide who are these people. You don't know do you. So we as a populous have no choice but to feel all are a danger. So what happens? We class everyone on the list as the same. We don't want them to live next ot us. Work with us. Even go to church with us.

    Painting each and everyone with the same brush of misunderstanding has lead to many murders of ex-sex offenders. The thoughtless dissimilation of information has taken homes from them and their families. It has made it so they can't hold a job if they get one as someone will spread the news. I wonder who they are protecting. People on this registry come form all walks of life. We want to think they are no more then animals and treat them as such. We have e-mail alerts. A web site to track these animals. Lifetime registration for all in some states. Why? Does it make us safer? Not really as 97% of the new crimes are committed by people not on the registry.

    So now we spend our time worried that some judge didn't do their job when sentencing and punishing these people. We worry that they are out there committing new crimes if we don't watch them very closely. We feel helpless as politicians spread the big lie that 50% repeat. I feel most can see where this is all going. So why don't we put a stop to all the hysteria? We fear what we don't know. We feel if we have enough information we will finally be safe. We are not safe. We are now confused. We have no idea who is a danger and who has been rehabilitated and is now trying to support their family and live a normal life. Being afraid we react in the only way we know how to do. We ostracize all of them. We make it so they can't work, rent or even live.

    Fear is a great tool for politicians. We as a populous have the right to be safe. All of the families in a community need to feel safe and have the right to be productive and live as well as they can. Given that why do we feel we are in a position to destroy anyone’s family with laws that destroy their ability to maintain a home for their family. Yes this is also their children. If it saves one child then its all worth it. What about the children that suffer from these laws? What about them? Who are we as a populous to take away their future.

    We need to back these laws back down to what they were originally intended to do. Trim this back to where we know who the dangerous ones are. The ones that are repeat offenders deemed predator. The ones that posse a treat that as a populous ,we have a right to know about. Let the ones that have paid the price and rehabilitated themselves go. Leave them alone to grow and prosper as they should. Let their children have a stable life. One free from one of their classmates spreading the news that they found out on the internet or from some over zealous miss informed person in the neighborhood. Stop spreading fear for the sake of the children.

    If we as a populous want to play citizens on patrol do it with the ones that posse a threat. Really if we don't get a handle on this we are going to spend all our time in our homes as we won't feel safe to even go out. How is that fair to anyone. Stop the lies. Stop the hysteria. Stop and take a look at what is really going on and then reform these laws that have gotten so out of control.

    ----------------------

    Sex offender registry
    By Susan Kenney on Jan 13, 2009 10:49:22 AM

    All rational people looking at this article have to realize just by the sheer number of people on the registry how out of control this is. There is usually a huge difference between a sex offender and an actual molester or predator, and so many do not deserve to be on it. They have taken their punishment, learned their lesson, and want nothing more than to be productive citizens contributing to our society.

    In our age of technology, this is going to hit a lot of people closer to home than they ever thought possible. With our judicial system as broken as it is, unless you have the right political connections and the resources for a high power attorney, you don't stand a chance of getting your side heard.

    Restructure the registry and use it for what it was originally intended. That is to keep track of the serious predators who are a threat. I think it will eventually self-defeat itself because it will become so commonplace for people to be registered that people will quit paying attention to it. At least that is my hope if nothing is done to rectify this.

    -----------------------------
    Corrupted Laws
    By Brian Yates on Jan 13, 2009 7:01:13 AM

    The Adam Walsh Act is very deceptive in that it claims to protect children when, in fact, it harms many.

    Most sex offenders do NOT re-offend according to the Department Of Justice and several university studies. Many have committed non-violent crimes such as streaking, one-time voyeurism, and teens who had consensual sex with other teens. Children related to these offenders suffer collateral damage and, as mentioned in this article, some states list young children on public registries (often for non-violent crimes like playing doctor).

    Plus, public registries incite vigilante violence from cults like Absolute Zero United who believe all sex offenders, regardless of offense, should be murdered.

    In California, the homeless population has increased by over 800% because of zoning laws which are proven ineffective at keeping anyone safe, especially when such laws encourage violent offenders to stop registering. The AWA and similar laws are based on feel-good mentalities that only benefit vote-getting politicians. The AWA costs states millions to implement and raises tax dollars.

    It is time to reform sex offender laws, so that only real predators are on registries. This will help law enforcement do a better job of tracking them since currently they are overburdened watching thousands of people who pose no risk.
    But also, we need to give them therapy, employment, and housing while they are monitored. Statistics show a much lower re-offense rate with these class of offenders when they are in a stable environment.

    Lawmakers should base their decisions on facts, not hysteria generated by the media. I would definitely go with data provided by the DOJ over CSI hype any time.

    It is time to change these far-reaching laws.

    ----------------------------

    Way out of control!!!
    By Walt Howard on Jan 13, 2009 12:09:09 AM

    I think the sex offender focus is way out of control. These lawmakers are, in my opinion, traitors! They have circumvented the protections afforded ALL citizens by our Constitution and Bill of Rights for over two decades now. Remember this statement?: "The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes." Thomas Paine.

    I believe that eventually, these offenders will rise up and become subversives, or even domestic terrorists due to the abolition of their GOD given rights.

    Sex offenders indeed have the LOWEST rate of recidivism among ALL the criminal types, yet our lawmakers have found easy targets to experiment with diminishing civil and human rights protections that exist in our constitution and bill of rights.

    Just because someone's on a registry, or not allowed to live in a certain neighborhood is not going to stop an offender from attacking. In fact, I can prove beyond a doubt that these laws increase the likelihood of a re-offense.

    People will never understand how bad these laws are until someone close to them is affected, persecuted, and discriminated against.

    Wake up lawmakers, you are fertilizing anarchists.

    I personally think that most of you are con artists using this "sex offender" bashing as a means for support because you lack the understanding for the real issues plaguing America today. You certainly have no resolution other than to abolish rights for people who've made mistakes and payed the price. I think it's called "double jeopardy," but I'm sure you lawmakers will have some con story as to why it doesn't violate the constitution. Lawmakers in America are undereducated, superficial, and hypocrites. I've yet to meet a down to earth and compassionate lawmaker that serves the public interest even when it's unpopular.

    You people disgust me, and I hope the people wake up and remove you all from your playpens. We've had enough!!!

    If you can't find better solutions to social problems that have plagued mankind since the dawn of civilization, then get the hell out of office.

    Walt.

    -----------------------------

    Sex Offender Issues
    By Mary Molnar on Jan 12, 2009 10:22:56 PM

    Great informative article. However, I think the word "molester" is over-used. Bottom line: Not all "sex offenders" are "molesters". Not all "sex offenders" have committed dangerous, heinous offenses. The goal of Texas Voices: Differentiation! Current "sex offender" laws have reached out and snagged thousands who pose no threat to children or society. Many have committed misdemeanor type offenses. Offenses which should not be registerable for life. Offenses that were neither violent, dangerous nor harmful. The registry is certainly not keeping anyone safer.

    ---------------------------------------

    Research shows registries increase danger
    By Rika W on Jan 12, 2009 3:24:46 PM

    Researchers at Columbia Universtiy found that community notification INCREASES recidivism amoung registered sex offenders.

    They also found a decrease in reported crimes amoung family and close friends by first-time offenders. However, that shouldn't really be taken as a positive. Why? Because child advocacy groups have been saying for ten years that notification laws DECREASE the liklihood an abused child will report the family member.

    So we're spending billions to create and maintain a system shown to increase recidivism by the already-convicted, and shown to decrease the liklihood a victim will seek intervention.

    Besides, if the registry system worked as it was billed--to keep all registered sex offenders from ever harming another person--we'd still be left with over 90% of sex crimes untouched. After all, the Department of Justice found less than ten percent of sex crimes were committed by registered sex offenders.

    And while we're on the subject of law enforcement, perhaps someone can consider why the rise and broadened scope of registries has corresponded with a large DECREASE in the percentage of sex crimes solved?

    The registry is an expensive experiment based on theory, and the facts on the ground have proven the theory wrong. Alas, since so many have banked their future, earnings, and reputation upon the faulty theory, it's unlikely any of them will back down.

    It's often said that policies are worth it if it "saves one child." Is it still worth it if it harms just one child? Unfortunately, for many, the answer is a resounding yes.












     

    S.O. License Plates DON´T PASS in Ohio
    By posted by Margie <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 12.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [0094]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0094 and be sent to the above email address, with a copy to Alex at alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    ------------------------------------------------------
    NOT YET AT LEAST! No Flourescent Green Sex Offender License Plates for Ohio!
    Northern Ohio
    News Leader
    Jan. 7, 2009
    url: http://www.the-news-leader.com/news/article/4501546

    Sex Offender Plates: Legislation offered in the Senate that would have required sex offenders to display florescent green license plates on their vehicles had some emotional committee hearings but didn't gain much traction during the past general assembly.
    It was titled Kristen's Law, after a young Wooster-area girl who was viciously raped, murdered and dismembered by a neighbor. It would have targeted offenders and predators who are already are required to register with county sheriff's offices, including those convicted of rape, sexual battery, gross sexual imposition, importuning and sex-related crimes involving children.
    They would be required to display a florescent green license plate on their vehicles, providing clear evidence to any onlooker of their past crimes.
    The plate would serve as a deterrent to potential future offenders and would enable parents, children, law enforcement and others to monitor sexual offenders' activities.
    Marc Kovac is the Dix Newspapers Capital Bureau chief. E-mail him at mkovac@dixcom.com.
     

    Bumper Stickers: Kill Pedophiles
    By posted by Marge <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 12.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [0093]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 003 and be sent to the above email address, with a copy to Alex and alexm60@fastmail.fm, and to the journalist whose email address is at the bottom of this news story.
    Alex´s comment: More and more murders of accused ¨pedophiles¨ and other ¨sex offenders¨ will occur so long as the campaign of hatred continues - let´s help our neighbors understand that hatred only breeds more hatred.
    ----------------------------------
    The Brockton (Massachusetts) Enterprie
    January 6, 2009

    Joe Burns: No call for a call to kill

    By Joe Burns
    GateHouse News Service
    Posted Jan 06, 2009 @

    --------------------------------------------------------------------

    “Protect our children: kill a pedophile.”

    That’s what the bumper sticker read on a car just ahead of me.

    Encountering a call for murder is unsettling, but, in this case, not surprising. In the dung heap of depravity, where sadists, serial killers and mass murders dwell, you will find the sexual predator as well. But while convicted serial killers and mass murderers will, mercifully, never see freedom and may even be executed, that is not the case with pedophiles and other sexual offenders. We don’t give them the same sentences we give to murderers, and with good reason: doing so would offer little motivation for sparing the life of the sole witness to a sexual crime. And so they serve their sentences and are released out into the world.

    But unlike many other violent criminals who are returned to society without restrictions, the whereabouts of sexual offenders are monitored. And those deemed most likely to re-offend also have their name, address, photo and past offenses made easily accessible to the public.

    So what message is that giving us — that these are people ready to live among us or that they’re a danger in our midst that we must protect ourselves and our family against? Many would say the latter.

    That was likely why, in 2006, a 20-year-old Canadian, Stephen Marshall, who had no history of being sexually abused, took the law into his own hands. Marshall killed two Maine men whom he had never met and whose names and addresses he had gotten from a sexual offender list. One of the men, 24-year-old William Elliott, had been placed on the list after serving four months in jail because, as a teenager, he had consensual sex with his girlfriend who was days shy of the age of consent.

    Marshall shot and killed himself as police were about to arrest him. Shortly after the killings, Maine took down its online sex offender listing. They are now up again.

    Two men in a small Tennessee town didn’t want to kill the pedophile who lived down the road, but they took a life just the same. Attempting to drive away a neighbor convicted of downloading child pornography, they set fire to his home. The man escaped the blaze, but his wife died in the fire.

    One of the most famous, or perhaps infamous, examples of taking the law into one’s own hands is that of Ellie Nesler, a California woman who died last month.

    Nesler, whose story was the subject of the TV movie “Judgment Day,” became a hero to some in 1993 when she walked into a California courtroom and shot and killed the man who was accused of molesting her son and other boys.

    “He deserved to die. Maybe I'm not God, but I'll tell you what — I'm the closest damn thing to it for all the other little boys," Nesler said at the time.

    The state of California disagreed. Nesler served three years in prison for her crime.

    Some would call that a small price to pay for doing away with a predator. Others might say it’s a small price to pay for taking a life. But Nesler also paid in other ways.

    Eleven years after Nesler took the law into her own hands, her son did the same, stomping to death a man he accused of stealing his tools. How much of that disturbingly distorted sense of justice stemmed from his abuse and how much stemmed from his mother’s actions and the public’s reactions to her act is impossible to determine. But he is now serving 25 years to life, and his mother was unable to have him by her side before she died.

    Being made aware of who and where the most dangerous sexual offenders are is meant to be a way of controlling crime and protecting the public, but as this anecdotal evidence shows, it can backfire tragically.

    The “kill a pedophile” sentiment doesn’t represent the feelings of just one motorist; the bumper sticker has been spotted all over the country. Why someone chooses to advocate violent vigilantism is not ours to understand. Perhaps they do so because of a personal pain, a hatred for those who commit such vile acts, or a frustration with those who turn them out into society and then tell us to beware. In all cases, one can recognize the rage while rejecting the rationale.

    But as long as we free convicted sexual offenders, saying that they’ve paid their debt to society, and then tell the public the “degree of dangerousness” posed by them is such that we be made aware of their whereabouts “to prevent further victimization,” there will be people who believe they must take the law into their own hands.

    Anyone that dangerous should not be reintroduced to society. The way we deal with sexual offenders must be changed, and not with death sentences or mandatory sentences. We need a system that allows for greater flexibility in sentencing — a system that sets benchmarks for release so that those who are judged a serious danger to society aren’t set free, while others, like William Elliott, are allowed to return to their community without the threat of being targeted by some self-appointed vigilante with a downloaded hit list.

    If you have an idea for a "Who Cares" column, you can call Joe Burns at 508-375-4936 or e-mail him at jburns@cnc.com.

     

    Take Off low-level offenders from Tx registry!
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 11.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [0092]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 0092 and be sent to me - i´ll send them on to the person who sent this in.
    Alex Marbury

    ----------------------------------------
    From GRITS FOR BREAKFAST
    Texas Justice Blog
    Sunday, January 04, 2009
    Alonzo bill would let judges pare sex offender rolls

    Reacting to concerns that the sex offender registry includes too many low-level offenders and may increase recidivism, a Dallas state rep wants to give judges discretion to shorten sex offender registration periods for certain first-time offenders.

    Declaring "Some offenses don't rise to the level" of needing registration, Rep. Roberto Alonzo, D-Dallas, has filed HB 190, reports the Houston Chronicle's Texas Politics blog, which:

    would give certain first-time sex offenders the ability to petition the courts to shorter their registration periods, or to have their registration completely waived . The vast majority of sex offenders in Texas must register on the state's Department of Public Safety website for life.
    Alonzo "filed his bill at the request of a Dallas judge who was fed up with low-risk offenders brought in on technical violations tying up the court's docket," said the Texas Politics blog, which quoted the new group Texas Voices praising the legislation. Via Kuff.
     

    Another Sad Teen S.O. Suicide Attempt
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 10.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [0091]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 0091 and be sent to Alex at the above email address. Alex´s NOTE: How long must this horror go on before sanity prevails?
    -----------
    URL for this story:
    http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/news_details/article/16/2009/january/09/boys-rescue-shuts-down-route-611.html

    Boy's rescue shuts down Route 611

    January 09, 2009
    By: CHRISTOPHER RUVO
    The Intelligencer (Philadelphia, PA)

    A teen who lives at a facility for juvenile sex offenders left the
    center and tried to kill himself by jumping off a Route 611 bridge over the Neshaminy Creek.

    A 16-year-old from Quakertown attempted to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge on Route 611 in Doylestown Township on Thursday afternoon, sparking a rescue effort that closed the highway for about an hour, police said.

    Police said the teen, who lives at a facility for juvenile sex
    offenders, plummeted 25 to 30 feet onto boulders on a wooded embankment beside the Neshaminy Creek about a quarter mile south of the intersection of Route 611 and Edison-Furlong Road.

    The boy was flown by helicopter to Lehigh Valley Medical Center in
    Allentown following the incident around 12:15 p.m. The extent of his injuries was not clear, but a statement released by the nonprofit facility where he was living, Mathom House, said the teen was conscious and stable. The boy appeared to have avoided "significant injuries," it said.

    According to the statement, the teen left a nonsecure placement area at Mathom House without permission. The facility is in Doylestown Township on the 1700 block of Route 611, near the bridge and Neshaminy Creek.

    Staff members followed the teen, attempting to get him to come back, but he refused, the statement said. When they reached the bridge, he
    apparently decided to jump.

    "The juvenile then appeared to go limp and stepped off the bridge
    overpass on Route 611," according to the statement. "He was quickly
    attended to by+staff who immediately summoned medical assistance and the police."

    Doylestown Fire Co. used a ladder truck to lower a stretcher known as a Stokes basket to the boy and brought him up. The rescue mission took about a half-hour, said Fire Chief Dennis Loux Jr.

    Robert Stanzione, chief of Bucks County's juvenile probation division, said he could not discuss the teen's case because he is a juvenile and his offenses "do not rise to the level of public availability."

    According to the Mathom House Web site, a typical adolescent at the
    center is between the ages of 13 to 18 and has gotten in legal trouble for voyeurism, exhibitionism or child molestation.
    Mathom House also cares for others who commit sexual assault or "bizarre sexual offenses with strangers, or whose deviant sexual acts involve physical force or threat," the Web site says.
    (article truncated - to read the whole article go to the url above).
    Christopher Ruvo can be reached at 215-345-3147 or
    cruvo@phillyburbs.com.
     

    VICTORY AGAINST CIVIL COMMITMENT LAW
    By posted by Mary and John <rsolvirginia@comcast.net>
    Posted on 09.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [0090]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 0090 and be sent to the email above, with copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    Associated Press permissions policy does not allow us to copy the article in full. NOTE from Alex - This is a VERY BIG ONE! Pass the word!
    ------------------------------
    VICTORY AGAINST FEDERAL CIVIL COMMITMENT LAW
    January 9, 2009
    Associated Press story
    The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the entire Federal Civil Commitment law, ordering 4 sex offenders to be released from custody because they had completed their sentences. This will of course go to the US Supreme Court, but if sustained, it would mean freedom for hundreds held nationally in civil commitment confinement centers, such as Coalinga State Hospital in California.


    The URL for the story (via Goggle news), is:
    http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gbWKFtDcXrsrysnDyoLpbnxqNxRwD95J7KB00
     

    Minnesota Considers More Strict SO Rules
    By posted by Fima <estrinyefim@gmail.com>
    Posted on 06.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [0089]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 0089 and be sent to Minnesota contact person,Fima, at the above email, with copies to alexm60@fastmail.fm, and also to the TV station listed below
    -----------------
    KAALTV (KVAALTV.COM)-contact News@KAALTV.com
    Rochester, Minnesota
    Nicole King
    Dec. 29,2008

    Strict Restrictions for Sex Offenders

    (ABC 6 NEWS) - If a convicted predatory offender lived close to your kids' school or playground, would you want to know?

    The truth is, many do.

    In Minnesota, only level three sex offenders, those who are most likely to re-offend, are required to register with the state.

    But there are no legal restrictions on where they can live once they've served their time.

    A new law would change that.

    But some say it goes too far.

    Ella and her brother Quincy love to hit the slope at Skinner's Hill.

    Their dad, Dan, keeps an eye on the action.

    In the Muzik family, safety is a priority, whether it's a ride in a sled or talking about the danger of strangers.

    That's why Dan wants to know if a sex offender lives close to where his kids play.

    "If it's got anything to do with our children and any kind of sexual predator, we want to know where they're at,” he says.

    With the support of parents like Dan, Minnesota Representative John Lesch hopes to toughen the state's sex offender laws.

    That includes strict restrictions on where offenders can live.

    "The areas that these individuals, high-risk sex offenders were moving into, they were near schools. They were near parks, playgrounds, areas where children would congregate,” says Lesch.

    That's what exactly what Lesch wants to stop.

    His plan is to ban sex offenders from living within 1,500 feet of school, day care center, park or another sex offender.

    And unlike several other similar laws, Lesch wants to put these restrictions on all offenders, not just those who are most likely to reoffend.

    "Because of the crime they committed, I don't feel sorry for them,” he says.

    "It's not only not needed, it's unproductive,” says Charles Samuelson, the Executive Director of Minnesota’s Civil Liberties Union.

    Samuelson says the ACLU will fight the proposed law.

    "If this guy lives next to you, he's a monster and he's going to eat your children. That's basically what they're saying,” he says.

    A level three-sex offender lived at the Sterling Motel for about a week, just a few hundred feet from Banfield Elementary.

    While the school didn't want to comment on the issue, they say they did notify parents.

    A new law in Minnesota would make this distance illegal.

    But even if you push it back a few hundred feet and the offender can still see the school, will the law do any good?

    "Where there's a will, there's a way. No matter what, they're going to find a way to get to their victims,” says Mower County Sheriff Terese Amazi, who adds the law would also put a strain on the state's law enforcement.

    Instead of just watching Minnesota’s 141 level three-sex offenders, they would have to monitor more than 4,700 sex offenders.

    "To keep track of all those individuals, it would be a cumbersome process,” she says.

    And while 1,500 feet isn't as far as Iowa's 2,000 feet requirement, it would make finding a place to live difficult in small Minnesota towns.

    Samuelson says it's unfair to offenders who have already served their time.

    "It punishes people for crimes these people haven't committed yet, which overturns the American principle of innocent until proven guilty,” he says.

    Until a law is in the books, Muzik will continue to talk to his kids about strangers who could harm them.

    "They have rights, I understand, but we have the right to keep our children safe as well,” says Muzik.

    Representative Lesch thinks the law will pass during the 2009 session, but admits it will likely be amended.


     

    Cast the 1st Stone: Register All Sinners?
    By Rev. Joseph Gleason <biblelighthouse@gmail.com>
    Posted on 06.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [0088]
     
    Send comments to the minister listed at the above email address, as well as to the rsol Illinois contact, Renate, at gvr123@aol.com and Alex at alexm60@fastmail.fm. ALSO SEND COMMENTS TO THE EVANSVILLE, ILLINOIS CURRIER PRESS - the more positive comments the better!
    --------------------------------
    Evansville (Ill.) COURRIER PRESS
    January 5, 2009
    OPINION

    OFFENDERS AMONG US
    Past sins listed,not explained,in sex registries

    I pastor a church in the cozy town of Omaha, Ill. A friend here recently confided in me that a number of people are concerned that a "child molester" has been attending my church. He asked if that is really true. Then he said, "This has been a big dark cloud hanging over your entire operation there."

    Well, the guy was no "child molester." (And even if he had been, it would be irrelevant.) Over 15 years ago, as a stupid 20-year-old, he flashed a couple of minors, and he paid dearly. He admits he was wrong. But he now has a wife, a son, a good job and is one of the finest Christian men I know. I have five children, and I trust him with them. Unfortunately, a person can get labeled as a "sex offender" whether he urinated in public, physically assaulted someone or did something in between. But when the state requires a person to register, everyone assumes the worst. I never heard anyone say, "A sex offender moved into town. I hope he doesn't pee outside!"

    I do understand the desire to have an online registry. While I have known the guy for years, I don't know those other guys.

    Perhaps we should even expand the Internet registry. Then we could be even better protected. Before letting customers in your store, check the thief registry to ensure they never shoplifted as teenagers. Consult the marijuana registry to guarantee your baby sitter never smoked dope 20 years ago.

    Are some sins worse than others? Display everyone's sins online and let readers decide for themselves.

    It could expand even further. Screen potential dates through an online adultery database. Screen potential employees and friends through an online liar registry and gossip database.

    If we create Internet registries to expose everyone with skeletons in their closets, those registries will contain everyone in your phone book. Everyone has the potential to hurt us.

    If someone commits a heinous crime and is a danger to society, we have options such as execution and life in prison.

    But it is nonsense to tell a person he is "free" to live normally in society, while broadcasting his past sins on the Internet.

    If we must have registries, we need to include everyone's sins, not just a select few.

    Repentance and forgiveness are what Christianity is all about. So after my friend informed me about the "big dark cloud" that has been hanging over my church, I responded something like this: "If you know any repentant murderers, adulterers, child-molesters, drunks, wife-beaters, liars, thieves or gossips who need Jesus, you send them to me. I'll gladly give them a warm welcome!"

    Paul was a murderer, Peter denied Christ, King David was an adulterer and a murderer, and Solomon had lust issues. Yet God worked wonders through them, wouldn't you agree?

    How many of your past sins do you want others to see online?

    How much grace and forgiveness do you yourself wish to receive?

    Contact Joseph Gleason at biblelighthouse@gmail.com.

     

    Another (teen) s.o. suicide: Stop This Now!
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 05.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [0087]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0087 and be sent to Alex at the above email address. Also see Ms. Low´s email at the bottom of the article.
    -------
    Oakland youth in sex diary case found dead, committed suicide after
    finding out he would be placed on the sex offender registry for life.

    BY MARSHA LOW
    FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
    Jan. 5, 2009

    Justin Fawcett, whose name was among 22 penned in a 14-year-old girl's sex diary, was found dead in his bedroom Friday.

    The Oakland County Medical Examiner's Office has yet to determine the
    cause of death, but David and Gayle Fawcett said their son died of a
    drug overdose.

    Fawcett, 20, learned recently that his name would appear on the state's sex-offender list. His parents said they believe learning that he would live as a marked man came as a shock, and he faltered.

    In May 2002, at age 18, Fawcett was one of four young men charged with statutory rape for having sex with a 14-year-old Andover High School student.

    The girl's diary later revealed she had been sneaking out of her
    parents' Bloomfield Township home in the middle of the night to have
    oral and anal sex with 22 boys and men.

    In a May 2002 interview with the Free Press, the girl conceded that she was a predator and a victim: "I declare I am both. Yes, I'm a victim. I was a victim who was deceived by my own emotions and ignorance, of misplaced confidence, a victim of my own fantasies . . . Yes, predator for I chase people who themselves were victims of misplaced confidence."

    In September 2002, Fawcett pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of
    seduction, allowing him to avoid jail time and registry on the
    sex-offender list.

    But a complicated series of legal events would later change that plea
    agreement, to the surprise of Fawcett and his parents.

    Fawcett was sentenced under the state's Holmes Youthful Trainee Act.
    Under the act, Fawcett's record would have been wiped clean as long as he met the requirements of his probation. In this case, Fawcett was instructed to stay out of trouble, not use drugs or alcohol and to pay his court fees.

    Instead, Fawcett violated probation in December 2002 when West
    Bloomfield police found him illegally possessing prescription drugs. He also failed to pay court fees. And in January 2003, he was arrested for stealing from a vehicle. He served 10 months in the Oakland County Jail.

    Pleading to seduction as Fawcett did in 2002 meant his name would not
    appear on the sex-offender list. But changes last year require those who pleaded guilty to seduction to appear on the list, said the county's Chief Deputy Prosecutor Deborah Carley.

    Fawcett was released from jail on Dec. 30.

    He enrolled at Oakland Community College with the hope of earning a
    business degree. He was earning good grades and making plans to take a job this spring, his father said. His parents said he was working toward cleaning up his life.

    In late February, Fawcett proudly took his well-received school reports to his probation officer as proof that he was a man getting his life in order, David Fawcett said. He was told then that he would be placed on the sex-offender list.

    His parents called it a devastating blow to their son.The state enacted New Laws and applied them Retroactively, which is against the United States Constitution. His parents said it was wrong to for the state to break an agreement, their plea agreement, and do this to their son.They said they believe the plea agreement he made two years ago should stand.

    The Fawcetts said juveniles have consensual sex all the time. And though they do not approve, they said they believe it is a mistake for the law to mark their son for life and label him a danger.

    "We thought he was on the road back," David Fawcett said. "He would
    sometimes say he'd kill himself, and that worried us. But we watched him and we didn't think he was suicidal."

    Fawcett's parents described him as a strong-willed and artistic boy who played the piano and enjoyed baseball and soccer.

    The Fawcetts said they will work to give meaning to their son's life.
    They plan to campaign against drug use and to make the sex-offender list more meaningful.


    Contact MARSHA LOW at 248-351-3299 or low@freepress.com
     

    GA S.O.s Must Hand Over Online Passwords
    By Terrence <tjwhite1963@gmail.com>
    Posted on 03.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [0086]
     
    Comments should be sent to Terrence at the above address, with copies to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    Kelly Piercy should be commended for his courage in speaking to the press about this outrage!
    See Terrence´s excellent response at the bottom of the URL summary here. The full article cannot but used because of permission requirements by AP.
    ---------------------------------
    GEORGIA RULES THAT SEX OFFENDERS MUST HAND OVER INTERNET PASSWORDS
    Associated Press article

    URL:
    http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/local/news-article.aspx?storyid=126961&provider=rss

    The article points out that so far only Georgia and Utah require than passwords be handed over - allowing state officials to read private email to and from family and other personal email. Kelly Piercy is quoted as asking ¨How much further down this road must sex offenders be chased?¨ After reading the article on the URL, read Terrence´s great response:
    --------------------------
    The incredible fact (is) that Georgia has now joined the State of Utah in requiring all registered sex offenders to tender their internet and e-mail user names and passwords to their local Sheriffs Departments. The penalty for this new law, which went into effect in Georgia on 1st January, 2009, is (of course) a felony.

    None of us were prepared for this new development; it quite literally blindsided us all. I am strongly suspecting another instance of Republican 'midnight legislation', which (as I'm sure you know) is their favoured tactic for sneaking in highly questionable legislation, under cover of darkness.

    As you will I'm sure realise, this is not only a violation of the right to privacy, but it is also an end-run around the need to obtain a legal search warrant. It thus directly and brazenly violates the United States Constitutional Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

    This is what I specifically had in mind when I said that I would refuse to cooperate, and allow myself to be arrested and incarcerated before ever going along with such a nefarious scheme.

    It is now clear that the mighty behemoth State is intent upon annihilating not just all of our natural rights, but also our very identity, our sense of Self. Well, I refuse to consent to the annihilation of my inmost Self.

    The State wants to literally hound and punish us to the ends of the Earth. But they do not want us dead: they want us alive, so that they can torment us the more, and so that we can suffer the more.

    As I know you will realise, the only thing that will stop this is exposure: their evil deeds must be exposed, and brought to the light of day. Not until their evil deeds are decried from every housetop, not until the average and the ordinary people step up to demand that such evil cease, we we ever see any positive change.

    As has been so truly said, the real evil is not the Hitlers of the world: it is the mass of simpering, terrified, "ordinary" citizens who cow in their corners and refuse to speak out against the evil, and thus enable it--permit it to happen. Hitlers are never possible without such enablers.

    Europeans should take note of this new development with horror, and beware: how long will it be before this is repeated in your land?

    How can fascism rear its ugly head so soon after we thought we defeated it in the last century? Simply and sadly, by reason of the apathy of the populace. This is what allowed it in the first instance, and is what is allowing it again.

    Terrence
    (From an email to Brian Rothery of Inquisition21.com)

     

    Wash Post Exposes S.O. Homelessness
    By posted by Margie <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 02.01.2009
    Link to this news item: [0085]
     
    Comments should be sent to Margie at the address above, copies to alexm60@fastmail.fm, and also write the journalist at the email address given in the article.
    This article may not be copied in full on a website, so we give the url only.

    SEX OFFENDER HOMELESSNESS TRACKED ACROSS THE COUNTRY
    The Washington Post
    Dec. 27, 2008
    by Karl Vick

    An excellent summary of this problem, created by the poorly conceived sex offender residency restriction laws!


    URL
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/26/AR2008122601722.html
     

    Big Brother in W. Va. - No Rights for S.O.s
    By posted by Renate <gvr123@aol.com>
    Posted on 28.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0084]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 0084, and be sent to Renate, above, copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    Note from Alex: This shows that places like W. Va. are in the dark ages on these laws. Some of the worst prejudices are in this article. We urge everyone to send comments to the journalist,
    Samantha Perry at sperry@bdtonline.com, and urge her to research our site and some of the positive changes in other states!
    SEE COMMENT FROM KELLY PIERCY, RSOL Ga. contact, at bottom of this story.
    -----------------

    Keeping tabs on sex offenders

    By SAMANTHA PERRY
    Bluefield (West Virginia) Daily Telegraph
    Dec. 20, 2008

    PRINCETON – From GPS monitoring and lie detector tests to registration of Internet screen names and vehicle identification, Big Brother is keeping a close eye on registered sex offenders in the two Virginias.

    In the past three years, the Princeton Detachment of the West Virginia State Police has had more than 500 felony arrests on sex offender registrations. The charges can stem from various issues, such as a convicted offender failing to register with the state, to one who did not contact police within the mandatory time frame after changing a telephone number.

    “We don’t play,” said Cpl. J.C. Long, an expert on the sex offender registry process at the Princeton Detachment.

    The Mountain State’s sex offender registration process is detailed and complex, but its purpose is simple. The goal is take proactive measures by monitoring convicted offenders in an effort to prevent another child or adult from becoming a victim of a sex crime, Long said.

    “Some sex offenders are child predators and they’ll never stop pursuing crimes against children,” Long said. “And we’ve dealt with numerous cases like that in the last three-and-a-half to four years in Mercer County.”

    Registration of sex offenders varies according to the crime and court disposition. Some are sentenced to a 10-year registration; others must register for life.

    The West Virginia State Police website lists all sexual offenders. Information posted includes the offender’s full name, date of birth, race, gender , hair color, eye color, age, home address, other properties owned, the offender’s conviction offense and the age and gender of the victim. To access the registrations, log on to the State Police web site, www.wvstatepolice.com, and follow the links to the sex offender registry.

    Long said the information is posted “for public awareness — no more, no less.”

    If a family discovers a sex offender is living nearby and has a concern for their children, Long said parents may want to advise their children not to speak with strangers. “If there is a concern about a specific person, they may want to tell them to stay away from that person.”

    Long cited examples of crimes that carry a penalty of a lifetime sex offender registration, including any sex crime convictions (from first-degree sexual assault to third-degree sexual abuse); “the kidnaping of a child who is not their own”; and child pornography convictions.

    Also, any sex offender convicted in another state who moves to West Virginia must register, as do offenders who live in another state but work or attend school in West Virginia.

    This rule is also in effect in Virginia, said Tazewell County Commonwealth Attorney Dennis Lee, who noted “anyone convicted in another state of a sexually violent offense” must register on Virginia’s sex offender registry.

    Lee said others required to register in Virginia include those convicted of any murder involving a victim under the age of 15, all sexually violent offenses — “and that pretty much covers the gamut of sex offenses in Virginia” — felony sex offenses and those convicted of indecent liberties.

    “They have to register, and they stay on that registry for the rest of their lives,” Lee said.

    Sex offenders who fail to register in West Virginia or Virginia or update their registration face felony charges.

    For example, in West Virginia a convicted sex offender has 10 business days to notify the state police of status changes on his or her registration such as a new car, new job or a move to a new home. Long said if they do not notify the state police of this change within the required time frame, they are charged with a felony offense, which carries a potential prison sentence of one to five years. A second offense violation carries a possible 10- to 25-year prison sentence.

    Failing to register as a sex offender is also a felony offense in the Commonwealth, with a first offense carrying a potential five-year prison sentence, Lee said. Those convicted of a second offense could face up to 10 years in the penitentiary.

    Virginia also has strict time frames in place for offenders to notify authorities of changes on their registration.

    For example, Lee said if a convicted sex offender was allowed to have an Internet connection and e-mail, this information would be part of his or her registration with the state. “If the offender makes a change to those services, they have within 30 minutes of the change to report it to the state police, and if they fail to do that it is a crime — a felony offense — punishable by up to five years in prison.”

    Virginia also posts its sex offender registry online, which can be accessed at http://sex-offender.vsp.virginia.gov/sor/ .

    “The website is pretty detailed,” Lee said. “You can actually get maps that show where the offenders are. I think people would be surprised by how many there are in any given community.”

    •••

    A new Virginia law enacted in July of this year adds additional limitations on sex offenders. The law prohibits anyone convicted of a sexual offense “to forever be prohibited” from loitering within 100 feet of places where children gather, such as schools, playgrounds, athletic fields and other such sites. While this law does not prohibit a convicted sex offender from picking up his or her child from school, it does prohibit the individual from hanging out there or having contact with a child that is not in his or her custody.

    “They could not go to a playground and stand around and watch the kids,” Lee explained.

    Additionally, convicted sex offenders are “routinely required to go through intense counseling programs that generally last five to 10 years,” and they may also be ordered to have “no contact with children whatsoever, no Internet services, websites or e-mail addresses and, depending on the circumstances, they can give them curfews. We have had cases in which they have them hooked up to GPS monitoring,” Lee said.

    Sex offenders on probation may face even tougher monitoring in Virginia. “They bring in all offenders on probation before Halloween and go over their restrictions for the holiday,” Lee said. “And they’re required to sign a document stating they understand they can’t hand out candy, they can’t have their lights on, they can’t go to functions. If they fail to do that, it’s a violation of their probation.”

    Lee said the probation office also brings in convicted sex offenders twice a year for polygraph tests, during which they question them on issues regarding any contact they may have had with children.

    •••

    Both Lee and Long said there has been much more awareness of the potential danger of sexual predators in recent years, and increased efforts in proactive measures for the prevention of crimes.

    “Of course there have always been sexual predators, but I think there is much more awareness,” Lee said. “Now with the Internet, it’s such a scary world out there. The ability of sexual predators to reach out and make contact with victims has become much easier.”

    Lee described the Internet as “a buffet for sexual predators.”

    Parents who have a convicted sexual offender living in their neighborhoods need to speak with their children about the potential hazards, Lee said. The details of the conversation may vary depending on the age of the child. “As a parent, you need to advise them the person down the street or next door is a convicted sexual offender and potentially dangerous,” Lee said. With younger children, parents should discuss with them the importance of not having contact with the individual, not going to his or her house and not having contact if approached.

    Living in small, rural communities does not isolate families from the dangers of sexual offenders.

    Within the last six months in Tazewell County, charges have been brought against people in three separate cases for soliciting children and/or trading child pornography, Lee said.

    Lee said the most surprising development he has witnessed in recent years is the increased number of juvenile sex offenders. “We have had quite a few cases in which juveniles have sexually assaulted other juveniles ... this has doubled, or even tripled, from what we were seeing 10 years ago.”

    Lee reminded parents that the stereotypical image of a sex offender — “the guy in the raincoat” — does not always hold true.

    “We’ve prosecuted community leaders and business leaders,” he said.

    “My advice (to parents) would be to educate yourself,” Lee said. “If you see something that strikes you as not right, if you see a registered sex offender around a playground, by all means contact local law enforcement or the state police and report that.”

    In West Virginia, Long also advised parents or others with concerns of potential danger to a child or other individual to contact the state police at (304) 425-2101.

    ---------------------------------
    COMMENT
    Dear Ms. Perry;

    I read your article in the Bluefield Daily Telegraph and have to wonder where ethics in journalism has gone.

    You depend heavily on quotes from Corporal Lee to give a biased and prejudicial slant to your story. The article constantly assails the reader with logical non sequitor. In this story, buy quoting Cpl. Lee, you jump from sex offender to immediate danger. You allow Cpl. Lee to advise parents to warn their children about the sex offender that lives in the neighborhood. Yet, you never provide the balance by reporting the truth that 95% of all sex offenses are not committed by former sex offenders. That the greater danger to children and adults is posed by persons known to them (90% of all sex offenses are not committed by a stranger, they are committed by someone known to and trusted by the victim.)

    Your effort to 'protect' children is noble... and it is mis-guided. Parents who follow your advice may prevent the slim chance of being a victim of a former offender. A very slim chance indee. A study in Connecticutt demonstrates that a child 16 and under is 150% more likely to die from all causes than to be the victim of a sex offense committed by a person previously convicted of a sex offense.

    While you and Corporal Lee are whipping parents into a hysteria watching the stranger down the block, 80% of all sex offenses against children are being committed in the home by a close relative, close friend, or baby-sitter.

    Please have the journalistic integrity to do your research before producing such boiler-plate yellow journalism that actually serves to reduce the safety you so nobly hide behind. PLeae note that the comments link to this story appears to be closed. Does this suggest something about your agenda?

    Reference: http://bdtonline.com/local/local_story_355192137.html

    Kelly R Piercy
    rrsol.corrcomm@gmail.com
    RSOL Correspondence Committee
    http://www.reformsexoffenderlaws.org/
    Georgians for Sex Offender Registry and Residency Restriction Reform
    http://www.gasorr.org/


    — Contact Samantha Perry at sperry@bdtonline.com
     

    HRW response to US Report on Anti-women Violence
    By posted by Margie <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 23.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0083]
     
    NOTE (from Alex Marbury) - This is a Human Rights Watch Report press release about a new U.S. Justice Department report on increased violence, and sexual violence, against women. It is written by Sarah Tofte - the author of a previous HRW study on problems with the ¨sex offender¨ registry and other sex offender laws. RSOL agrees that there is a huge amount of sexual and other violence against women, but we feel Ms. Tofte should have added to her list of things that need to be done, the reform of the existing ¨sex offender¨ registry and related laws that CLAIM to be helping the problem, but in fact help no-one - and harm many, including women and children in the families of ¨sex offenders.¨

    Below the article are some further comments by RSOL activists.

    Comments should be sent to Margie at the above email address, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm, (refer to News Item No. 0083) as well as to Sahra Tofte at Human Rights Watch.
    -----------------

    US: Soaring Rates of Rape and Violence Against Women
    More Accurate Methodology Shows Urgent Need for Preventive Action

    December 18, 2008
    Human Rights Watch Press Release
    (http://www.hrw.org)

    The numbers in this survey show an alarmingly high rate of sexual violence in this country. This should serve as a wake-up call that more must be done to address the problem in the US.

    by Sarah Tofte, researcher for the US Program at Human Rights Watch.

    A new government report showing huge increases in the incidences of domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault over a two-year period in the United States deserves immediate attention from lawmakers and the incoming administration, Human Rights Watch said today. The statistics show a 42-percent increase in reported domestic violence and a 25-percent increase in the reported incidence of rape and sexual assault.

    The National Crime Victimization Survey, based on projections from a national sample survey, says that at least 248,300 individuals were raped or sexually assaulted in 2007, up from 190,600 in 2005, the last year the survey was conducted. The study surveyed 73,600 individuals in 41,500 households. Among all violent crimes, domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault showed the largest increases. Except for simple assault, which increased by 3 percent, the incidence of every other crime surveyed decreased.

    "The numbers in this survey show an alarmingly high rate of sexual violence in this country," said Sarah Tofte, researcher for the US Program at Human Rights Watch. "This should serve as a wake-up call that more must be done to address the problem in the US."

    The projected number of violent crimes committed by intimate partners against women increased from 389,100 in 2005 to 554,260 in the 2007 report. By comparison, the number of violent crimes against men by intimate partners went down.

    "Domestic violence is often a hidden crime, and these numbers are a stark reminder of how serious and widespread this problem is," said Tofte. "The Obama-Biden administration should make prevention and protection against all forms of domestic and sexual violence a top priority."

    The National Crime Victimization Survey is conducted every two years, with data gathered in phone calls made to a sample of households across the United States. Due to criticism from experts in the subject, the survey's methodology was adjusted in 2007 to capture more accurately the incidence of gender-based violence. The authors say in the report that the higher numbers may reflect the new, more accurate methodology rather than an actual increase. Two major shifts were to describe types of sexual assault to those being interviewed, and to replace "computer-assisted telephone interviews conducted from two telephone centers" nationwide with interviews "by field representatives either by telephone or in person."

    "The new numbers indicate that previously, the government significantly underestimated the number of individuals affected by domestic and sexual violence in this country," said Tofte. "Authorities should urgently adjust public policies, law enforcement, and provision of support services accordingly."

    Human Rights Watch is currently investigating and monitoring the criminal justice response to sexual violence. The organization's recent work includes investigating the backlog in untested DNA evidence collected in rape cases in the US. In Los Angeles City and County alone, there is a combined total of at least 13,000 untested sets of evidence, known as rape kits, sitting in storage.

    Human Rights Watch's national recommendations include:

    -The Obama administration should appoint a special adviser on violence against women in the US;
    -Congress should restore full funding to the Office on Violence Against Women;
    -The Department of Justice, through the National Institute of Justice, should authorize comprehensive studies that more accurately track sexual and domestic violence in the US, especially among individuals who are least likely to be surveyed by the National Crime Victimization Survey;
    -Congress should increase funding for sexual and domestic violence prevention, intervention, and treatment programs;
    -Congress should amend the federal Debbie Smith Act, a grant program designed to eliminate the rape kit backlog, but that states can and have used for other kinds of DNA backlogs;
    -The US should ratify the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which obligates states to prevent, protect against, and punish violence against women.

    -----------------------
    Further comments by RSOL Participants

    Marge Furlong (thesnappy1@gmail.com)
    ¨We are appalled by this recent news. But, at the same time, the rights of many individuals are being stripped away whereas many are guilty of only a one time lapse of good judgement. Also, it would be
    interesting to find out, how many were actual crimes? We are all too familar with 'guilty by accusation only' whether it be a messy divorce, or a pissed off mother, etc.¨


    Kelly Piercy (gasoem@gmail.com)
    ¨The Problem is that this has been with us for the generations.
    and Previously this 800 pound gorilla was ignored. It can no longer be ignored or allowed to continue.¨ (The Justice Dept. report is right in that, and Human Rights Watch is right to support the campaign against such violence. comment by Alex)
    ¨ But, we can not throw more 'feel good' laws at this problem.
    We tried that with the ineffective Sex Offender Laws and we have learned that these draconian measures do nothing to address the problem and only continue the problem.
    ¨We propose addressing the problem through education and treatment instead of blanket ill conceived legislation.¨

    Renate, gvr123@aol.com

    ¨I am kind of tired that woman cry rape too soon, and I am a woman too! It is, of course unfortunate and sad when there is a rape or any kind of violence against a woman. But as long as these cases, which are often mostly viewed from one-side only, are not realy investigated, the problem will not be solved. Often women use their "helplessness" against men to their advantage. There is then enough fuel for the public to ralley against men.¨...Of course others need to focus on violence against women, ¨but someone like RSOL must find out about injustice against offenders. Females are (nowadays) so protected, they are almost untouchable. I find that disturbing!¨


     

    Safety, Fear: Adam Walsh Legacy
    By posted by Margie <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 22.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0082]
     
    Comments should be sent to the above email, and mention News Item No 0082 (see also recent RSOL blogs about Adam Walsh case). Also, contact the reporter, whose email is at the bottom of the story.

    -------------------------------
    Safety and fear make up Adam Walsh's legacy
    By Michael Kruse,
    St. Petersburg (Florida) Times Staff Writer
    Monday, December 22, 2008


    We've never been more safe.

    We've never been more afraid.

    That's the paradox we're left with now that police have finally named a killer in the murder of Adam Walsh.

    For 27 years, it seemed that the freckle-faced 6-year-old was snatched by the bogeyman Out There Somewhere. Last week, we got a name: Ottis Toole, drifter and serial killer, who died in 1996 while in prison for other crimes. But since 1981, when Adam was kidnapped from a Sears at a South Florida mall, we've become irreversibly more watchful, and more worried, and more aware of dangers both real and imagined.

    We search for missing kids better now. We find more of them. But we're also a little paranoid. We put kids on leashes and track them by satellite. We teach them the world can be mean.

    The legacy of Adam Walsh isn't fixed. It pulses on a sliding scale between cautious responsibility and hypervigilance.

    Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, credits Adam's father, John Walsh, for changing the way parents and lawmakers think about and respond to the threat.

    "Adam's story captured the attention of the American media and moms and dads all over the country," Allen said. "The results have been overwhelmingly positive."

    A leading criminologist says not so.

    "John Walsh, if he had raised awareness in a more rational, considerate and moderate way, he might have done some good," said Richard Moran, a sociologist and criminologist at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. "But he raised awareness in this hysterical way and he created enormous anxiety among parents.

    "It robbed a lot of children of their childhoods."

    The changes — in law, and in perception — started almost immediately after Adam Walsh went missing.

    John Walsh and his wife lobbied Congress to pass the Missing Children's Act in 1982. It required the FBI to enter data about missing children into a national crime database. They also helped found the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 1984.

    Security tightened at stores and schools. Pictures of missing kids appeared on milk cartons and shopping bags and fliers in the mail.

    In 2006, on the 25th anniversary of Adam Walsh's kidnapping, the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act was passed, expanding the national registry of sex offenders and stiffening penalties against them.

    These days, Amber alerts go out, practically instantly, all over the country, when a kid goes missing. Code Adam is an alarm set off in stores that alerts employees to a missing child and locks the doors.

    Statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice show that since the mid 1970s violent crime has gone down, down, down.

    The Department of Justice estimates that 115 kids a year are kidnapped in what are labeled "stereotypical" kidnappings — a stranger taking a child with intent to keep or harm or kill. Fewer than half of those cases end in deaths.

    In 1990, police recovered 62 percent of missing kids. Now it's about 96 percent, according to Allen, the president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

    It's impossible to say exactly how much of this has to do with Adam Walsh.

    On Tuesday, though, Allen's group called Walsh's parents "true American heroes" who "deserve the gratitude of every person."

    It's safer now. Kids are far more likely to die by drowning, choking or in a car crash than they are to be kidnapped, raped and killed. Even accidental deaths are on the decline, thanks to bike helmets and seat belts and pool fences. It just doesn't feel safer.

    Moran blames John Walsh.

    "He created a sense of panic that was unrealistic," Moran said, "and he inflicted it on the nation."

    Said author Richard Louv, who writes about overanxious, overprotective parents: "I'm not saying there's no risk out there, and I'm not saying the fear people feel is silly. But the stats in no way match the amount of fear parents feel."

    In Florida a generation ago — before Carlie Brucia was taken and killed in Sarasota, before Sarah Lunde was taken and killed in Ruskin, before Jessica Lunsford was taken and killed in Homosassa — kids built tree forts and rode bikes all day till dark and played cowboys and Indians with cap guns in orange groves.

    Not anymore.

    Now we scan mug shots on sheriffs' Web sites.

    Now we check for area pedophiles on the national sex offender registry.

    America's Most Wanted, hosted by John Walsh, is on still, and has been for two decades.

    Nancy Grace is on CNN every night talking about Orlando girl Caylee Anthony, confirmed dead.

    Malls offer fingerprinting and DNA swabbing. Dentists can put ID chips in kids' teeth. Parents can buy GPS-based homing devices with names like Toddler Tag to stitch into their kids' clothes.

    "This is all about this little boy," John Walsh said at last week's news conference.

    More than 27 years had passed since a voice came over the loudspeaker at the mall.

    "Adam Walsh," the voice said.

    "Please come to customer service."

    Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or (727) 869-6244.

     

    BR S.O. Wins Groundbreaking Ruling
    By posted by Margie <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 22.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0081]
     
    Comments should refer to news item 0081 and be sent to the above email address, and to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    -----------------------

    Sex offender wins groundbreaking court ruling
    Dec 19 2008 Evening Chronicle
    New Castle, England

    A SEX offender has won a groundbreaking ruling that his "indefinite" placement on the sex offenders register with no right of review breached his human rights.

    The test case of Angus Thompson came before three judges at the High Court in London.

    Lord Justice Latham, Mr Justice Underhill and Mr Justice Flaux said the current system denied him the chance to prove in a review he no longer posed a risk of reoffending.

    The judges ruled that Thompson was entitled to declarations that the scheme was incompatible with his right to private and family life under the European Convention on Human Rights.

    Lord Justice Latham said it might well be that any right of review "should be tightly subscribed in the public interest".

    But he added: "I find it difficult to see how it could be justifiable in Article 8 terms to deny a person who believes himself to be in that position an opportunity to seek to establish it."

    Lawyers had argued that Thompson should be entitled to attempt to come off the register and stop having to notify the police of his personal details, including whether he intended to travel abroad.

    The judges heard that the Sexual Offences Act 2003 means that a person sentenced to 30 months or more "shall be subjected for life" to the register’s notification requirements.

    Pete Weatherby, appearing on behalf of Thompson, argued that he should be entitled to periodic reviews.

    Thompson was sentenced in November 1996 to five years in jail on two counts of indecent assault on a female and other offences of actual bodily harm. The court heard he has since been released and he has not been in any more trouble.

     

    CA S.O. Homeless Rate Jumps 800%
    By Margie posted this <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 22.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0080]
     
    This was posted by Margie at the above email address. Refer in comments to News Item 0080 and send to her, and to alexm60@fastmail.fm


    ----------------------------------------------------------
    California's homeless sex offenders on parole up 800%
    December 19, 2008
    LOS ANGELES TIMES

    SACRAMENTO

    Homeless sex offenders on parole jumps sharply

    The number of homeless sex offenders on parole in California has increased dramatically since the approval two years ago of Proposition 83, an initiative that imposed harsh restrictions on where they can live, a state panel reported Thursday.

    The Sex Offender Management Board said the number of parolees monitored by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation -- one of the only government agencies to enforce what is known as Jessica's Law -- increased from 88 in November 2006 to 1,056 at the end of June 2008.

    "Common sense leads to the conclusion that a community cannot be safer when sex offenders are homeless," the report states, citing research concluding that unstable housing can lead to recidivism.


    Jessica's Law, which prohibits sex offenders from residing within 2,000 feet of schools and parks where children play, was proposed by state Sen. George Runner (R-Lancaster) and his wife, Sharon, a former assemblywoman, and strongly backed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    When the state board looked at its effect on housing for all sex offenders, including those not on parole against whom the law has not generally been enforced, it found homelessness had increased 60%. Potential solutions mentioned included housing multiple sex offenders in the same place and putting them in mobile trailers until they can find a permanent home.

    The governor's office said Thursday that Schwarzenegger still "strongly supports Jessica's Law, which all involved concede needs fine-tuning." Neither the governor nor the law's other sponsors have offered proposals to amend it.

    -- Michael Rothfeld LOS ANGELES
     

    Phone calls alert residents to S.O.s
    By Chris <rsolnc@gmail.com>
    Posted on 21.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0079]
     
    Comments should be sent to Chris at the above email, refer to News Item No. 0079. Chris is the co-contact person for N.Carolina for RSOL N.Carolina, the NC affiliated state group.
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    PHONE CALLS ALERT RESIDENTS TO SEX OFFENDERS
    an Associated Press Story, Dec. 16, 2008

    My statement to the attorney general is below. I'm really tired of this crap. (Chris)

    -----------------------------------------------
    Mr. Cooper,

    I'm writing regarding the latest article in the AP concerning phone alerts for Sex Offenders. As a sex offender, husband, and father of three children (ages 6, 8, and 10), I am also concerned about the safety of my children. The general public is under the assumption that every offender is a child molester or a rapist when this is simply not true. Many are like me, who made a one-time poor decision, did our time and are trying to rebuild our lives. It seems that every month that goes by, more and more laws are implemented in the name of "protecting our children". If we truly want to protect our children, keep the violent offenders, and repeat offenders in prison. Adjust the registry to reflect only those that do pose a true danger to the public so that it's not too confusing to distinguish between offenders. Also remember there are vigilante individuals who utilize the registry for the purpose of inflicting harm on offenders. This poses a significant risk to the offender's families as well. Please take this under consideration.

    Sincerely,

    Chris

    -----------------------------------------
    Dec. 16, 2008
    Associated Press (North Carolina)

    A state registry will begin notifying people by phone when sex offenders move into their area, courtesy of a new system from two state programs.

    "Because tens of thousands of people still aren't online, this allows
    them to use the phone system to get the notifications," Attorney General Roy Cooper said Tuesday.

    Cooper and Governor's Crime Commission Chair Linda Hayes announced the program, an expansion of the North Carolina Sex Offender Registry and the North Carolina Statewide Automated Victim Assistance and Notification program, Tuesday morning.

    The sex offender registry is already online, allowing people to search for convicted sex offenders in their neighborhood, view maps and sign up for e-mail alerts. Through NC SAVAN, residents will get the online information by phone.

    NC SAVAN was first established in 1998 for victims to track court dates and custody changes of their attackers. Those services will remain.

    Nearly 12,000 registered sex offenders live in North Carolina, including just over 1,100 currently incarcerated, according to the North Carolina Offender Registry's Web site. Their movements are tracked and funneled into the NCSAVAN system by sheriff's offices, the Department of Correction and district attorney's offices statewide. Cooper said he's aware parents like to know the information being made available to them.

    "This helps them plan for the safety of their children," Cooper said.
     

    Keep S.O.s Away from Everybody?
    By margie <thesnappy1@aol.com>
    Posted on 18.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0078]
     
    Comments should be sent to Margie at the above email, with copies to alexm60@fastmail.fm. Always refer to the News Item No. - in this case 0078! Comments are also posted after the article below.
    -----
    Alex´s Note:
    And so it goes on and one - the hatred, the hysteria, the hype. We have to demand that America is better than this!!!!!!! Eventually, Americans will see this for what it is.
    ------------------------------------------------
    Council hears about local sex offenders
    Tuesday, December 16
    Lassen County (California) Times

    There are currently 11 registered sex offenders registered with the Susanville (California) Police Department, and at least one person in the community is looking to make sure there aren’t any more.

    Community member Jazmine Buchanan first came to the council at its regular meeting on Wednesday, Nov. 19. In that meeting, she explained how she had come across a registered sex offender in public. Buchanan has since come back to the council asking for its help in bringing about harsher punishments for sex offenders.

    She came back to the council at its Dec. 3 meeting to ask the council to sign a letter of support for harsher penalties on all known sex offenders, which would then be passed on to Senator Diane Feinstein’s office.

    “These offenders cannot be around schools and parks,” Buchanan said. “The reason why is because there’s children around. Well nowadays there’s children around everywhere. So they shouldn’t even have the privilege to be out walking the streets, like everyone else. We believe they should have life in prison. They lose their rights when they do the crime.”

    Buchanan explained the current laws designed to punish sex offenders aren’t enough. She said that Jessica’s Law and Megan’s Law weren’t harsh enough for people who cause permanent damage to their victims.

    The council eventually told Buchanan that it could not sign her letter because changing laws was something that had to be done at the state level, not at the city level. Mayor Kurt Bonham also said it would be difficult to pass any kind of new legislation asking for people who have already served their time in prison to go back.

    Buchanan said she would continue gathering community support and bringing the issue before organizations like the city council until she started getting results.

    To highlight how the sex offender issue’s it pertains to Susanville, Police Captain Tom Downing presented a report to the council at its request.

    “Currently, 11 sex offenders are registered with the Susanville Police Department,” Downing said. “Out of the 11 registered sex offenders, one is in the Lassen County Adult Detention Facility, one is registered as a transient, and one resides in the county and is attending classes at Lassen Community College.

    “The remaining eight are residing in the city. The city currently has no registered sex offenders who are on parole or probation, and no registered sexually violent predators.”

    (article truncated by A.M. because of length and extraenous material....)

    ---------------
    COMMENT: Ref: News Item 0078 - Maybe we should put everyone that ISN´T on the SOR in prison - this way they'll know they are safe. Or, we could put all the children on an island without adults - this way people like the lady (in California who made this proposal) would stop being an idiot.
     

    S.O. photos decorate Christmas Tree
    By margie <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 18.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0077]
     
    Comments to Margie at above email address, with copies to alexm60@fastmail.fm. Note - We are not allowed to post the whole story because of Assoc. Press rules.

    SEX OFFENDER PHOTOS DECORATE CHRISTMAS TREE

    A very sick and sadistic police chief in New Baltimore, Ohio, has pasted the photos of the 8 registered ¨sex offenders¨ of that town on stars and other ornaments on the town Christmas Tree. What new low will be next in the witch-hunt against ¨sex offenders¨?
    (Summary of article by Alex Marbury)

    To view the whole story, go to this URL:

    http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2008/12/17/Police_Xmas_tree_bears_sex_offender_photos/UPI-78811229529238/
     

    NC Students who are S.O could be expelled.
    By Margie <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 16.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0076]
     
    Send comments to the above email address and to the address of the journalist below, as well as a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    Refer to News Item No. 0076.
    ------
    Schools address student sex offenders Friday, December 12 (updated
    Greensboro, NC News-Record
    Saturday, December 13, 6:50 am)
    By J. Brian Ewing
    Staff Writer

    Guilford County Schools officials are trying to decide how to handle students who are registered sex offenders, with one such student in a school now.

    The system’s Governance Review Committee is developing policies to address a state law passed earlier this year restricting the access registered sex offenders have to places where children are, including schools.

    One of those policies will address sex offenders who are students.

    The board could decide to do one or a combination of several things including:

    * expelling any student who is a registered sex offender

    * expelling any student 16 years and older who is a registered sex offender, considering younger students on a case by case basis

    * reviewing each case, applying various options to address the student based on the degree of the crime.

    The policy could require that any student who is a registered sex offender be supervised or any student expelled be provided an alternative course of education, such as online classes.

    School board attorney Jill Wilson said she has reviewed a few similar policies from school boards and her recommendation is that the board review each case.

    “Do a true review of all the risks and benefits,” she said, noting that there is a wide range of crimes that can result in the person being a registered sex offender. Offenses can range from rape to cases of multiple peeping.

    Wilson told the committee there is one registered sex offender enrolled in a Guilford County School.

    However, officials declined to name which school or reveal any information about the student.

    The committee also is working on a similar policy to address adult sex offenders coming on campus, specifically parents and guardians who are registered sex offenders.

    A policy being considered would require all such parents and guardians to notify the school’s principal before coming on campus for things such as dropping their child off at school and parent/teacher conferences.

    The school board is expected to debate the policy at its meeting Jan. 13.

    Contact J. Brian Ewing at 373-7351 or brian.ewing@news-record.com
     

    Exiles on Main Street
    By Margie Furlong <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 16.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0075]
     
    Refer to News Item No. 0075, and send to Margie, who sent this in, at the above email address, and a copy to alexm60@fastmial.fm.
    Also, write to the Baltimore City Paper, or email them.
    See excellent letter from an RSOL participant, published in the City Paper in January, appended below the article.
    ---------------------------
    EXILES ON MAIN STREET
    by Chris Landers

    Baltimore City Paper
    Dec. 10, 2008

    Exiles On Main Street
    City Council Request to Limit Residency of Sex Offenders May Be Too Restrictive Areas in black on the map are within 2,000 feet of an accredited school or full-time daycare center. Under a law requested by the City Council last month, sex offenders would not be allowed to live in those areas. More than 1,000 home-based day care providers and an unspecified number of other locations where children congregate are not shown. By Chris Landers
    The City Council last month asked state lawmakers to introduce laws limiting where registered sex offenders in the city could live. The law, which would prohibit offenders from living within 2,000 feet of "a school, day care center, or location where children congregate," would effectively ban registered sex offenders from the city.

    City Paper mapped the locations of schools and larger day-care centers, based on state data, and discovered that few, if any, residential areas of Baltimore are farther than 2,000 feet from either.

    LOCATE: Child Care, the nonprofit which contracts with the state to keep a database of licensed day-care centers, provided the locations of 253 full-time childcare centers in the city. The nonprofit also tracks more than 1,000 home day-care centers, but declined to release those locations.

    Across the country, residency restrictions on sex offenders have proven popular, but problematic. Childrens' advocates and sex-offender treatment experts say there is no evidence that residency laws do anything to reduce recidivism.

    "It's kind of like thinking you're going to stop bank robbers by not letting them live in close proximity to a bank," says Fred S. Berlin, head of the Baltimore-based National Institute for the Study, Prevention, and Treatment of Sexual Trauma. "There is no evidence in the jurisdictions that have these laws that it's cut down on sex offenses."

    A policy paper from the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center, a Minnesota nonprofit that fights child exploitation, says residency laws may do more harm than good because they drive registered offenders underground, making them more difficult to track. "Because residency restrictions have been shown to be ineffective at preventing harm to children, and may indeed actually increase the risks to kids, [the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center] does not support residency-restriction laws," the paper states. "Such laws can give a false sense of security while sapping resources that could produce better results used elsewhere."

    Nancy Sabin, the director of the Wetterling center, in an e-mailed response to questions for this article, wrote this:

    Councilman Warren Branch, who introduced the Baltimore resolution, says it was proposed in response to concerns he heard from his 13th district constituents.

    "I was at one of the eastside community association meetings," Branch says, "and it was brought up that there were sex offenders living near two of the schools near Oliver Street and Lakewood, and some of the residents saw one of the offenders speaking to one of the young kids. They notified channel 45 and there were maybe 50 people who attended that meeting--screaming and shouting."

    Upon investigation, Branch says, he came across a bill that had been introduced at the state level more than once, but died in the Judicial Committee. He says he was surprised no one in the city delegation had taken up the issue before, given the number of times he had heard complaints from residents. He says he drafted the bill hoping to spur state representatives to action.

    Asked whether the 2,000-foot limit would force offenders out of the city, Branch says he would consider a smaller figure. "We can work on scaling it back," he says. "The way we have it, it's about eight or 10 blocks away from a school. I would feel comfortable with about two or three blocks. We don't want to send them somewhere where they would have to go and hide.

    "I can relate to the constituents," Branch says. "We don't want to place [the children] out there like candy for them. The [offenders] who are going through treatment or something like that, we don't want to place them in the line of fire with some of the kids."

    Critics of residency laws say they are based on myths about sex offenders--according to the U.S. Justice Department, the majority of sex offenses are committed by someone known by the victim, and that most sex offenders were unlikely to re-offend. The City Council resolution borrows language from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to warn that sex offenders have a high risk of re-offending, and are largely unknown to the community, although the organization itself opposes residency laws.

    According to the Council for State Governments, 24 states have passed blanket residency restrictions similar to the one Branch proposes, with restriction zones ranging from 500 to 2,000 feet. The council found that pressure on state legislators for tougher sex-offender laws had increased, even as the efficacy of residency restrictions was called into question.

    In Iowa, one of the first states to enact a sex-offender residency law, some legislators are attempting to scale back the law after the number of offenders that police couldn't locate skyrocketed. The Iowa County Attorney's Association, made up of prosecutors in that state, issued a statement in 2006 calling for the repeal or amendment of the residency restriction, saying that it caused a reduction in the number of confessions and plea agreements made by sex offenders, forced offenders from established residences, and compromised the safety of children. The restrictions have proven difficult to get rid of. Keith Kreiman, an Iowa state senator and cochair of the state's judiciary committee, told USA Today last year that it was difficult to scale back or amend the residency laws once they had passed. "It is very politically risky to even hold hearings [on residency laws]" he said, because of fears of being seen as "soft on crime."

    In Maryland, a residency law similar to the one requested by the City Council has been introduced in prior sessions by Baltimore County Del. Eric Bromwell (D-8th District), who did not respond to calls for comment for this story. In 2006, Bromwell wrote a letter to his constituents promising to introduce residency requirements after two registered sex offenders were discovered to be living near a school. The measure died in committee in 2007 and 2008 legislative sessions. Branch said Bromwell's bills prompted him to draft legislation asking for city delegates to support them.

    "If we can put some laws in place for the safety of the child," Branch says, "that has to come first. It's sort of hard to call, but if we don't have any measures in place, then we don't have any guidelines to go on."

    Del. Curtis Stovall Anderson (D-43rd District), head of the Baltimore delegation, was unavailable for comment. Ian Brennan, spokesman for Mayor Sheila Dixon, says the mayor would reserve judgment about supporting a residency law until it had been drafted at the state level.

    The National Institute's Berlin cautions that the laws need to be based on available evidence.

    "There are a lot of things that need to be looked at carefully," he says. "Sometimes in the rush to enact this legislation these things are not very well addressed. . . . I'm open to evidence that [residency laws are] serving a useful purpose in the community, but at this point it's really based more on fear--understandable fear, but fear and emotion--rather than something that's showing in a rational fashion that this is going to be effective public policy. . . . I understand the emotions, I understand the fears, but these laws are really important--first in terms of community safety, and second, as long as the community's safe, treating the people who have served their time fairly and helping them to get a new start in the community."
    ----------------------------------
    LETTER FROM JON SWIFT, RSOL PARTICIPANT, TO THE CITY PAPER

    Reporter Chris Landers is to be commended for his well-written and meticulously researched article ("Exiles on Main Street," Mobtown Beat, Dec. 10), which proves beyond any doubt that a new law mandating residency restrictions for convicted "sex offenders" would prove to be as disastrous in the Baltimore area as it has been everywhere else it's been tried.

    H.L. Mencken wrote that the main purpose of politics in America is to scare the public "by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." With the Drug War generally conceded to be a bust--even by many of those charged with doing the busting--the "sex offender" has emerged as our current favorite bogeyman. (I put "sex offender" in quotes because many of those currently imprisoned for sex crimes have, in fact, committed no crime at all--I am a personal acquaintance of one such victim--while others are guilty only of harmless "offenses" such as consensual teenage blowjobs.)

    Landers' piece is correct in suggesting that those convicted of this type of crime have a re-offense rate that's surprisingly low. Too bad the same can't be said of politicians who propose and often pass worthless laws that help no one (aside from those employed by America's prison-industrial complex) while making us all less free. Recidivism is close to 100 percent for these crooks, and that scares me far more than any phantom strangers with candy.

    Jon Swift
    Baltimore


    --Baltimore CITY PAPER Jan, 28 2009


     

    Some Cities Pass Worse Laws - Belleville, Il.
    By Renate <gvr123@aol.com>
    Posted on 16.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0074]
     
    Comments should be sent to Renate (RSOL Il. State contact) who sent this in - email is above. Send comments also to the journalist, whose email is at the end of the story, and to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    REFER to News Item 0074

    SOME STATES PASS WORSE LAWS THAN EVER -
    Belleville, Illinois for instance!


    -------------------------------------------
    Belleville OKs sex offender ordinance
    BY JACQUELINE LEE AND LAURA GIRRESCH -
    News-Democrat
    BELLEVILLE, IL -- Metro East News and BND.com
    Dec. 16, 2008

    Boosts restrictions on where they reside

    The City Council voted unanimously Monday night to pass an ordinance that will make it unlawful for registered child sex offenders to live or loiter within 1,500 feet of schools, parks or pools -- triple the distance required by state law.


    The ordinance, effective in 10 days, will not affect child sex offenders who currently own or lease a property within 1,500 feet of the named areas: schools attended by people under age 18, parks and public pools.

    "This ordinance is intended to apply to and prevent such new residential lease agreements, and renewal of expired residential leases, entered into after the effective date of this ordinance," the ordinance states.

    Those who violate the ordinance would be fined $100 to $1,000, including landlords who rent to offenders if their building's lot line is within 1,500 feet of the lot lines of a park, pool or school property.

    "It will potentially make criminals out of law-abiding (landlords) who make mistakes," Metro-East Landlord's Association President Donn Schaefer said, referring to landlords who may not keep track of where sex offenders are supposed to live. "Will they provide the public with maps? That's a very, very tight list there."

    Ed Yohnka, of ACLU in Chicago, agrees that sex offenders should be the ones to register and abide by the rules, and not "a third party to somehow enforce them."

    "We're seeing just a lot more of these kinds of restrictions. Fifteen hundred feet from every park or other place may frankly leave out large swaths of the city from a place where someone could even live," Yohnka said.

    Mayor Mark Eckert said he doesn't mind that child sex offenders may not want to live in Belleville because of all the restrictions: "That doesn't hurt our feelings. It makes it safer for our residents."

    Eckert said the Police Department learned of what other cities were doing and decided to follow suit; Collinsville passed a similar law in September.

    Contact reporter Jacqueline Lee at jlee@bnd.com or 239-2655.

     

    Journalist wins Emmy for ¨Jessica´s Law Fallout¨ article
    By Margie Furlong <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 15.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0073]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0073 and be sent to our intrepid regular contributor, Margie Furlong, at the above email address, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm, and to the journalist at the Gallup Independent.

    Journalist Wins Emmy for Exposing ¨Jessica´s Law Fallout¨
    Gallup, New Mexico Independent, Dec. 12, 2008

    John Sandoval, a TV journalist, did an excllent 8 minute clip, exposing the negative fall out for ¨sex offenders¨ who become homeless as a result of ¨Jessica´s Law.¨



    The URL:
    http://www.gallupindependent.com/2008/12december/120808emmy.html
     

    SEND IN THE CLOWNS!
    By Margie Furlong <thesnappy1@gmail.com>
    Posted on 15.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0072]
     
    Comments should be sent to the above email - obviously the person listed as ¨author¨ is the author of our News Item, not the journalist listed below who wrote the article. You might also send an email to the Rome News Tribune, and send a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm., too!
    ----------------------------
    Send In The Clowns
    Rome, Georgia, News Tribune
    editorial
    12/09/08

    IT’S ALMOST time to send in the clowns again, meaning the General Assembly will be back in session next month.

    As an Atlanta editorial quite correctly observed recently, “Most of the bills that the legislature enacts are pantomime — symbolic acts designed to give the appearance of decisiveness.”

    Would that these clowns were actually mimes whereby citizens would only have to see their pratfalls instead of also having to listen to them boast about them.

    One of the legislature’s worst pratfalls in recent years has been its sex-offender residency/registry law, one of the lousiest, most unconstitutional, absurd and brain-dead bits of political posturing ever to disgrace a deliberative body.

    No doubt one of the first items on the legislative agenda come January will be an effort — once again — to rewrite and repair yet more portions of this law as courts continue to strike down section after section of it. Unfortunately, the way the legal system works, issues must be raised piecemeal instead of doing what’s actually required and ash-canning the entire thing.

    MOST RECENTLY, the Georgia Supreme Court deemed the portion requiring an automatic sentence of life in prison for released sex offenders who don’t register where they are living (because the legislators also made it near impossible for them to live anywhere) to be unconstitutional because it amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment.” Not a one of the 23 other states with similar laws exact anywhere near this severe a penalty.

    And, after the coming rewrite, there are certain to be more revisions in future years as the legislators hold onto their ugly creation with a death grip. This bunch simply refuses to admit it can be wrong about anything.

    Still pending in federal courts are suits challenging the provision banning sex offenders, who have served their sentences, from volunteering at a church and the one not allowing them to live near churches (of which Georgia has thousands) and school-bus stops (of which Georgia has 150,000).

    Actually, a challenge is needed to the core problem of this law, which is its overly broad, sweeping definition of what constitutes a “sex offender” who must be kept tabs on for life. Basically, it’s anyone who had sex, natural or unnatural, at a time, place or age that the legislators believe inappropriate ... and go caught at it.

    ONE WONDERS how many Georgians, including those in the legislature, are not now governed by the awful law simply because they were never caught.

    If the definition were limited to known predators not vouched for as “cured” by psychiatric professionals, that would be one thing. But just about anybody for anything?

    In the specific instance of the latest court ruling, the state was trying to send away for life a 26-year-old who, at the age of 19, was convicted of statutory rape for consensual sex with a 15-year-old. Were it not for U.S. Supreme Court rulings striking down rape being a capital offense, one wonders if the current batch of Georgia legislators would try to make have sex out of wedlock a hanging offense.

    Far-fetched? Just remember, this same bunch has already made active membership in a church community illegal for those they don’t appear to believe worthy of salvation.

    Repairing the law’s definition of what constitutes a sex offender who poses an actual threat to concentrate on predators would solve much of its problems. There’s nothing wrong with protecting “our children,” the cover excuse the legislators use. There’s something very wrong with violating the fundamental civil rights of tens of thousands of largely upstanding citizens who once made a mistake (as the state sees it) and are now back on the straight and narrow.

    ONE SUSPECTS that a large part of the legislature’s problem in this regard is the mindset of its current majority. Some (not all) of the Republican leaders actually appear to believe they are infallible.

    Indeed, it was worrisome in the recent Georgia Supreme Court ruling to note that the sole objector in the 6-1 decision, Justice George Carley, said the law should stand because to do otherwise would be a “monumental abuse of this court’s authority to determine the constitutionality of legislation.”

    If whatever a legislative body does is legal, as Carley seems to imply, and the constitutional rights conferred to citizens so easily discarded, why even have courts? The judiciary is the sole check (other than the ballot box) against legislators who believe they are gods.

    Would Carley uphold a law banning all Georgians from participating in any church activity other than services themselves? After all, “freedom of religion” may be protected but there is no “freedom to operate a food bank” in the state and national constitutions.

    To amplify on what our Atlanta peers noted, the General Assembly engages in more than “symbolic acts designed to give the appearance of decisiveness.” They engage equally in symbolic acts designed to give the appearance of omnipotence.


     

    ¨SEXTING¨ - Teens & Younger Making ¨porn¨
    By Kelly <gasoem@gmail.com>
    Posted on 15.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0071]
     
    Comments should be sent to the above person and email address, who posted this News Item, and should refer to News Item 0071.

    SEXTING
    Teens and younger children are using cell phones to ¨text¨ their friends and others nude and sometimes sexual pictures of themselves or their friends. Some teens have been arrested, and at least one is serving a long prison sentence, for this practice! We urge parents and others to warn their children that their ¨sexting¨ may be illegal and that they could be charged!
    This ABC News video touches on a ¨taboo¨ subject - that kids themselves are making what may be called ¨porn,¨ and that they often are sexually provocative.

    The URL to see the ABC Video is

    http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=6457011
     

    Md. RSOL Contact in a Courageous Interview
    By Caryn Tamber <caryn.tamber@mddailyrecord.com>
    Posted on 08.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0070]
     
    NOTE - This incredibly good article is the result of a courageous interview (my term, not hers) with the Maryland RSOL affiliate group, Sandy Kennedy. We urge everyone to contact the author of the story, Caryn Tamber, at the Maryland Daly Record (URL MDdailyrecord.com) - her email is caryn.tamber@mddailyrecord.com.
    She has gone into more depth than almost anyone - quoting Dr. Fred Berlin, an rsol signatory, and Paul Shannon our lead contact person, as well as Kennedy and many others. Congratulate her - and also congratulate Sandy, whose email is above, for her courage!!!!
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0070, and be sent to Caryn Tamber, Sandy Kennedy (SDK5460@yahoo.com) and to me, alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    ------------------------------------------------

    Advocates for sex offenders take aim at registry, other rules
    CARYN TAMBER
    Daily Record Legal Affairs Writer
    Maryland
    December 7, 2008 7:37 PM
    Sandy Kennedy hates that her husband’s picture is on Maryland’s sex offender registry.

    Elected officials and victims’ advocates say tough sex-offender laws are necessary to protect society from dangerous criminals. But some offenders and their relatives, like Kennedy, see the restrictions as overly intrusive and unnecessary.

    Her husband has served his time and is a danger to no one, Kennedy argues.

    “In Salem, they had a witch-hunt, and in America, we’re still having a witch-hunt, and the witch-hunt is just different,” said Kennedy, a Parsonsburg nurse. “It’s the sex offender.”

    Kennedy runs a blog called Sex Offenders and Their Wives, where she vents about the difficulties of living with sex-offender restrictions and debunks what she said are myths about offenders, like the high probability that they will re-offend and their imperviousness to treatment.

    Sex offender package
    SIDEBAR: Federal law ties funds to tougher state restrictions

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    SIDEBAR: Michael Kennedy's conviction
    She also heads the Maryland chapter of the national group Reform Sex Offender Laws. So far, there are only three other members, she said.

    Out eight years

    Sandy Coulbourne, now 48, met Michael Kennedy, now 53, in 2007 at a bookstore. Both were browsing the murder mysteries.

    After only a couple of dates, Michael Kennedy sat his new girlfriend down and told her he had spent 20 years in federal prison for rape and murder before being paroled in 2000. He hadn’t done it, he insisted.

    She cried at the thought of an innocent man imprisoned for that long. The two married a few months later, despite his parole officer spending 45 minutes trying to convince her not to go through with it.

    People ask how she can love a killer and rapist, but the man she knows could never have done those things, Sandy Kennedy said. She can recite the details of his case, pointing out police, prosecution and witness errors along the way. In fact, it took three trials, with two hung juries, to convict him.

    She was spurred to activism when Michael Kennedy was required to register as a sex offender earlier this year, even though he had been out of prison for eight years.

    The directive to register came out of a recent federal law that Kennedy and other convicted sex offenders are fighting.

    She started reading about sex offender laws on the Internet and found that lots of offenders, their family members and some advocacy groups agreed the restrictions had gone too far.

    Human Rights Watch released a study last year arguing that registration laws are overbroad, that registries have led to violence and harassment against registrants, and that residency restrictions “banish[] offenders from entire urban areas.”

    Like Sandy Kennedy’s blog, offender-advocacy Web sites argue that the majority of registered sex offenders are not monsters who repeatedly kidnap and rape children — or, as Baltimore criminal defense lawyer Thomas P. Bernier put it, “some lecherous guy pulling 10-year-olds into a van.”

    Many don’t pose a continuing threat to children, Bernier said; some never did in the first place.

    Challenging the premise

    Fred Berlin, founder of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic and an associate professor of psychiatry, said sex offender monitoring laws and restrictions are predicated on the premise that offenders are more likely than not to commit another offense.

    Recent studies have shown that, at most, 20 percent to 30 percent re-offend, a lower rate of recidivism than other criminals, he said. (Other sources point out that different types of sex offenders re-offend at different rates, and that this statistic only covers reported offenses.)

    Annapolis lawyer Thomas A. Pavlinic said few offenders need to be monitored for life, although many are anyway.

    “There are these evil people,” said Pavlinic, who specializes in defending accused child molesters. “Those are violent sexual predators, people from whom the public has to be protected. There are a lot of people who have in the course of their life simply made a mistake, either with their own children or because of the age difference.”

    They “get treatment and then they never do it again,” he said.

    Sandy Kennedy suggested that the government register criminals with a higher risk of recidivism, like drug dealers.

    She said she is not opposed to all sex offender restrictions, just the pointless ones.

    “I’m not against totally what they make us do,” she said. “I know there’s a reason people need to be protected. But come on, that Halloween stuff was a joke.”

    She was referring to a widely mocked Maryland effort to get certain sex offenders to post “no candy” signs on their houses, turn off their outside lights and ignore knocks on the door on Oct. 31.

    The signs were provided not only to child sex offenders but to those registered as sexually violent. So Michael Kennedy received a sign, even though the crime for which he was convicted did not involve children, his wife said.

    Elizabeth Bartholomew, who runs Maryland’s Sex Offender Registry, said the effort was merely a “request” on the state’s part, designed to protect the offenders “so the community knows that they’re trying to make sure everyone’s safe.”

    Opposing the registries

    “Safe,” though, was not what Sandy Kennedy felt when a local newspaper published her husband’s name.

    “[O]ur hick town’s little newspaper, decided to use a full page to report every sex offenders name and address,” she wrote on her blog. “I’ve read about the vigilantes who prey on sex offenders. We are small town Delmarva and I could just see some red neck get his buddies loading up in his pick up and start working on the list.”

    Vigilantism is one reason some activists oppose putting offenders’ identifying information, including pictures, on Internet registries.

    Paul Shannon, a founder of Reform Sex Offender Laws, said registries encourage people to target sex offenders, citing the 2006 murder of two Maine offenders by someone who found their names online. (Shannon would like to see public registries abolished; information about truly dangerous criminals should be shared among law enforcement officials, who would decide whether to alert the community.)

    One of the men killed in Maine had served time for having otherwise consensual sex with his girlfriend when he was 19 and she was a few days shy of 16.

    So-called “Romeo and Juliet” offenders shouldn’t be required to register as child sex offenders alongside pedophiles, Shannon said.

    “Virtually all adolescent sexuality is now criminalized,” said Shannon, who said he is not an offender or ex-offender, just a civil liberties advocate. “This is a serious attack on children and their right to grow up.”

    ABC reporter John Stossel did a series earlier this year on offender laws gone overboard; among other people, he featured a man who had, had sex with his girlfriend when he was 19 and she was 15. Twelve years later, they are married with four children, but he must still register as a sex offender.

    Russell P. Butler, executive director of the Maryland Crime Victims’ Resource Center Inc., said cases involving two consenting adolescents are usually dealt with less harshly than other sex cases. Judges often give statutory offenders probation before judgment so they do not have to register, he said.

    Besides which, he said, he is primarily concerned with protecting children who don’t have the capacity to consent to sex, not the older people who have sex with them.

    “If we have to balance the rights of pedophiles versus the rights of children, I’m going to balance those to protect children and not pedophiles,” Butler said.

    Legislators seem to feel the same way, said defense lawyer Bernier, a shareholder at Segal, McCambridge, Singer & Mahoney Ltd.

    “In general, the real problem is, any time someone in the legislature feels they haven’t done enough, they propose a law on sex offenses,” he said.

    He said sex offenders have begun pushing back against the regulations but haven’t gotten much traction.

    “Who wants to be the guy who wants to be known as out in [the] legislature championing sex offenders?” Bernier said.

    ‘Opportunity to know’

    Bartholomew, of the state’s Sex Offender Registry, said critics of sex offender laws actually have much less to complain about in Maryland than they would elsewhere.

    For example, some states prevent offenders from living within a certain distance of schools, daycares or churches, forcing them out of cities, into the country or even onto the streets. Critics say such residency restrictions ultimately do more harm than good by forcing offenders underground.

    In Florida, several sex offenders were famously discovered to be living together in a colony under a bridge because it was the only place where they wouldn’t be living too close to a forbidden landmark.

    Maryland does not have automatic residency restrictions, Bartholomew said. Judges can, however, order individual offenders as a condition of parole or probation not to live within a certain distance of a place.

    For those who doubt the necessity or fairness of registries, U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein points to Richard D. Morris.

    Morris was a baseball coach about to take three of his players on a trip to Florida, according to a press release Rosenstein’s office issued earlier this year. A suspicious grandfather of one of the boys searched the Maryland Sex Offender Registry and found that Morris was a convicted sex offender.

    The trip was halted. The grandson told police Morris had touched him inappropriately in the past, and when police searched Morris’ home computers, they found child pornography.

    “The community ought to have an opportunity to know and therefore be alert to any sex offenders who might present a risk to other people,” Rosenstein said.

    Freedom to fight

    As a convicted rapist and murderer, Michael Kennedy is hardly a sympathetic poster boy for changes to the sex offender monitoring laws.

    Still, his wife tries.

    Sandy Kennedy said she started the blog and the Maryland chapter of Reform Sex Offender Laws so she could find other women who could relate to the experience of living with a convicted sex offender.

    “I can talk to my husband and I do a lot, but I thought it would be nice to talk to other wives or other girlfriends,” Sandy Kennedy said.

    Shannon, the national organization’s founder, said it’s typical for women who are close to sex offenders to advocate on their behalf. The offenders themselves don’t necessarily want to call more attention to themselves, he said.

    “These stories are absolutely heartbreaking,” he said. “The people who are carrying around the pain are mostly the women: the mothers and the wives.”

    Kennedy has her own pain. She said her sister, who didn’t know about Michael’s past, stopped returning her calls after his picture went online.

    Though Kennedy worries about her safety and that of her husband, she said she needs to speak publicly in order to bring change.

    “I figure he’s on the registry; how much more visible can you get?” she said. “I felt that if we didn’t want publicity, that we won’t be able to change the way things are.

    “We were trying to keep a low [profile], not being public,” she said, “until he registered and they kind of gave us the freedom to go on out and make it known, and fight some of the injustices.”
     

    Erase Laws Marking S.O.s For Life
    By Mary Sue Molnar <marysueintx@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 07.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0069]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0069 and be sent to the above email address, as well as to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    NOTE (from Alex Marbury): This excellent article which quotes Mary Sue Molnar of Texas Voices, and is a well reasoned look at the Texas s.o. laws, is being used by extreme fanatics who would undermine the work of RSOL and Texas Voices. We urge EVERYONE to post comments to the story, by going to the URL, reading the story and following the prompt.

    URL: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/Sex_offenders_try_to_erase_laws_marking_them_for_life.html

    SEX OFFENDERS TRYING TO ERASE LAWS THAT MARK THEM FOR LIFE
    by Lisa Sandberg
    San Antonio Express News
    Dec. 7, 2008

    AUSTIN — Martin is tired of the dead-end jobs and unrelenting stigma that comes with being a registered sex offender.

    Although he has a master's degree in liberal arts and wants to be a teacher, employers have been unable to see beyond his presence on the state's sex offender registry, which he is required to be on for the rest of his life.

    It's true that a decade ago, he was convicted of sexually abusing a 16-year-old girl who was half his age. But the registry doesn't divulge that his victim was his girlfriend who now is his common-law wife, with whom he has three children.

    Glancing at his profile, there's little to distinguish him from the repeat pedophiles and violent rapists who are among the 54,000-plus registered sex offenders in the state's database.

    “I just can't equate my offense with the guy who sat next to me in my therapy sessions who raped his 5-year-old stepson,” said Martin, 42. He asked that his last name not be used for this article for fear that his children will be stigmatized.

    The military veteran, who lives with his family in a bedroom community south of Austin, is so mad about his lifetime registration requirement that he's joined forces with hundreds of other sex offenders similarly aggrieved about being on the registry.

    This unlikely political force, which dubs itself Texas Voices, is vowing to fight the state's — and the nation's — sweeping registration laws.

    The group believes community notification laws fail to protect the public because they don't distinguish dangerous predators from otherwise harmless men and women who foolishly had sex with underage lovers, served their sentences and don't need a lifetime of public scrutiny.

    While Texas Voices hasn't yet turned anyone away, the group targets its message at those who committed non-violent offenses that didn't involve young children.

    Selling the concept to the public may be more difficult; Texas law stipulates that minors, defined as anyone younger than 17, can't legally consent to sex with an adult.

    But Texas Voices is finding agreement in unusual places.

    Ray Allen, the former Texas House Corrections chairman who helped shepherd into law many of the past decade's toughest sex registration bills, said he and his colleagues went too far.

    “We cast the net widely to make sure we got all the sex offenders. Now, 15 years on, it turns out that really only a small percentage of people convicted of sex offenses pose a true danger to the public,” he said.

    Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, the powerful Senate Criminal Justice chairman, said: “If we're not careful, we're going to have a sex offender registry that is so large and so encompassing, it's not much good.”

    Texas Voices members know their chances for success hinge on politicians risking their careers on a population with just about zero political clout.

    Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, who has been a driving force behind the community notification laws, isn't ready to assume that risk — or have victims assume it. She insists that if the registry is too large, it's because there are too many people out there committing sex crimes.

    “If one child is saved, then the laws will be worth what we've done,” Shapiro said.

    Fighting back

    Dozens of offenders, along with moms, dads and significant others, show up for the monthly Texas Voices' meetings, sharing stories and plotting strategy.

    Some meet privately with lawmakers. The most committed spend days and nights scrolling through the registry seeking to recruit new members. Nearly 1,000 offenders have been contacted and about 300 have heeded the call to action, organizers say.

    “We're getting letters from ladies in their 20s who say, ‘I was never a victim and I didn't know my offender was on the registry,'” said Mary Sue, the mother of a jailed sex offender who helped establish the organization earlier this year. She asked that her last name not be used for fear it would have negative consequences for her son.

    Martin's common-law wife, Avea, now 27, says she's ready to tell lawmakers that her husband is a decent man whose dream of being a high school teacher is forever dashed because of a decade-old offense that, barring changes in the registry law, will follow him the rest of his life.

    “Even murderers can get out of prison and lead a normal life,” she said.

    And Martin's public profile raises questions about the registry's ability to keep tabs on offenders.

    The registry listed an old Austin address for Martin, despite the fact that Martin registered his new address with police in October, confirmed a police captain in the town where Martin relocated several months ago.

    Officials with the Texas Department of Public Safety, which maintains the sex offender database, said Friday they received the information in late October, but hadn't updated the registry. The site was updated only after the San Antonio Express-News called.

    The registry also gives an inaccurate age for Martin's victim at the time of the offense, listing her as 17, rather than 16.

    At a recent Texas Voices meeting, Richard Calderon tells those gathered that the road to public acceptance is to advocate for victims, not sex offenders.

    “Once elected leaders hear sex offenders, you've lost them,” he said, adding, “Concern about public safety and how we can improve public safety” is much more effective.

    Calderon, 38, is one of the group's founders. He served probation for having sex with a 14-year-old when he was 23 and a student teacher.

    He tells his audience not to expect miracles.

    About the best members should expect in next year's legislative session, Calderon said, is a bill that would distinguish pedophiles and violent offenders from those who had sex with an underage girlfriend or who urinated in public a few times.

    Ashley's law

    Texas' first community notification law was passed in 1995 and named for Ashley Estell, the 7-year-old girl who was snatched from a North Texas playground and murdered by a sex offender parolee.

    The first notices were printed in local newspapers. An online registry followed in 1999. Since then, the number of registered offenders has more than tripled to 54,000, including nearly 7,500 who committed their crimes as juveniles, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. Most offenders now must register for life.

    But not all sex offenders pose the same dangers.

    According to a 2003 U.S. Justice Department study, about 5 percent of sex offenders released from prison were re-arrested for another sex crime within three years, a recidivism rate lower than for many other types of crimes. And 3 percent of all child sex offenders were arrested for another sex crime involving a child within the same time period.

    Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the John Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic, said most studies showed that “as a group, sex offenders show lower recidivism rates than people who commit most other crimes. If you look at almost all the laws out there on the books, they usually have been enacted following a horrible crime, a sexual assault and murder, which represent a tiny fraction of sex offenses.”

    Advocates generally have pushed for the registration laws, believing parents needed to know when a sex offender moved into their neighborhood.

    Annette Burrhus-Clay, executive director of the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, concedes the registry may include people who don't pose a public safety threat.

    However, the bigger problem, she said, is the number of those who aren't on the registry — but should be — because they either weren't caught or they pleaded to a lesser, non-sex-related offense.

    Linda Ingraham, a psychologist in Dallas who has treated sex offenders in her private practice, said most people would be surprised at the number of low-risk misdemeanor offenders. She said she's probably treated 200 people who were forced to register because they were caught several times having consensual sex in a park.

    “It's yucky,” she said, “but as a group, they're not a danger to anyone.”

    Searching for victims

    From her two-story suburban home north of Austin, Jan Fewell, 50, searches for sex abuse victims in order to help their perpetrators.

    “Do you know a man named Stephen Fisher?” she asked into her cell phone. “Do you still keep in touch with him? You do? Was it consensual sex or was it rape?”

    She had just phoned a now 23-year-old mother of two. Combing through court records, Fewell learned the woman, at age 13, had had sex with Fisher, a man five years her senior. Fewell knew the woman had refused to help prosecutors and now, a decade later, Fewell wanted to know if she considered herself a victim, and if not, if she would be willing to help her group.

    The call from a stranger to a sex abuse victim could have easily ended badly, but the woman indeed had remained close to the man who's serving eight years in prison in connection with sexually assaulting her.

    Later, in an interview, the woman explained she regularly visits the man in prison, is raising the two children he fathered with her, and counting the days until his release. Yes, she would be receptive to helping the group.

    As the mother of adult daughters, Fewell is an unlikely advocate for sex offenders. She became involved after one of her daughter's teenage schoolmates was arrested for sexually abusing a younger teen. Now, she works full time recruiting members for the group.

    At one of the group's recent meetings, Jerry Tuckner, who sat beside his mother and his girlfriend's 8-year-old son, talked about how hard it is to get a job.

    Tuckner, 36, was sentenced to probation for having sex with a 15-year-old when he was 23.

    The victim's father, Patrick Peterson, 55, said he was furious when he found out a 23-year-old man was having sex with his teenage daughter. He turned Tuckner in after he refused to stay away from her.

    But Peterson was disturbed to learn that Tuckner remains on the state's sex offender registry. “I felt obligated at the time because (Tuckner) was a bit older,” Peterson said by phone last week. Now he said he'd gladly sign a petition urging leniency for Tuckner.

    Neither landlords nor minimum-wage employers want to deal with sex offenders, Tuckner complained.

    “I've tried everything from fast food to dry cleaners to warehouse work to temp agencies,” he said. “Even the temp agencies won't hire me because they say I'm a liability.”
     

    Murder Because of S.O. Status?
    By Joel Pentlarge <joelpent@comcast.net>
    Posted on 06.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0068]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0068 and be sent both to Joel at the above email, and to alexm60@fastmail.fm, as well as to the journalist who wrote the story (his email is at the bottom of the story).


    ------------------------
    I received a call from RSO who lives in or near Crescent City, California. He was calling because another RSO was murdered a few days ago. He thinks that the victim Terry Maddon may have been murdered because of his status as a RSO. He also thinks that the police may be covering it up, claiming that the murder was motivated by a prior altercation. Below is a news article on the murder and the arrest of a suspect, who allegedly confessed to the murder.



    Man admits to stabbing victim in trailer killing
    Published: November 26, 2008
    By Adam Madison

    Triplicate staff writer
    Crescent City, CA

    The killing of a Crescent City man last week may have been retaliation for an altercation the night before, authorities said Tuesday.

    Mario Contreras Garcia, 21, and Guillermo Montanez, 21, have been charged in connection with the Nov. 19 killing of Terry Eugene Maddon, 39, outside his residence at the Shangri-La Trailer Court, 1130 U.S. Hwy. 101 North.

    Garcia has confessed to stabbing Maddon, according to Del Norte County Superior Court documents.

    The night before the murder, an altercation occurred between the victim and two people the suspects were familiar with, the documents state.

    In the early morning of Nov. 20, hours after the stabbing of Maddon, Garcia was found hiding in the trailer park with "blood stains on his clothing and on his hands," the documents state.

    Sheriff's Detective Ed Fleshman said that Garcia was a Sureño gang member and that an altercation that occurred Nov. 18 was "a contributing element to one of the motive theories we're looking into."

    Fleshman said that a motive has not been determined.

    Garcia was arrested on suspicion of murder, while Montanez was arrested on suspicion of being an accessory to the murder after it occurred.

    According to the court documents, Montanez was found to be in possession of bloody clothing. He had a bruise on his face when authorities arrived at the trailer he resided in with a woman, who said the clothing was waiting to be laundered.

    The documents also state that Garcia claimed he had acted in self-defense.

    Garcia said he had been walking back to the trailer park with the woman and Montanez when they passed Maddon's trailer, the documents said. Garcia told authorities he got into a fight with Maddon. Montanez and the woman gave similar accounts, but neither acknowledged seeing a knife, the documents said.

    Nevertheless, the woman later led authorities to a bloody knife, the documents said.

    According to the document, Garcia stated that he had been struck by Maddon and had been knocked to the ground. Garcia then "blacked out" while on the ground, pulled out his knife and then opened it when he got to his feet. He stated that "he stabbed Maddon, he believes, only once," the documents said.

    District Attorney Mike Riese said Tuesday he is "still awaiting DNA testing" on the knife and clothing.

    Fleshman said the Sheriff's Office is still investigating other suspects.

    Reach Adam Madison at amadison@triplicate.com.

     

    S.O. Laws - More Harm Than Good
    By Chris <rsolnc@gmail.com>
    Posted on 06.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0067]
     
    Comments on this, or for suggestions, contact Chris in NC at the above email, and send a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    ---------------------------------------------------
    MORE HARM THAN GOOD
    by Melissa D. Grady
    North Carolina News and Observer
    Chapel Hill, NC
    Dec. 5, 2008

    This is an excellent article about the unitended consequences of the ´sex offender´ registry and other laws in North Carolina, by a clinical asst. professor at the University of North Carolina School of SOcial Work.

    WE URGE YOU TO READ THIS AND CONTACT HER, thanking her for an important article, and urging her to support national reformsexoffdenderlaws.or, as well as rsolnc (the North Carolina group). Her email is mgrady@email.unc.edu, or write her at U.N.C. School of Social Work, 301 Pittshurst St., CB3551, Chapel Hill, NC 27599.

    The URL is:
    http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/columns/story/1321233.html
     

    22 yr old Gets Hearing: Held as Predator Since 14!
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 03.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0066]
     
    Comments about this news article should refer to News Item 0066, and be sent to me Alex at the above email address.
    ----------------------------------------

    Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

    Appeals court orders hearing in sexual predator case

    By Mike Johnson of the Journal Sentinel
    Nov. 19, 2008

    A Washington County man who was locked up as a teenager in a state
    mental health institution after he was determined to be a sexual
    predator will get his day in court to argue for his release.

    Daniel Arends, 22, filed a petition for discharge in Washington County
    Circuit Court, but a judge last year denied the petition without holding
    an evidentiary hearing.

    Arends appealed, and the state Court of Appeals said Wednesday that the
    judge erred and ordered that a hearing be held.

    The appeals court panel sitting in Waukesha said the state's sexual
    predator law requires a court to hold an evidentiary hearing if such a
    petition alleges facts from which a judge or jury might conclude that
    there has been a change in the person's condition since the initial
    confinement.

    In his petition, Arends contends his behavior has changed and that he is
    "no longer more likely than not to commit a future act of sexual
    violence."

    The state's sexually violent person law allows for the worst sex
    offenders to be held for treatment after prison if it is determined
    during a civil trial that they are more likely to re-offend than not.

    Arends, of West Bend, was adjudicated delinquent in 2000 for sexually
    assaulting an autistic child. His juvenile detention was extended
    several times because he had inappropriate sexual contact with boys.

    When he was 17, in February 2004, the state filed a sexual predator
    petition against him, seeking to block his freedom. He was the first
    juvenile offender in Washington County to face such proceedings.

    After a trial in 2005, a jury determined Arends was a sexually violent
    person.

    In ordering the evidentiary hearing for Arends, the appeals court noted
    that a psychologist who examined Arends stated that he had "no reports
    of inappropriate sexual behavior since October 2003," and that the last
    incident of criminal sexual activity occurred when Arends was 14.



    Find this article at:
    http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/34785569.html
     

    Very Good Documentary-Scum of the Earth
    By Phyllis Redman <phyllis@phyllisredman.com>
    Posted on 02.12.2008
    Link to this news item: [0065]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 0065, and be sent to the film maker at the above email address, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    NOTE: We have not seen this documentary, so we cannot be sure how positive it really is......we need a review!
    One of the filmmakers, Phyllis Redman, has signed the RSOL statement. She has a website, the url is http://www.phyllisredman.com. Check it out!
    Please send comments also to the newspaper, since many online comments thus far have been negative!
    ------------------------
    GREENVILLE ONLINE
    Greenville, N.C.
    Associated Press
    Dec. 1, 2008

    Filmmakers examine marginalized' lives of sex offenders
    The Associated Press • December 1, 2008

    ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The Palace Mobile Home Park has become a sort of modern-day leper colony. Tucked beside a liquor store off Interstate 275, the trailer park is a haven for sex offenders, with about 100 of its residents on the state's registry.


    It is also the subject of a documentary film by a group of Central Florida filmmakers. Titled "Scum of the Earth," the film takes a generally sympathetic approach to its subjects, whose crimes involved children.

    One subject molested his daughter, whom he's now not allowed to contact. Another claims she was sexually abused by family members and years later molested a 3-year-old girl she was baby-sitting.

    The title, meant as irony, sums up society's view of sex offenders. The film explores how the Palace became a sanctuary for these outcasts.

    Clustering of sex offenders is a natural outgrowth of restrictions on where they can live, said Jill Levenson, an assistant professor at Lynn University in Boca Raton who specializes in sex-offender issues. Communities throughout the state have restricted offenders from living too close to schools, day-care centers and bus stops.

    "This public policy of fear and revenge is really making the problem worse," said filmmaker Phyllis Redman, who has a background in social work. "Yet it's continuing to be implemented primarily because of public fear."

    Her husband, Eric Breitenbach, a fellow filmmaker, acknowledges that many people might find the subject matter tough to watch. When he has brought up his latest project in group settings, "you can hear a pin drop in the room ... You can tell people are immediately worried or turned off or apprehensive about watching or even considering watching a film like that."

    Breitenbach and Redman, who live in Deltona, Fla., often focus on those Redman describes as "marginalized." Their critically acclaimed film "When Pigs Fly" chronicled a Flagler County, Fla., woman's battle to save domestic pigs from death. The production team also includes Gary Monroe, a DeLand, Fla., photographer.

    When the group started its most recent project, a mental-health counselor at the Palace encouraged his clients to tell their stories on film. It would be cathartic for them, said therapist Don Sweeney, and educational for those who might choose to watch.

    By opening up on camera, "I wanted people to see that I'm still a human being," said Robert Smith, who spent time in prison on charges of lewd or lascivious battery on a child. Smith said he molested a 10-year-old girl at his son's party. Smith said he doesn't remember the crime because "I got pretty blitzed" beforehand.

    People credit — or blame, depending on their point of view — a woman named Nancy Morais for creating this haven for sex offenders. Morais, whose son is a convicted sex offender, began offering services at the Palace for sex offenders when she was managing the park. The group she founded, called Florida Justice Transitions, has its headquarters there. At the Palace, "I think they feel safe," said Sweeney, who runs group-therapy sessions there. "They don't have to worry about vigilantism, people hating them, putting them down."

    Redman said their subjects suffer with shame, guilt and remorse. In the course of filming, one went back to jail for missing by one day a deadline to register as a sex offender. One attempted suicide. Another faces eviction from the park.

    "All of these guys are really hanging in the balance," Redman said. "The tougher society makes it on them, the more likely they will not be successful, whatever that means: re-offend, return to addictions or commit suicide or become homeless."

    The Palace has its share of problems, although law enforcement officials say it's rare for park residents to get rearrested for sex crimes. Sweeney said drugs and prostitutes are prevalent. Earlier this year, a transient visiting friends at the park murdered a pregnant woman whose fiance lived there, according to news reports. And there is occasionally tension between the sex-offender residents and their neighbors.

    "It's hell here," said one woman who had complained to management that an offender in the park had harassed her.

    Residents pay several hundred dollars a month to live — often with roommates — in tiny mobile homes packed tightly along narrow streets. Many of them are well-kept, landscaped and decorated with items such as pink flamingos. An American flag hangs in front of one home.

    Harold Cooney's home has a ramp for his wife's electric scooter. The living room is decorated with angel figurines and filled with wooden and glass furniture that seems out of place in its cramped surroundings. A small sign over the door reminds him not to forget to wear his electronic monitoring device when he leaves the house.

    Now 76 and battling leukemia, he served prison time in 2006 after police caught him masturbating on a Web camera, thinking a 14-year-old girl was watching him on the Internet. It was actually a law enforcement officer.

    Cooney and his wife, Ruth, consider themselves parental figures to many of the men. She said her husband's arrest turned out to be a blessing in disguise because they have been able to help so many men at the park.

    "If it wasn't for this place," she said, "I don't know where these people would go."
     

    Ä New Sexual Agenda (?)
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 30.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0064]
     
    IMPORTANT NOTE: This article goes into areas that we at RSOL do NOT endorse - abortion rights, etc. And, in our opinion, it gives too little emphasis to ¨sex offender¨ issues, and does not go far enough in it´s agenda on this topic. With that in mind, we urge you to contact the author (see email address at the end of the article) and give him your feedback!
    Refer in your comments to ME, also, to News Item 0064 - and send to me, and also to David Rosen, the author.
    ----------------------

    COUNTERPUNCH
    Online ¨Progressive¨ Political Newsletter
    Nov. 28-29, 2008


    Nine Proposals for an End to the Culture Wars
    A New Sexual Agenda
    By DAVID ROSEN

    The recent electoral victory of Barack Obama and the Democratic party presents a unique opportunity to overturn the most perverse policy of the Bush administration and the religious right, the conservative repressive sexual agenda. The following nine proposals can help frame a new sexual agenda to be introduced in the first 100 days.

    For the last three decades the religious right fought a take-no-prisoners war over popular morality. Taking power with Bush’s victory in 2000, Christian conservatives were finally in the position to impose their beliefs as public policy. And they did so with a vengeance. At the local, state and federal levels, religious zealots, working through the Republican party, took control of the apparatus of the State and aggressively implemented a diverse set of programs to further their goal of creating a morally upstanding, Christian society. Family life, sexual relations, education, scientific knowledge and popular entertainment became battlegrounds of
    the culture wars.

    The culture wars played a decisive role in the 2000 and 2004 elections, but were eclipsed in the 2006 Congressional elections, the religious right’s moral fervor spent. While sex issues were all but absent from the 2008 national presidential campaign, they did help rally the conservative faithful at the state level. Efforts to outlaw gay marriage were successful in Arizona (Proposition 102), California (Proposition 8)and Florida (Marriage Protection Amendment) as was Arkansas’ Proposed Initiative Act No. 1 that prohibits co-habiting couples of the same sex, whether gay or straight, from either adopting a child or serving as foster parents.

    Nevertheless, efforts in Colorado (Amendment 45) and South Dakota (Initiated Measure 11) to, respectively, establish “fetal personhood” and ban abortion failed. And in Washington, voters approved a proposition permitting physician-assisted suicide similar to one already in force in Oregon. In 2008, it was the collapsing economy, failed Bush policies and culture-war fatigue as well as Obama’s broad popular appeal that turned the tide for the Democrats.

    The Democratic landslide provides a unique opportunity for Congress and the President-elect to quickly address at least one of the many profound failings of the Bush administration, its repressive sex policies. The following proposals can help frame the upcoming battle for political reform and, hopefully, finally put an end to the religious right’s culture wars.

    * * *

    Proposal #1: Safeguard Roe v Wade

    President-elect Obama was a co-sponsor of the 2007 Senate version of the Freedom of Choice Act (S. 1173) that would reaffirm Roe as a fundamental right. As he stated: “Throughout my career, I've been a consistent and strong supporter of reproductive justice, and have consistently had a 100% pro-choice rating with Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America.” Congress should pass and Obama should sign the Freedom on Choice Act.

    If enacted, the law would effectively overturn many state and federal restrictions imposed over the last eight years on a woman’s ability to choose an abortion. In particular, the Act would lift requirements on health-care providers to provide questionable medical “information” about the risks of having an abortion; lift restrictions limiting abortion providers to only licensed physicians; lift parental-notification and approval requirements for minors seeking an abortion; and overturn the dubiously-named “partial-birth abortions” laws.

    One of the critical features of the Roe decision was establishing personhood at the moment of birth. As evident in Colorado voters’ rejection of the “fetal personhood” proposition, the notion of personhood at the moment of conception is a veiled attempt to undercut Roe. Medico-scientific advances are pushing the moment of birth earlier and earlier before full-term is reached, with an increasing number of ever-smaller preemies living healthy lives. This is a remarkable accomplishment and should only strengthen the need to ensure that personhood remains at birth.

    Proposal #2: End Abstinence Policies

    The Bush administration’s abstinence-only crusade is a failure. Mounting research data indicates an upswing in pregnancy among teen girls, including Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol, and that the abstinence-only policy must be replaced. Abstinence-only education contributes to unwanted pregnancies, oftentimes leading to unwanted abortions. According to the ACLU, the federal government has spent more than $700 million since 1997 on abstinence-only programs and, last year, allocated approximately $170 million to such programs.

    Obama once insisted: “As President, I will improve access to affordable health care and work to ensure that our teens are getting the information and services they need to stay safe and healthy.” Democrats need to take Obama at his word and quickly move to end funding for existing abstinence-only programs and implement a more humane, sex-positive and age- appropriate educational programs.

    In addition, humane sex education is only half the challenge in addressing the needs of teens and young people regarding their sexual health. The monies that have been wasted on abstinence-only programs should be more wisely spent on providing health care screenings and, where appropriate, birth control materials. A young person needs to be supported in terms of both her/his mind and body for an effective sex education program to work.

    Proposal #3: Remove Religion from the Classroom

    U.S. District Judge John Jones ruled in December 2005 that the board of Dover, PA, school district had violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by requiring biology teachers to include “intelligent design” in their curriculum. In a trial recalling the legendary 1925 Scopes monkey trial, the judge found that such intellectual hokum was nothing more than a disguised form of creationism smuggled into the classroom under a different name.

    For the last half-century, Americans have attempted to restricted religious practice in public life, especially prayer in school. In 1962, Engel v. Vitale ended state-mandated, teacher-led prayer; the follow years, Abington Township v. Schemmp extended Engel. The 1971 Lemon v. Kurtzman called for the strick separation of church and state. And the 1985 Wallace v. Jaffree decision ended the moment of prayer in the classroom. While believes of all strips need to have their First Amedment rights protected, even in voluntary group meeting in schools, relgion needs to removed from the classroom.

    The tyranny of religion is the ignorance it fosters. As evident in the Dover decision and other battles over evolution, this ignornace has found expression and public-policy legitimacy in the many false Bush-administration claims like those that linked abortion to breast cancer and advised that condoms to not prevent conception or transmission of sexual diseases. The administration of lies must be thoroughly repudiated and replaced.

    Proposal #4: Accept Civil Unions & Marriage among Same-Sex Couples

    President-elect Obama has come out in favor of civil unions and in opposition to marriage among same-sex couples. The recent electoral decisions banning gay marriage in Arizona, California and Florida reflect a deep fear among many Americas about the meaning of marriage, personal intimacy, in a rapidly changing world.

    According to the Human Rights Campaign, twenty-six additional states that have constitutionally restricted marriage to one man and one woman. These states are: Alabama (2006), Alaska (1998), Arkansas (2004), Colorado, Georgia (2004), Kansas (2005), Idaho (2006), Kentucky (2004), Louisiana (2004), Michigan (2004), Mississippi (2004), Missouri (2004), Montana (2004), Nebraska (2000), Nevada (2002), North Dakota (2004), Ohio 2004), Oklahoma (2004), Oregon (2004), South Carolina (2006), South Dakota (2006), Tennessee (2006), Texas (2005), Utah (2004), Virginia (2006) and Wisconsin (2006).

    In addition, fifteen states have passed laws, but not constitutional amendments, restricting marriage to one man and one woman. These include Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia and Wyoming.

    However, the question that haunts these popular initiatives is simple: Are they Constitutional? Since America was first settled by English colonists nearly four centuries ago, there has been a persistent battle between civil and religious authorities over who had the power to legitimized a marriage agreement. Is marriage a legal contract between consenting adults involving property relations or a sacred relation involving a holy union mediated by god? In practice, civil society has won the battle and determines formal marital agreements. However, religious organizations persist in laying claim to a role in sanctifying these relations. This confusion must finally be put to rest.

    Gay marriage is legal in two states, Connecticut and Massachusetts. A peculiarly historic irony informs the gay-marriage issue as Obama assumes the presidency. When Obama’s parents married in 1960, twenty-two states had laws prohibiting interracial marriage. These states ranged from traditional hard-core racist strongholds like Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana to otherwise moderate Delaware and Maryland. The Supreme Court’s now-celebrated Loving decision of 1967 voided "racial hygiene" laws, finding that state “anti-miscegenation” law violated the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. A similar Court decision could well apply to marriage among gay men and women and, thus, finally bring full bourgeois rights to a discriminated minority.

    Proposal #5: End “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell”

    President-elect Obama earlier this year announced his intention to end the "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" [DADT] policy banning gay people from military service. "There's increasing recognition within the armed forces that this is a counterproductive strategy,” he said, “ya know, we're spending large sums of money to kick highly qualified gays or lesbians out of our military, some of whom possess specialties like Arab-language capabilities that we desperately need. That doesn't make us more safe". [NY Daily News, April 11, 2008]

    Congress should pass and the new president should sign the Military Readiness Enhancement Act [MREA]. MREA ends the discriminatory and unworkable policies inherent to DADT. It was introduced in the 109th Congress by Rep. Martin Meehan (D-MA) and has 122 bipartisan co-sponsors.

    In a 2006 report, the Boston Globe found that since 1994 a total of 9,682 soldiers have been discharged on sexual ground. It reports that “the number of soldiers facing discharge under the [DADT] policy has dropped steadily --- from 1,273 in 2001 to 906 in 2002 and 787 in 2003 … .” Time magazine argues that “because the military is fighting two wars, commanders discharge only about 600 bisexuals, gays and lesbians each year, down from about 1,200 a year in the late '90s.” [Boston Globe, March 19, 2006; Time, July 23, 2008]

    The new president and Congress could join an increasing number of former military leaders calling for DADT’s repeal. General John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former supporter of DADT, is one of its fiercest critics, arguing that it is simply an unworkable policy. "When that day [of ending DADT] comes, gay men and lesbians will no longer have to conceal who they are, and the military will no longer need to sacrifice those whose service it cannot afford to lose."

    His assessment is shared by former defense secretary William Cohen. He argues that "we’re hearing from within the military what we’re hearing from within society,that we’re becoming a much more open, tolerant society for diverse opinions and orientation." It’s time to deposit DADT in the dustbin of history.

    Proposal #6: Adopt Enlightened Obscenity Standards

    The ’08 presidential campaign was remarkable for the absence of any discussion by the two leading candidates of obscenity or pornography, decency. Bob Peters, president of the conservative advocacy group, Morality in Media, solicited replies from both candidates as to their respective positions on enforcing pornography laws. He reports that neither candidate replied to his inquiry. The candidates’ shared silence on the issue of media pornography speaks volumes as to the relative acceptance of “indecent” materials among consenting adult Americans. [OneNewsNow, August 15,2008]

    Federal obscenity policies are framed by an effort to protect the “public” for what is broadly considered pornographic or “indecent” materials. These efforts focus on two principal areas: (i) indecent expressions offered over broadcast media like television and radio that might offend a viewer/listener and (ii) the display of sexually explicit images of children on the Internet.

    In the wake of Janet Jackson now infamous “accidental” display of her breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show and incidents involving Cher and Nicole Richie during live award shows in 2002 and 2003, the issue of "fleeting" expletives is now under consideration by the Supreme Court. This decision could be as significant as the 1978 FCC vs. Pacifica ruling against the broadcast (i.e., the censorship) of George Carlin's "seven dirty words". Times change, one can only wonder if justice does as well?

    The Court recently upheld, in a 7-to-2 ruling, the 2003 “Protect Act” (an acronym for Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today) that seeks to curb sexually explicit images of children on the Internet. The law applies to "any person who knowingly advertises, promotes, presents, distributes, or solicits" child pornography. Some civil libertarians wonder whether movies or innocent photographs of babies in the bath might be covered by the law. The two dissenting justices were David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

    As a Constitutional lawyer, President-elect Obama will likely give special consideration to his appointments to the FCC and, in time, the federal courts. One can only hope these appointments will encourage personal freedoms and enhance individual choice while preserving and protecting the privacy of those most vulnerable to violation and without genuine consent. Justices like Souter and Ginsburg.

    Proposal #7: Decriminalize & Regulate Commercial Sex

    President-elect Obama must have met one or more commercial sex workers during his days organizing on the streets of Chicago’s South Side. Our next president knows something about American urban life. He must know, like most Americans, that, like the “war on drugs”, every attempt to halt this illegal activity has failed.

    The FBI reports that in 2005, 85,000 arrests were made for prostitution or commercial vice; such arrests declined by 13 percent (from 98,000) over the preceding decade. Law enforcement anti-prostitution efforts are focused on public nuisance offenses. Thus, they tend to target streetwalkers, massage-parlor workers (often non-documented migrants) and strippers or pole-dancers in would-be gentlemen’s clubs. The secret sex trade, accessed through escort services, craigslist and news weeklies, flourishes.

    Two states have decriminalized and regulated commercial sex. In Nevada, brothel prostitution is regulated in rural counties. In Rhode Island, private consensual commercial adult sex has been decriminalized, although the state still enforces laws against streetwalkers and brothel prostitutes. In years to come, we are likely to see further decriminalization efforts in other states and localities.

    The Democrats and the next president can make a big dent in the “war on drugs” and commercial vice by decriminalizing and regulating both enterprises. In addition, they should support the adoption of national “Safe Harbor Laws” that protect young people (to 18 years of age) from criminal prosecution if arrested for prostitution and that provide the needed social and medical services for their rehabilitation.

    Proposal #8: Develop Better Diagnostic, Treatment & Incarceration Methods for Sex Offenders

    The President-elect and the Congress have a unique opportunity to address one of America’s oldest and thorniest questions: How to deal with sex offenders. They have been part of the social landscape since the nation’s earliest colonization and persist as social deviants, increasingly identified as criminals. As presented on shows like NBC’s “Dateline” series, “To Catch a Predator”, their apparent omni-presence fosters a state of constant fear and trepidation among the American.

    In response to vocal public outrage over the apparent ubiqutous presence of offenders “free” in their community, state goverments are pushing far-reaching civil confinement law. With its passage earlier this year, New York joined nineteen other states that permit the continued imprisonment of sex offenders after they have completed their sentence. Civil confinement permits the state to transform a criminal sentence with a specified duration into an indeterminate life sentence.

    The President-elect and the Congress should initiate a two-front educational campaign that addresses the issue of sexual offenders. The first front would be directed to the general public and help deal with the widespread fear about the actual treat represented by sex offenders. It can also inform participants about the realities of childhood sexuality. Thus, it can dispel many popular myths, like sex crime is on the increase. It can help the public recognize sexual abuse and assess the experiences of both the victim and perpetrator of such behavior. Equally important, such a campaign would include a “professional” component made up of thoughtful representatives from appropriate federal agencies, law enforcement groups, criminology, public interest and legal organizations, psychology and other fields that addresses the issues of sex offenders.

    The output from such a “blue ribbon” committee could lead to legislative, law-enforcement and clinical recommendations that could help America finally address the problem of sex offenders. It would be an invaluable contribution by the Obama administration and a progressive Congress.

    Proposal #9: Reform, Extend & Strengthen PEPFAR

    President-elect Obama should move quickly to adopt Congress’ revision of the Bush administration’s PEPFAR programs (for President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). Bush first promulgated it in his 2003 State of the Union address, declaring: "I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean." And it did.

    PEPFAR, the centerpiece effort for U.S. “soft” foreign diplomacy, suffers the same failures as other Bush-administration programs that deal with cultural values, including abortion and teen sex education. It is intended to improve the care, treatment and prevention of those suffering from HIV/AIDS in developing countries. While limitedly successful, for anything is better then nothing, it could never achieve its true potential because of its ideological blinders. Put simply, its prevention efforts are inhibited by its restrictions on condom.

    Earlier this year Congressed passed legislation reauthorizing PEPFAR (HR-5501). It allocate $50 billion for PEPFAR over the next five years, rejected White House efforts to hold funding to $30 billion. It also removed a requirement that at least one-third of HIV prevention funds went to abstinence-until-marriage programs. It signals a new PEPFAR.

    The new 111th Congress should quickly pass this reauthorization legislation and the new president should sigh it. It will signal not only a change in foreign health-care policy and “soft” diplomacy, but perhaps a change in overall international relations as well. Of course, the great-unanswered questions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan,Iraq and Palestine-Israel remain to be addressed.

    David Rosen is the author of the forthcoming, "America's Grand Sex Scandals: From Pochontas to George W. Bush" (Key, 2009), and can be reached at drosen@ix.netcom.com.

     

    Ga. S.C. Strikes Down Life Sentence for Failure to Register
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 30.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0063]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 0063 and be sent to the above email address.
    ---------------------------
    Atlanta Journal-Constitution

    November 25, 2008
    Court strikes down life sentence for sex offender.
    Prison term imposed after he failed for second time to register as sex offender.
    By BILL RANKIN

    The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

    Tuesday, November 25, 2008

    The Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down another provision of
    the state’s tough sex-offender law, calling mandatory life sentences
    for offenders who fail to register a second time “grossly disproportionate” punishment.

    In a 6-1 decision, written by Justice Robert Benham, the court said the life sentence imposed upon 26-year-old Cedric Bradshaw of Statesboro violates the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment.

    “We conclude the imposition of a sentence of life imprisonment is so
    harsh in comparison to the crime for which it was imposed that it is
    unconstitutional,” Benham wrote.

    Georgia’s sex-offender law has been under legal attack on a number of
    fronts. It requires offenders to register their addresses within 72
    hours after release and makes it a crime for them to live within 1,000 feet of places children congregate.

    On Tuesday, the court ordered Bradshaw, who tried repeatedly to find a place to live without breaking the law, to be re-sentenced. His lawyer, circuit public defender Robert Persse, applauded the ruling.
    “The state’s penalty provision was excessive and clearly
    disproportionate to the offense in question,” he said.

    Bradshaw, who has a prior conviction of enticing a child for indecent
    purposes, pleaded guilty in 2001 to statutory rape for having sex with a 15-year-old girl. He received five years in prison.

    After his release, Bradshaw registered as a sex offender but gave an
    invalid address — his first failure-to-register offense. He spent six
    months in jail.

    After getting out, Bradshaw registered as required and moved in with
    his sister. But he was forced to leave because her home was within 1,000 feet of a children’s recreation center. He properly registered again and moved in with his aunt. But he had to move once more because she lived near a church.

    Bradshaw then registered a family friend’s trailer but gave an
    incorrect address and never moved in. Last December, he was convicted of the second offense and sentenced to life.

    In his ruling, Benham noted that someone convicted of voluntary
    manslaughter or aggravated assault with the intent to murder, rob or
    rape can receive a sentence as lenient as one year.

    Benham also compared Georgia’s mandatory life term with punishment
    called for in 23 other states. Of the others, three states call for a maximum punishment of 2 years; 12 call for sentences of up to 5 years; six provide maximum terms of 10 years; two allow up to 20 years; and New Hampshire calls for a minimum 7-year sentence, Benham wrote.

    “Georgia’s mandatory punishment of life imprisonment is the clear
    outlier, providing the harshest penalty and providing no sentencing
    discretion,” Benham wrote. “This gross disparity between Georgia’s
    sentencing scheme and those of the other states reinforces the
    inference that [Bradshaw’s] crime and sentence are grossly disproportionate.”

    Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, in a concurring opinion, said life
    sentences “should be reserved for society’s most serious criminal
    offenders … Bradshaw’s failure to register as a sex offender, when
    his underlying crime only landed him in jail for five years, is not the kind of crime a civilized society ought to require him to pay for with his life.”

    Justice George Carley issued the lone dissent, calling the decision a
    “monumental abuse of this court’s authority to determine the
    constitutionality of legislation.” The Legislature’s amendment in
    2006 calling for the mandatory life term “constitutes the clearest and most objective evidence of how society views a punishment,” he wrote.

    The ruling is the latest setback for the sex-offender law. A year ago, the court ruled in favor of a Clayton County homeowner, saying it would be an “illegal taking” if he were forced to abandon his
    home after a day care center was built nearby. The ruling prompted the Legislature to amend the law.

    Two months ago, the court struck down as vague another provision,
    saying it gave no clear direction to offenders who are homeless and cannot register a route or street address.

    Still pending is a federal lawsuit attacking the law’s provisions
    that make it a crime for sex offenders to live or work within 1,000 feet of places children congregate. On Monday, a judge allowed the lead plaintiff, Wendy Whitaker, to remain in her home outside of Augusta while her lawsuit makes its way through court.

    Find this article at:
    http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2008/11/25/georgia_sex_offender.html
     

    ACLU NEVADA BLOCKS RETROACTIVE SO LAWS
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 26.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0062]
     
    Refer in comments about this News release to News Item No. 0062, and send to the above email address.
    -------
    PRESS RELEASE
    ACLU of NV Wins Permanent Injunction Against Retroactive Enforcement of New Sex Offender Laws
    Submitted by Phil Hooper on Wed, 09/10/2008 - 22:26.

    On September 10, 2008, the ACLU of Nevada won a permanent injunction against the retroactive enforcement of A.B. 579 and S.B. 471, Nevada's new sex offender laws. Judge Mahan held that the retroactive application of the laws violated the U.S. Constitution, including the Due Process and Ex Post Facto clauses, making clear that the Constitution applies to all.

    The new laws, contained in SB471 and AB579, would have drastically changed how Nevada deals with sex offenders. Regardless of whether their crimes even involved children, sex offenders who committed even misdemeanors with any sexual element since July 1, 1956 would have fallen within the purview of registration and some notification provisions. For example, someone caught masturbating in their truck in 1956 could suddenly be classified as a dangerous sex offender subject to registration and notification. One of the ACLU's clients, a grandfather and solid member of his community, was about to be treated like a dangerous pedophile for committing statutory rape at age 17 back in 1960.

    Many, many such rehabilitated, low risk offenders whom the state of Nevada has already determined to be unlikely to re-offend would have retroactively become Tier 3 – "high risk" – offenders based solely on the crime committed. Those offenders would also have been subject to widespread community notification, which in turn would have meant that they and their families faced social ostracism, losing their jobs, and even possible vigilante violence. Further, Parole and Probation was also imposing severe movement and residency restrictions retroactively on some offenders, which meant some people would have had to move and sell their homes.

    The ACLU does not in any way oppose tough sex offender laws. In fact, by drawing attention away from offenders who are a known high risk – some of whom would have been reclassified as low risk offenders – SB471 and AB579's changes would have jeopardized public safety. In addition, by retroactively imposing terms on offenders who were known to be low risk and giving people no means to challenge the laws even if they were misapplied, the laws would have violated numerous constitutional provisions. Further, the laws are so confusing that the Attorney General's office itself has repeatedly changed its position on the laws. Nobody seemed to understand what they mean and how they were supposed to be applied.

    This case was not about "the rights of sex offenders," but instead about the limits on the power of government to impose sweeping retroactive punishment. The ACLU was very concerned that if the Nevada legislature were allowed to impose laws retroactively in this context, it would pass other laws that take effect retroactively and violate the Constitution.

     

    CA Court Against Residency Restrictions
    By Margie <snapper1964@hotmail.com>
    Posted on 21.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0061]
     
    Refer in comments to News Item No. 0061 and send to Margie at the above email address - also send comments to the writer, see end of the article, and send a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    ------------------------
    SEX OFFENDER LAW UNFAIRLY RESTRICTIVE
    by Bob Egelko
    San Francisco Chronicle
    Nov. 21, 2008

    SANTA ANA -- A voter-approved law prohibiting sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or a park amounts to additional punishment for the offenders' original crimes, a state appeals court has ruled in a case that could affect thousands of parolees.

    The ruling Wednesday by the Fourth District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana was the first by a California court to find that the residency restrictions in Proposition 83, a November 2006 initiative, are not just public safety measures but also would punish ex-offenders by forcing them out of their homes.

    Prop. 83, called Jessica's Law by its sponsors, imposes "traditional banishment under another name," the court said.

    The ruling leaves the law in effect but could limit its application. The U.S. Constitution forbids laws that retroactively impose criminal penalties or increase punishment for past offenses.

    A lawyer for four men who are challenging Prop. 83 before the state Supreme Court said Thursday that the ruling should prevent the state from imposing the residency restrictions on parolees who committed sex crimes before the ballot measure passed.

    The attorney, Ernest Galvan, said the state now is applying the 2,000-foot buffer zone requirement to any former sex offender who has been paroled since Prop. 83 passed, even if the parolee committed a sex crime many years earlier and was serving a sentence for an unrelated crime. He said at least 2,000 parolees fall into that category, and the number is growing by hundreds each month.

    "You can't criminalize conduct after it's already happened, can't increase the punishment, because everyone's entitled to notice of what's criminal now," Galvan said.

    Lisa Page, spokeswoman for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said the administration is reviewing the ruling. "The governor strongly supports Jessica's Law and keeping families and children safe," she said.

    Prop. 83, approved by 70 percent of the voters, increased sentences for various sex crimes and also barred all registered sex offenders - whose crimes range from forcible rape to indecent exposure - from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park where children regularly gather.

    State law previously prohibited only convicted child molesters from living within a quarter-mile of a school. Prop. 83 makes most densely populated areas of California off limits to paroled sex criminals, including nearly all of San Francisco.

    The state initially sought to apply the residency restrictions to all 90,000 registered sex offenders in California, but federal judges ruled that it did not cover anyone paroled before Prop. 83 passed.

    In the case pending before the state Supreme Court, the four parolees say the residency restrictions are an unconstitutional retroactive punishment and an unreasonable parole condition. They say the limits should be applied only to those who committed crimes against children.

    In Wednesday's ruling, the appeals court overturned the residency restrictions on an Anaheim man, Steven Lloyd Mosley, who was convicted in 2007 of assaulting a 12-year-old girl four years earlier but acquitted of committing a lewd act. The trial judge nevertheless concluded that Mosley had committed a sex crime, ordered him to register with police as a sex offender and barred him from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park.

    In a 3-0 ruling, the court said the judge's order would have been valid if the Prop. 83 requirements were simply nonpunitive measures to protect the public. But because they have an "overwhelmingly punitive effect," the court said, they can be imposed only after a jury trial and conviction for a sex crime. That also means the restrictions can't be applied retroactively.

    The law forces many parolees to leave their homes and leaves them under "constant threat of ouster" from their new residences if a new school or park opens nearby, said Justice Raymond Ikola.


    E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.

     

    S.O.s get Different Life Sentence
    By renate <gvr123@aol.com>
    Posted on 20.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0060]
     
    BELOW is a very strong and sympathetic account of a typical problem for ¨sex offenders¨ in America today. Before you read it, read here the intelligent letter sent by Renate, the RSOL Illinois contact person. We are doing our job - and the media is beginning to do theirs! Refer comments to news item 0060 and send to Renate at the above email, with a copy to me, and also to the journalist at the Post Dispatch.
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    Letter from Renate, RSOL Illinois Contact, to Sylvester Brown, St.Louis Post Dispatch
    Thank you for writing this story about Patrick Clark in the newspaper. Most papers would not even care to touch this unpopular subject. If you realy want to find some sad storys, go to reformsexoffenderlaws.org. There you will find out what the law has done to many none violent offenders who should not even be on "the list" and also not to forget their families and the children themselves,
    thanks renate

    ------------------------------------------------------------
    Sex offenders get a different kind of life sentence

    Sylvester Brown Jr.
    More columns
    Sylvester's BiographyBy Sylvester Brown Jr.
    ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
    11/20/2008

    What do you do when a sobbing man calls and tells you his life is cracking like a fractured goblet, that he's "at the end of his rope"?

    Probably nothing, if that man is a convicted child molester.

    Twelve years ago, Patrick Clark, 43, pleaded "no contest" in Florida to a "lewd and lascivious act" with a girl under 16. Clark says he was innocent then and is no sex offender today.

    If I had a nickel for every time an ex-con professed innocence … Clark didn't gain my sympathy. His fiancée, Linda, a mother with a teenage daughter, however, did.
    "I trust Patrick 100 percent, and my daughter loves him," Linda told me. "He can't clear his name. He can't get a job, and he can't live with me because the state doesn't allow sex offenders to be in the home with minors. I just hate to see a good man go down like this."

    After Patrick was charged in Florida, he called his father, John Clark of Eureka. His father talked to a Florida attorney who felt the charges of inappropriate touching were suspect. However, the lawyer feared Patrick might face jail time if the case went to trial.

    The lawyer, John Clark said, convinced him that Patrick would most likely receive probation and a "suspended imposition of sentence," which means, with no repeat incidents, the conviction would be publicly erased.

    Patrick said he followed his father and lawyer's advice and pleaded "no contest." He received two years' probation and a "suspended imposition of sentence." It was the safest way to settle the matter and move on, he said.

    Patrick was wrong.

    In the mid-1990s, Florida and other states, including Missouri, implemented Sex Offender Registration laws. All 50 states have registration and tracking systems that require convicted sex offenders to register. Florida adopted a retroactive amendment requiring that anyone who had been "convicted, pled guilty" or, like Patrick, pleaded "no contest" to a sexual offense after Oct. 1993 had to register. Missouri requires anyone who registered in another state to register here as well. Failing to do so amounts to a felony. Sex offenders are on the lists for a lifetime.

    Patrick's father, John Clark, 82, has regrets.

    "If I believed for a second that Patrick had relations with that girl, I would have been with the prosecutors, nailing his (expletive) to a wall," he said. "If this law had been in force at the time, I would have told Patrick, 'the heck with it, we're going to trial.' "

    Patrick never registered in Florida but his name was added to the sex offender list after his sentence was suspended. That listing Patrick says, cost him his job at Disney World in 1999.

    Patrick returned to Missouri in 2000. He's been working odd jobs — window washing, home repair and carpentry work — but hasn't found anything steady.

    In 2003, Patrick was involved in a car accident in Des Peres. A year later, his father received a letter from state officials demanding that his son register as a sex offender. Patrick called his lawyer in Florida, who told him Missouri had no jurisdiction on a case disposed of in another state.

    The attorney was wrong, according to Eric Selig, an attorney with Rosenblum, Schwartz, Rogers & Glass in Clayton: "If another state required that you register, Missouri requires that you register," he said.

    Patrick turned to Selig's firm hoping it could help him avoid registering as a sex offender.

    "I served my two years, this case was supposed to go bye-bye. This is not what I agreed to."

    Tony Rothert, legal director with the regional ACLU office, empathizes with those in Patrick's position. Revisions to sex offender statutes have raised serious "constitutional issues," he said. The ACLU is arguing several sex-offender cases before the courts. If the accused plead "no contest," they may wind up on a list forever. Rothert maintains that expanded restrictions force more people into trials. Selig also worries about victims reliving horrific crimes during trials and judges with no power to settle cases they feel pose no danger to children.

    "We want the law to be meaningful. We don't want so many restrictions that people who deserve the chance, can't make a living, feed their families or rejoin society," Rothert said.

    Selig worked out a deal with registry officials in St. Louis County. If Patrick posted bond and registered, there would be no fines or charges against him.

    Patrick declined the offer, Selig said. His client told him indefinite placement on a sex offender list is "absolutely unacceptable."

    Even if he feels it's an injustice, if Patrick wants to avoid jail, he must register, Selig said, adding: "The law is the law, in Missouri."

    The crack in the goblet had spread a little deeper when I spoke with Patrick on Wednesday. With a shaking voice, he spoke of attorneys who have abandoned him, police who want to lock him up and losing Linda, the woman he described as "the only bright spot" in his life.

    What can be done for a man at the end of his rope?

    Very little, it seems, if that man was ever considered a child molester.


     

    Atlanta Constitution - A 2nd Good Editorial
    By Margie <snapper1964@hotmail.com>
    Posted on 20.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0059]
     
    NOTE - The Atlanta Journal Constitution is a bell weather newspaper for the U.S. South - it led the way in changes on race, war and other issues. This is a 2nd editorial in a month urging reform of Georgia´s sex offender laws. The reforms suggested don´t go far enough, but they are a start. WE URGE WRITERS TO CONTACT THE EDITOR AND PRESS FOR FURTHER REFORM - see the email at the bottom of the article. Also, comments to us should refer to news item 0059 - the earlier AJC editorial was 0040. Send comments to Margie at the above address as well as to me, alex, at alexm60@fastmail.fm
    -----------------
    OUR EDITORIAL BOARD’S OPINION: Real offender in this sex case is Georgia law
    By Maureen Downey

    The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

    Thursday, November 20, 2008

    In its relentless efforts to expel Wendy Whitaker from her Columbia County home, the state of Georgia has crossed the line from protector to persecutor of its citizens. The state isn’t inciting torch-wielding mobs to chase Whitaker from her home 20 miles west of Augusta. But it is using a gaggle of state attorneys and a politically driven, poorly written sex offender law to wreck her life.

    Twelve years ago, Whitaker engaged in oral sex with a classmate in her sophomore class on high school property. She had just turned 17; the boy was three weeks shy of 16. After they were caught, Whitaker pleaded guilty to sodomy, never realizing that the admission to a single act of adolescent stupidity would cast a shadow on her life that she could never escape. Whitaker is now doomed to be on Georgia’s sex offender registry for the rest of her life. She can’t live near schools, churches, swimming pools, school bus stops, day care centers, parks, rec centers or skating rinks, or work near schools, churches or day care centers.

    Whitaker poses no danger to the children of Georgia; she’s a happily married 29-year-old, trying to get on with her life and live in the home that she and her husband bought a few years ago. Yet, the state has spent thousands of taxpayer dollars to force Whitaker from her house.

    In 2006, after politicians discovered that there was political mileage in talking tough on sex crimes, Georgia passed one of the most draconian laws in the country on where offenders could live or work. Born out of political expedience rather than careful research, the law failed to differentiate offenders based on the nature or severity of the crimes, placing Whitaker and others like her in the same category as truly dangerous people such as rapists and child molesters. The law imposed the same wholesale residency and work limits on all offenders, including Whitaker. A sheriff’s deputy told Whitaker in July that she had to move within 72 hours because her house was within 1,000 feet of a day care center. She didn’t want to give up her home and sought help in federal court.

    On Nov. 13, U.S. District Court Judge Clarence Cooper declined to intervene on Whitaker’s behalf. The judge accepted the state’s contention that finding a new place to live represented an “inconvenience” for Whitaker rather than a banishment from her home county.

    Describing what is happening to Whitaker as an “inconvenience” is a grave understatement. After plotting all the property in Columbia County, a researcher testified that registered sex offenders could legally reside on only about 1.2 percent of all the parcels in the county, assuming there were even rental housing available on those parcels.

    Whitaker fought back tears when the court ruled against her. She testified that her home will go into foreclosure now because she and her husband cannot afford to pay rent somewhere else and the mortgage.

    “A teenager shouldn’t be punished in perpetuity, especially one who poses no threat to society,” said Whitaker’s attorney Sarah Geraghty.

    Most of the bills that the Legislature enacts are pantomime —- symbolic acts designed to give the appearance of decisiveness. But, sometimes, lawmakers blunder into acts of real and grievous consequence, including the sex offender statute. Since its passage two years ago, the over-reaching law has lost several court challenges that required the Legislature to revise it. For example, a united Supreme Court struck down the law last year as it applied to homeowners who owned their homes before a day care or church opened nearby, ruling that such forced evictions violate the takings clause and property rights protections in the Fifth Amendment.

    Now, lawmakers have to revamp the law in January because the high court recently declared unconstitutional the provision of the sex-offender registry law that made homelessness a crime. With all of the successful and costly legal challenges to the law, common sense might suggest that the General Assembly reconsider its haste in passing it and rewrite the law to reflect the difference between the youthful indiscretions of teenagers, such as Whitaker, and the predatory acts of dangerous deviants.

    The law should create a graduated scale of restrictions, leveling the toughest limitations on the most dangerous offenders rather than on people like Whitaker. That would free up law enforcement officials to focus their time and attention on those truly dangerous offenders.

    The public has no problem understanding the difference between Whitaker’s offense and those of true child predators. Why can’t our legislators?

    —- Maureen Downey, for the editorial board (mdowney@ajc.com)
     

    Councilman´s letter to NC RSOL
    By Linda <LCANADA777@aol.com>
    Posted on 19.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0058]
     
    NOTE: This is NOT technically a news item, since it has not been published, but a member of the High Point City Council, which is mentioned in News Item 0056, as having postponed prohibiting ¨sex offenders¨ from parks, has written the RSOL North Carolina contact person the letter published here. It is an astounding testament that some political leaders are beginning to hear our basic points about current ¨sex offender¨ laws. The Councilman has agreed to let this letter be made public.

    ------

    "Good to hear from you. I do have issues around removing someone's civil rights for their class and not their actions at the time. You sited the Charlotte case where a parent wants to take their child to a public park and get arrested not for their actions but for their class.

    When I look back in recent US history, our actions to protect ourselves from certain classes is not a good one. Let me share the issues that cause me pause.

    1. Prior to the 1920's women could not vote.

    2. In the 1940's Japanese Americans that lived on the West Coast were interned because of their race, not their actions. I always found it racist that the German or Italian American's were not? We had German submarines patrolling off the US east coast sinking shipping every night. Yet, nothing was ever considered as a threat.

    3. Until the late 1950's, African Americans were limited access to many things because of their race.

    4. Until the 90's, Gay and Lesbians were groups that could have been barred from our Parks because we did not want a group like this to be close to children.

    5. Certainly today, Muslims are all seen as terrorists. I could see them limited to their access to public spaces.

    Once you limit one group or class for who they are and not what they are individually doing at that time, all our rights are at risk. The proposed ordinance before us does not make anyone safer on the front side. What it does is make certain people feel good and give the public some twisted idea that they are doing something. One of our Council members called it a CYA ordnance. I'm very cautious when it comes to limiting someone's civil rights because of their class and not their current actions.¨

    Latimer (Alexander)
     

    Ga. Paper says S.0. Laws too harsh
    By Kelly Piercy <rrsol.corrcomm@gmail.com>
    Posted on 19.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0057]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 0057, and be sent to the above email address, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    ----------------------------------------
    SEX OFFENDER LAW MINDLESSLY HARSH

    One-size-fits-all laws don't fit all cases, and this is one of them
    Augusta Chronicle, Editorial
    August, GA
    Tuesday, November 18, 200858

    Should the law punish a motorist who is ticketed for a broken tail light as harshly as it punishes a drunken driver with multiple offenses who's found guilty of causing a fatal crash?

    Of course not. Traffic law violations, like other crimes, are punished according to the seriousness of the offense. But that's not necessarily true when it comes to Georgia's sex offender law. Just ask Wendy Whitaker of Harlem.

    More than 10 years ago, when she was a 17-year-old high school student, she engaged in consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old male classmate. In 1997 she pleaded guilty to sodomy and was put on five years' probation.

    Since then Whitaker has gotten married and been free of any hint of misconduct. Yet she still must register each year as a sex offender. Her photo appears on the sex offender Web site and she is subject to a Georgia law that prohibits convicted sex predators from living within 1,000 feet of places where children gather, such as schools, parks and day care centers.

    Her Harlem home is within 1,000 feet of a day care center, which as of now means she'll have to leave that home this week. Federal Judge Clarence Cooper denied Whitaker's motion last week to halt enforcement of that part of the state law that would force her out.

    Before she and her husband moved into their Harlem home a few years ago, the couple had to move several times because of the sex offender law. It's very difficult to find a place to live that's not within 1,000 feet of where children gather, a point Whitaker's lawyer made to the federal judge, but to no avail.

    The main point ought to be that the sex registry law shouldn't apply to Whitaker. She's clearly not a pedophile who preys on teenagers, and it's a travesty of justice that she's being treated like one.

    Adding to Whitaker's pain is that the law she was sentenced under was repealed by the legislature shortly after her guilty plea and was replaced by a law that is much lighter on teenagers having sex. Had she been sentenced under the new law, she would not have to register as a sex offender or move out of her home.

    Clearly, the toughest provisions of Georgia's sex offender law should not apply to persons like Wendy Whitaker. Distinctions must be made between nonviolent sex offenders -- particularly those with no record of repeat offenses -- and potentially dangerous predators.

    One-size-fits-all justice does not work in sex predator cases any more than it would in traffic cases. We want strong laws against sex predators, but not at the exclusion of common sense. Judges must have the authority to make distinctions between the severity of sexual offenses -- and impose punishment accordingly.

    Georgia's children won't be any safer because Wendy Whitaker is forced out of her home.


    From the Tuesday, November 18, 2008 edition of the Augusta Chronicle
     

    N.C. City Delays Park Restriction for S.O.s
    By Margie <snapper1964@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 18.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0056]
     
    Comments about this news story should refer to News Item 0056 and be sent to Margie at the above email address, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm


    HIGH POINT NC
    City Council delays plan to ban ¨sex offenders¨ from parks, due to questions raised. Another partial victory - rolling back or blocking the restrictions! The URL is below - the AP does not allow us to reprint the story - please complain to AP about that!

    Associated Press and WBTV, Ch. 3, High Point, NC, stories, Nov. 18, 2008.

    URL
    http://www.wbtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=9368781
     

    Dallas Editorial on S.O. Paroles
    By Mary Sue Molnar <marysueintx@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 18.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0055]
     
    This editorial was generated after a Dallas Morning News story interviewed Mary Sue Molnar and others about the unjust parole requirements for ¨sex offenders¨ in Texas. Refer to News Item No. 0055, and send Mary Sue your comments, with a copy to me at alexm60@fastmail.fm. Also, if you are in Texas, WRITE the Dallas Morning News and congratulate them on Jennings´story and on their editorial - it´s not perfect, but it´s progress. Thanks, Mary Sue! Way to go, Dallas Morning News.
    -----

    EDITORIAL
    Dallas Morning News
    Nov. 14, 2008
    ¨REASONABLE PAROLE LIMITS¨

    Texas' parole system regarding sex offenders provides a way to set conditions of release that can protect the public.

    That's the ideal, anyway. In practice, the parole board uses what can charitably be called a broad brush in setting potentially counterproductive restrictions on the lives of some paroled sex offenders.

    Let's be clear: Sex predators are often dangerous, loathsome creatures who belong in prison for life. Others need the tightest supervision after release, and parole guidelines indeed impose sweeping limits on where they can go and what they can do.

    But that slate of exacting restrictions – called Condition X – is imposed even in cases involving low-level, non-dangerous sex offenders whose crimes stem from teenage romances. Yes, they broke the law and must answer for their actions. It's also important that these young adults rebuild their lives and become productive. That won't happen if nonviolent offenders face obstacles inappropriate to their original crimes.

    In an examination of parolee supervision, Dallas Morning News reporter Diane Jennings found that 90 percent of paroled sex offenders are subject to Condition X restrictions even though they had no clear opportunity to due process in the matter. A panel of parole board members renders a decision based on their individual reading of cases. They can vote from the privacy of their individual offices.

    There is no guarantee that an inmate will have any face-to-face meeting with a panel member. There is no real opportunity for a low-level sex offender to argue for reasonable access to certain jobs, educational opportunities, social events or places of residence. A nonviolent parolee may be barred from moving back in with family. He may be barred, according to the law, from having "a platonic relationship with any person who has children 17 or younger ... ."

    This is not the best way to re-integrate people with potential back into society. If court tests fail to bring about proper reforms, lawmakers need to instill reason in the process.

     

    Oregon: Another Case Begins to Unravel
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 17.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0054]
     

    PLEASE refer in comments to News Item 0054, and send to Alex at the above email address. We´ll forward them to those who sent in the article. You may also wish to email the journalist, whose contact info is at the borrom of the story.
    -----------------------------

    The trials of a former lawyer
    by Susan Goldsmith, The Oregonian
    Sunday November 16, 2008, 9:15 PM

    Brad Holbrook's prison term ended in June, but as a registered sex offender he is not allowed to go anywhere children may be, including libraries, parks, malls, weddings or family reunions. The first time Allen Scott saw Brad Holbrook was from Scott's seat in a jury box.

    Holbrook was a strikingly handsome 32-year-old lawyer, but he wasn't trying the case.

    He was on trial, facing charges of sexually molesting a 10-year-old girl.

    But as the prosecutor built his case, something didn't click for Scott.

    Holbrook's clean record, glowing testimonials from friends and family and shifting stories from the girl all seemed to undercut the state's portrait of him as a scheming sexual predator.

    Scott was not alone in his doubts, and jurors deadlocked on the charges.

    "You need proof in court, and there was no proof of anything," said Scott, who works at a tool and die company. "The whole thing was just crazy."

    But the case didn't end there.

    Holbrook was tried again a year later, and jurors in the second trial convicted him of one count of sex abuse, while acquitting him on two others.

    Only two people, Holbrook and the girl, know what really happened a decade ago. Eleven jurors listened to scores of witnesses and decided he was guilty. Two attempts to overturn his conviction have failed. Others are pending.

    The prosecutor, Cal Tichenor, says Holbrook's conviction was justified.

    "The evidence was clearly there to sustain a conviction and the appellate courts have agreed with that," said Tichenor, now a Yamhill County judge. "The prosecution was fair. Both sides had a full opportunity to present the issues to the jury, and the jury made their decision."

    Still, the case was so troubling to four of the original jurors that they filed sworn statements with the court complaining about the prosecutor. One juror went to the judge to express his outrage. All four took the extraordinary step of helping Holbrook's defense attorney prepare for the retrial.

    Jurors compelled to act
    No juror has been more dedicated to Holbrook's cause than Scott.

    After the trials in 2001 and 2002, Holbrook was sent to an Oregon prison for 6 1/2 years. Scott kept in touch with him. And in June, when Holbrook was released, Scott and his wife, Diane, both born-again Christians, welcomed him into their Newberg home, ready to help him in any way they could.

    In the 1980s and '90s, scores of people were prosecuted and convicted based on allegations they were involved in child sex abuse rings. Many of those convictions were overturned after courts found serious problems with the investigations into those cases.

    As a result, safeguards for professionals involved in investigating child sex abuse were put in place in Oregon and elsewhere to protect against improper interviewing of child witnesses. While not mandatory, the measures were designed to make the interviews more transparent and to avoid false allegations.

    "I see a lot of interviews, and the interviews may be better today than 20 years ago, but many aren't good," said Stephen Ceci, a expert on child witnesses and child memory who teaches at Cornell University in New York and has written numerous articles and books on investigating child sexual abuse.

    Ceci and Phillip Esplin, a Phoenix-based forensic psychologist and nationally recognized expert on investigating child sex abuse cases, are troubled by the Holbrook case.

    The experts were consulted separately by The Oregonian. After reviewing investigative reports and testimony, both men concluded that in Holbrook's case investigators had failed to properly interview the accuser and ignored what they described as an attempt to tell them she hadn't been abused.

    "I think that justice urgently calls for this case to be revisited," Esplin said.

    An allegation of touching

    Brad Holbrook's criminal justice saga began with a visit to a dying young girl, Chelsea Carpenter, in McMinnville. The 10-year-old leukemia victim was his niece, and she had two months to live.

    Holbrook, who'd grown up in Oregon and attended Southern Oregon University as an undergraduate, came up to visit from California in June 1999.

    While watching Chelsea and her sister, Holbrook found himself alone in the kitchen with a new friend of the girls'. The two were getting bean dip out of the refrigerator for everyone to eat. Chelsea's parents were out on an errand.

    Soon after eating, the girl said she felt sick and wanted to call her mother. When her mother arrived, the girl reported that Holbrook had slipped his hand inside her shorts and touched her buttocks and vagina in the kitchen. She said she told him to stop and he did.

    That afternoon, the girl's mother called McMinnville police. A detective interviewed the girl immediately, but Holbrook was not contacted for two weeks. From the beginning he insisted to family members and friends that he never touched the girl in any way. He had never been in trouble with the law and had interned at the Monterey County, Calif., district attorney's office. Friends, family members, former employers and colleagues were stunned by the accusation.

    Three days after the initial allegation was made to police, the girl's mother took her to Juliette's House, a county-funded agency that teams with police to investigate allegations of potential child sex abuse.

    There, therapist Michelle Warner and physician Dr. John Sandberg spoke briefly to the girl and her mother and Sandberg gave her a physical exam.

    After the exam, the two recommended the girl undergo counseling "with a therapist skilled in treating children who have been the victims of sexual abuse." The Juliette's House officials also concluded the girl was a medically diagnosed victim of child sexual abuse even though, according to their later testimony, they had nothing more than the girl's own statements.

    Esplin found fault with this.

    "There was no basis in the physician's exam to conclude sexual abuse. The findings were nondiagnostic. The forensic interviewer should have said, 'I collected this information but can't render a diagnosis,'" he said.

    Both Sandberg and Warner declined to comment for this story, but in court they defended what they and other county officials did in the case as appropriate and responsible.

    The Holbrook investigation differed in several ways from the procedures Yamhill County put in place in 1998 to ensure child sex abuse investigations were conducted properly.

    For instance, the records from police and Juliette's House reflect only a summary of what the girl said. The county and state sexual abuse investigation guidelines, which lay out best practices for investigators, recommend questions and the accuser's answers should be documented verbatim and recorded.

    In the Holbrook case, investigators did not write down the questions put to the girl or her exact answers and only one interview with her was taped -- about six weeks after she initially talked to police.

    "Probably didn't mean to"
    That single taped interview would prove crucial to Holbrook's defense.

    In the interview, the girl is recorded on tape saying Holbrook "probably" had only brushed up against her accidentally.

    Warner, the Juliette's House therapist, asks the girl if she has anything else to add to her account of what happened. The girl replies, "When I was at the fridge, you know, and he touched my sides, after that he didn't put his hand down my pants, but he slightly went like this. And he touched my vagina, kind of, but I still had my pants on."

    Warner then asks, "OK, so that was, like, touching your vagina on top of your pants."

    The girl responds, "Yeah, but I couldn't, like, feel it" and later she adds, "I thought, well, he probably didn't mean to."

    Records and court testimony show that neither Warner nor Sandberg or police detective Morrison Hantze, who were participating, pursued the possibility that nothing happened or that the touch she'd reported earlier was accidental.

    Lyla Niehus, a juror in Holbrook's first trial, said it bothers her to this day that county sex abuse investigators did not follow up on the girl's statements.

    It appeared to her that they had "already made up their minds he was guilty," said Niehus, who is among the four jurors who later criticized the prosecutor. "They didn't want to hear he was innocent. They weren't interested in that at all and didn't pursue it."

    Warner said later in court that the girl had given investigators enough information to make an abuse determination and particular details about how the alleged molestation occurred were secondary.

    "Making the distinction between front or back at that point did not seem especially important to me," Warner testified.

    Ceci, the child memory expert who teaches at Cornell University, reviewed the transcript of the videotaped interview at The Oregonian's request. He said it appeared to him that county officials were so invested in prosecuting Holbrook that anything that pointed to his innocence was disregarded.

    "The adults involved seemed to have lost all perspective," Ceci said. "The interviewer (Warner) was interested in getting the goods. The confirmatory bias is pervasive."

    Confirmatory bias is when investigators ignore, overlook or dismiss information that points to the possibility that no abuse occurred.

    Esplin, the forensic psychologist who helped develop child sex abuse interview guidelines for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, also found the transcript of the taped interview disturbing.

    "There's no evidence they made any attempt to explore whether it could have been accidental and she made a mistake by reporting it and was trying to regroup," he said.

    Prosecutor offers a deal
    Before Holbrook's first trial began, Tichenor offered a deal: Plead guilty to one misdemeanor count of attempted sex abuse and do no prison time but be listed on the sexual offender registry for life.

    Holbrook turned down the offer, unable, he said, to plead guilty to something he didn't do. A year and a half after the accusation was made, he went on trial.

    Tichenor offered jurors a new theory, different from the facts alleged in the indictment. He said Holbrook had touched the girl twice, once by the refrigerator and again by the microwave. Her statements that he'd brushed up against her accidentally, Tichenor said, referred only to the first touch.

    Police detective Hantze, Warner and Sandberg all acknowledged they'd never been told about a second touch by the microwave and it was not documented anywhere.

    When the girl took the stand, she seemed confused about what she remembered. Asked by Tichenor what occurred, the girl said, "He grabbed my sides, and then you kind of reminded me like how he kind of touched my vagina with his hand from the outside of my shorts, but I kind of remember that, but not really."

    Under questioning from Kent Gubrud, Holbrook's attorney, the girl, then 11, said she never told the police, the social workers or the doctor who interviewed her that Holbrook had touched her twice. Asked why, she said, "I don't remember" but added that she'd told her mother. Her mother also testified the girl had told her about the second touch but nothing in the investigative records show that the mother ever informed anyone else.

    Contacted by The Oregonian, the girl, now 19, and her mother declined to be interviewed. Tichenor said in an interview with The Oregonian that he didn't fully understand what happened in the kitchen until the girl took the stand because the Holbrook investigation was not done thoroughly.

    "I have no idea why details weren't noted. Neither the Juliette's House nor the police took a detailed statement about what occurred," he said. "They just didn't want to put this child through more questioning than was necessary."

    Tichenor said the police detective believed Juliette's House would do a more detailed interview but that never happened.

    "Nobody took a detailed, comprehensive statement of what happened to that child until she took the stand" in the first trial, Tichenor said. "They didn't act improperly. They had the interests of the child at heart."

    James Woods, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas in El Paso who studies how sex abuse investigations are conducted, said a changing story about an alleged molestation suggests there are problems with either the accusation itself or the investigation.

    "We do know consistency is important. A changing story has to lessen your confidence in their memory," he said.

    Several jurors in the first trial simply didn't buy the new theory of the crime or much else for that matter. They deadlocked on the two charges after a trial that lasted nearly a month.

    "The way they approached the story and tried to prove she was molested just wasn't right. It seemed to me that he maybe accidentally brushed her on the butt and that was it," said juror Milton Butz, another of the four from the original trial and a retired country club sales manager. "I just didn't believe one word of any of it. After hearing the case, I was just thoroughly disgusted."

    The second trial
    For Tichenor, this was his first sex abuse case that ended in a mistrial because the jury couldn't reach a verdict. He wasn't sure what had gone wrong. He chalked the deadlock up to the unpredictability of juries.

    In March 2002, Holbrook's second trial began. For this trial, Tichenor had gone back to the grand jury and emerged with a new indictment that charged Holbrook with touching the girl twice.

    The second trial went pretty much as the first until Holbrook's attorney called friends and colleagues to testify on his behalf.

    During cross-examination of two of Holbrook's witnesses -- a former legal colleague and an ex-employer who ran an after-school program -- Tichenor asked the women whether they knew Holbrook had had a "secret correspondence" with a 14-year-old girl. Both said no.

    Tichenor later acknowledged that all he had to base his question on was an "unconfirmed suspicion," which neither he nor a McMinnville police detective could find any evidence to support.

    Nevertheless, Tichenor said, by putting on witnesses to vouch for his character, Holbrook opened the door to the question. Gubrud, Holbrook's attorney, attempted to object to the questioning but Judge Richard Barron allowed it.

    The Oregon State Bar would later reprimand Tichenor for using unsubstantiated, unconfirmed rumors in an alleged violation of evidentiary rules for attorneys. Tichenor fought the sanction and prevailed at the Oregon Supreme Court, which ruled the bar had brought the action under the wrong disciplinary rule.

    "The Supreme Court said that's not the job for the bar and it was not inappropriate conduct and what I did was ethical," Tichenor said.

    Laird Kirkpatrick, the former dean of the University of Oregon law school and the bar's expert in the case against Tichenor, came to a different conclusion about the ruling.

    "Even though this particular case was dismissed on procedural grounds, it stands as a warning to prosecutors that trying a defendant on the basis of highly prejudicial innuendo that is found to be unsubstantiated can result in disciplinary proceedings against the prosecutor," said Kirkpatrick, now a professor at the George Washington University School of Law in Washington, D.C.

    The jurors decide

    The jurors knew nothing about the evidence controversy. They heard two weeks of testimony, which included new witnesses who vouched for the girl's credibility. Behind closed doors, the panel struggled to come to a consensus.

    "We decided that we didn't feel there was enough evidence from her testimony alone that it was as sexual as she said but we felt like something sexual happened," said juror Linda Ogles, who voted to convict Holbrook in the second trial. "There was a young child's life involved and a man's life, and once you're a registered sexual offender, it follows you all your life. We knew that's what would happen but we felt that was better than letting someone go."

    Ogles said jurors argued over whether the girl could have been making the allegation for any other reason but had no evidence or information to suggest she'd ever done anything like this before.

    But, in fact, she had. Jurors were not told the girl had made a similar allegation against a boy when she was 3. She accused a 5-year-old of touching her vagina, and police and social workers were called in. The 1993 investigation determined the girl's allegation against the boy was "unfounded."

    The girl's mother testified the girl and her older sister engaged in all kinds of sexualized behavior at the time. "No, it wasn't normal," the mother said, "but they were doing it to get his (their father's) attention." The allegation was made soon after the girl's parents split up.

    Judges in both of Holbrook's trials excluded the information after determining there was no indication the girl's earlier allegation was intentionally false, which would have required them to allow it into evidence.

    Ogles said their decision-making largely boiled down to who was more convincing -- the girl or Holbrook.

    "I don't believe he was credible," said Ogles, a retired phone company employee. "When she got on the stand, she never wavered from anything that she said. It was as if it was still current in her mind."

    But one juror refused to believe any of the prosecution's case.

    "I was the only one who didn't vote him guilty on any count," recalls Christie Stark, a bookkeeper for a foster care agency. "I've seen kids come through the office who had been sexually abused and felt pretty strongly about the horrible things that happened to these kids. I was surprised they wanted me on the jury and then surprised I wasn't convinced he'd done anything to this little girl."

    Jurors acquitted Holbrook on the two more serious charges. They convicted him 11-1 on one count of sex abuse for touching the girl's buttocks.

    Holbrook's new home

    The case continues to weigh on some jurors' minds.

    "There was so much evidence things weren't done properly," said Niehus, 62, a juror from Holbrook's first trial. "It bothers me to this day. I think they got an innocent man."

    Butz, 81, said he thinks of Holbrook often. For a while, Butz said, he kept in touch with Holbrook's attorney.

    "He's just a great kid and destroying his life and his ability to practice law is just a disgrace."

    Butz said he had a message for Holbrook, now 41. "I think Brad should get his name cleared," he said. " And if he needs any help from me, I would do anything for him."

    Ogles, the juror in Holbrook's second trial who voted to convict, began to cry when she heard the girl had made a previous allegation involving touching.

    "That upsets me," Ogles said. "We didn't know that piece and had we known it, it might have made a big difference in the way we voted."

    Holbrook has raised that issue along with many others in the appeals he has filed since his conviction. Friends and family raised $50,000 to hire noted Portland defense attorney Stephen Houze for one of his appeals. So far, two have been denied. More appeals are pending in state court.

    Holbrook's prison term ended in June, but he has to contend with considerable restrictions that are in place until 2012.

    He is not allowed to go anywhere children may be, including libraries, parks, malls, weddings or family reunions. He is allowed to grocery shop only after 8 p.m. or before 8 a.m. For the rest of his life, he is required to register as a sex offender.

    "After six years of being locked up and deprived of my liberty, you'd think you could come out and restore your life, but in fact it's the opposite," said Holbrook, who has lost his law license because of his conviction. "It's almost as painful as being locked up. I can't get a job parking cars."

    Scott, the juror who invited Holbrook to live with him after his release, says he would like to see him stay for a while. Because Holbrook is now a registered sex offender, their grandchildren cannot come to the house and visit. Instead, the couple go to visit them.

    Diane Scott, Allen Scott's wife, said they hope to make Holbrook's life a bit easier.

    "What happened to Brad is wrong and unfair," said Scott, who sat through some of the second trial as an observer. "I'm so glad he's with us. To me it's a no-brainer because we love him."

    -- Susan Goldsmith; susangoldsmith@news.oregonian.com

     

    ¨Pedophilia¨ Hysteria Keeps Adults from Helping Kids
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 17.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0053]
     
    NOTE - This item should have been posted last spring. We don´t usually post overseas articles, but this is so pertinent to the hysteria in the US! Refer in comments to News Item 0053, and send to Alex Marbury at the above email address - I´ll send them along to the person who sent in the article.


    -----------------------------------------------------
    Day of the dad: paedophilia hysteria leaves men afraid to help
    LONDON (ENGLAND) TELEGRAPH
    By Tom Leonard
    Last Updated: 11:59AM GMT 23 Mar 2006

    The inquest on two-year-old Abigail Rae highlighted a sad dilemma, says Tom Leonard

    There was one small detail that jumped out at me in the tragic story of Abigail Rae, the two-year-old who wandered off from her village playgroup and ended up dying in a garden pond. Tucked away at the end of yesterday's inquest report was a line about how Clive Peachey, a bricklayer, drove past a child on her own, whom he later concluded had been Abby.

    She was not walking straight, she was tottering, said Mr Peachey. "I kept thinking should I go back? One of the reasons I did not go back is because I thought someone would see me and think I was trying to abduct her."

    Without wishing to add to the pain that Mr Peachey must be feeling, I have to say that opinion in my office was divided over his failure to intervene. Everyone agreed it could be filed under "sad sign of the times", but women generally thought his a pathetic excuse, particularly given that Abby was on her own. Men were more sympathetic and one female colleague said she could understand it "in a funny sort of way".

    This won't be a funny sort of column. Mr Peachey's experience may be extreme, but knowing how to deal with other people's children is, at the best of times, a pretty humour-free zone.

    The inquest didn't hear whether Mr Peachey has children of his own. Many single men manage to pretty much blank children out from their consciousness, so the fact that he even noticed Abby suggests he does (though the fact that he drove on might suggest otherwise). Still, fathers - perhaps most men - will recognise that fear about motives being misinterpreted.

    The hysteria over paedophilia hangs like some dark cloud over almost every interaction nowadays between a man and a child that isn't his.

    Modern society sends conflicting messages to fathers - you must be more touchy-feely with your own children, but with the rest, you're best advised to keep your touches and feelings to yourself.

    And so a dad who can be brilliant with his own brood suddenly becomes hesitant and clumsy simply adjusting the clothing of a daughter's best friend he has known for years.

    The playground is perhaps the trickiest locale for dealing with other people's children, whom you are unlikely to know and yet have to talk to and may even have to look after. When, suddenly, the little boy who has been happily playing with your son for 20 minutes falls flat on his face and gets up with a cut on his lip and no grown-ups he knows on hand, what do you do? Well, a mother will rush in with soothing words, pick him up, rub his head gently, maybe even wipe his eyes with a tissue.

    And a father? Too often he stands around like a lemon, muttering platitudes as he scours the horizon desperately for the boy's parents, or just anyone he can pass the problem on to.

    You comfort but you don't touch. Or in a doctor's case, you diagnose but you don't touch. GPs may get tired of overly worried mums but, my wife has noticed, they'll happily accept her word if it means avoiding physical contact with the young patient.

    Sometimes, it's not about wanting to help someone else's child. Quite the contrary, you want to slug the little horror who has just scribbled over your dining table. But of course you don't. In fact, you don't even know whether you should express your displeasure verbally. What will his parents say? Perhaps this "creative expression" is encouraged at home. Are you infringing their human rights if you say anything? Sometimes, the child looks at you as if you are.

    This newspaper's chief lawyer probably sums up the memories of many in describing how farmers in north Wales used to greet a little boy with a pat on the head and a coin. Today, when he wants to talk to a child, he makes sure he first gets a smile out of the parent and mentions that he has grandchildren.

    Abby would have been too young to know the rules about strangers, but what would have happened if Mr Peachey had stopped to help a slightly older child. Nowadays, the standard advice to lost children is unambiguous - find a police officer or, failing that, a woman with a child.

    Note, not a man with a child and certainly not a man without one.
     

    PARTIAL VICTORY FOR S.O.JUSTICE IN CA
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 17.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0052]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item 0052, and send comments to the journalist indicated at the bottom of this article, or to Alex Marbury at the above email address.

    A PARTIAL VICTORY in CALIFORNIA - THE ROLL BACK OF OPPRESSIVE PROPOSALS BEGINS!

    City rewrites sex offender ordinance
    LONG BEACH: Council will vote on law Tuesday after updating the original due to a pending lawsuit.
    By Paul Eakins, Staff Writer
    Long Beach, CA, Press Telgram
    Article Launched: 11/16/2008

    LONG BEACH - City attorneys have rewritten a controversial sex offender ordinance whose constitutionality is being challenged in a lawsuit.

    The ordinance, which will go to the City Council for approval Tuesday, no longer applies to current registered sex offenders, eliminates an anti-loitering provision that created "child safety zones," and limits to one the number of sex offenders who can live in a single unit, rather than in an entire multi-unit building.

    The council meets at 5 p.m. Tuesday in City Hall, 333 W. Ocean Blvd.

    The council approved the original ordinance in March in response to Alamitos Beach residents who were concerned about an apartment building at 1149 E. First St. that was housing more than a dozen registered sex offenders.

    The law builds on existing state laws that restrict where sex offenders may live, but is much more draconian and, critics claim, illegal.

    Under threat of litigation, City Attorney Robert Shannon suspended enforcement of the law in April, but that didn't stop the legal action.

    Reversing course

    Last month, attorneys representing 35 sex offenders filed a lawsuit claiming that the ordinance was unconstitutional because it applies a retroactive punishment.

    The rewritten law appears to resolve that issue.

    The ordinance now defines a sex offender as "any person convicted of a crime on or after the effective date of this ordinance," which means current sex offenders won't be affected by the law.
    If the ordinance is approved Tuesday, it will return to the council for a final vote likely

    Dec. 2 and then must be signed by the mayor. It would go into effect 31 days after the mayor's approval.

    "It's not ideal, but it's legally defensible," said Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal, who had pushed for the ordinance in response to the Alamitos Beach concerns in her 2nd District. "Ideally, this is not everything the residents nor the (elected officials) would have hoped for."

    Sarah Stockwell, a Fountain Valley attorney representing sex offenders in the lawsuit, said the revised ordinance satisfies her concerns.

    "It protects all of our clients," Stockwell said. "Now it's just negotiating how we end the lawsuit."

    New rules

    Under the sex offender ordinance, no more than one sex offender can live in a single unit unless the sex offenders are related by blood, marriage or adoption; no property owner or manager may knowingly rent any unit within a multi-family building to more than one sex offender; and no more than one sex offender can stay in a single room at a hotel, motel or inn, unless related.

    The ordinance creates "residential exclusion zones" - a 2,000-foot radius around child-care centers, parks and schools - where sex offenders aren't allowed to live. In this densely populated city, that provision makes most of Long Beach off-limits to any new sex offenders who commit their crimes after the law takes effect.

    An estimated 800 registered sex offenders live in Long Beach.

    The ordinance originally also established "child safety zones" within 300 feet of areas where children congregate and where sex offenders would not be allowed to loiter, but that language has been stricken from the law.

    The lawsuit had challenged this loitering provision as well, claiming it was too vague.

    "The question becomes at what point does lunch at McDonald's become loitering without lawful business or purpose," Stockwell said.

    According to Deputy City Attorney Cristyl Meyers, current loitering laws can address that issue.

    While the ordinance originally was created to deal with the "clustering" of large numbers of sex offenders in a single apartment building, the law is now less restrictive in addressing this. Sex offenders are limited to one per unit in duplexes and multi-unit buildings, but not one per structure, as the law originally read.

    Meyers said the lawsuit had played a role in the city's decision to change the law, but that also as other cities passed similar laws, Long Beach looked to tweak its own.

    Lowenthal said the ordinance was changed to avoid a long, expensive legal battle, but that she stands by the original law.

    "I am fully confident in the constitutionality and in the position that we took," Lowenthal said.

    Legal uncertainties

    However, there seems to be some confusion as to what, exactly, the rewritten law entails.

    Meyers told the Press-Telegram last week that sex offenders are safe in their current homes, but that when they move they will face the restrictions outlined in the ordinance.

    Marge Landress, who owns an apartment building next to the one at 1149 E. First St. that started the controversy, said that was the way she had understood it as well when Meyers spoke to the Alamitos Beach Neighborhood Association last week.

    But the ordinance doesn't seem to support that contention, and Stockwell said her interpretation is that the law can't affect any current registered sex offender, even if they move.

    It was unclear whether Meyers was referring to sex offenders only as those defined under the ordinance or in general, and she didn't return phone calls seeking clarification Thursday and Friday.

    This issue aside, Stockwell said other residency situations could eventually lead to new legal issues under the ordinance.

    If a Long Beach property owner who lives close to a school or park is convicted of a sex crime and must register as a sex offender, could the new ordinance force that person from his home?

    "Just because you have a conviction doesn't take away your right to own property," Stockwell said.

    paul.eakins@presstelegram.com, 562-499-1278

     

    Nursing Homes Built for ¨Sex Offenders¨
    By margie <snapper1964@hotmail.com>
    Posted on 15.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0051]
     
    To comment on this news item, contact Margie at the above email address, referring to News Item 0051, and send a copy also to Alex at alexm60@fastmail.fm

    ---------------------------------------------------------
    NURSING HOMES FOR ¨SEX OFFENDERS¨
    URL - http://www.koco.com/news/17976340/detail.html

    State after state is spending valuable and scarce tax payer money on boondoggles like this - when the whole system needs to be restructured! Not just further isolation and segregation - even of the elderly!

    NOTE: This news item has been copyrighted in such a way as not to allow it to be reprinted anywhere. If you know local media who do this, urge them to allow republication on non-profit websites.

    url - http://www.koco.com/news/17976340/detail.html
     

    Reform the whole S.O. law
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 13.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0050]
     
    Refer to News item 0050 and send comments to the above email address.

    ---------------------------
    Repeat sex offender
    Editorial, Rome, Georgia
    Rome News - Tribunal

    11/07/08

    ONCE AGAIN, the Georgia Supreme Court has struck down another portion of the state’s sex-offender law regarding allowable place of residence.

    Even though the General Assembly has tinkered with repairs in the past, one wonders how long it will take for it to realize that a total overhaul is needed that it must be based on reality more than the stated desire, by some in leadership roles, to force all released convicted sex offenders to leave the state.

    This time, the justices voided the portion regarding reporting by the homeless on the grounds it was unconstitutionally vague as to how they would be expected to comply. It’s really only specific about two things: They can’t use post-office boxes nor is being homeless and sleeping in a different place very night an excuse for not reporting where they are to authorities every time they find a new bridge to be under.

    One other state with similar requirements is now permitting the homeless to list their domicile as a specific bench in a public park.

    It’s getting to the point where valid challenges to this law appear endless. Why should it constantly be rewritten one word or clause at a time when a total rewrite by rational, rather than sex-crazed minds, is plainly in order? Why should Georgia be a repeat sex-law offender?

    THE HIGH COURT has already knocked down the notion of forcing homeowners who are sex offenders from moving on the basis that this violated their property rights. Currently elsewhere in the judicial system and under attack are sending those who fail to report their whereabouts twice back to prison for life, banning them from volunteer work at churches, or living near a church or school-bus stop (of which Georgia has about 150,000 that constantly get moved around).

    There is, of course, nothing fundamentally wrong with keeping a close and constant eye on those sex offenders who prey on children in particular. However, as constantly noted here in the past, these persons have “paid their debt” to society and if the state really believes they remain such a perpetual danger why isn’t it holding them in a mental-health facility until professionals deem them safe to re-enter polite society?

    Of course, in Georgia’s case (or rather, in the case of its legislators), the core problem is far broader.

    In this state, every past sex offender must be on a registry for life and report their whereabouts. Comparatively few of these are pedophiles. Their number includes the 17-year-old caught receiving oral sex from the 14-year-old now his wife and who has children that, unless he abandons the family, can’t live within walking distance of a school-bus stop ... or church, or park.

    SIMPLY REDEFINING the meaning of “lifetime sex offender” to limit it to pedophiles and rapists would go a long way toward repairing the worst of this law. So would including (and paying for) involuntary mental-health treatment for the high-risk offenders who have served their time.

    That’s unlikely, of course, as the current state government rarely seems to put its wallet where its mouth is.

    Most Georgians probably don’t know it but, under Gov. Sonny Perdue’s recently ordered budget cuts, the Georgia Sex Offender Registry staff has been cut from seven to two. Those are the people who check with the state’s 159 counties to get information on where the sex offenders are and then post the information on the Internet so all citizens can keep tabs of who’s in their neighborhood.

    Might one suggest that the state has probably spent far more in legal fees associated with trying to explain away its unconstitutional provisions than it has on maintaining the registry (budgeted at $218,765 a year before the cuts).

    Some national commentators have begun to compare the excessive zeal with which convicted sex offenders (of whom there are currently 550,000 no longer behind bars) are being hounded in Georgia and other states as comparable to the Holocaust’s persecution of Jews and Gypsies.

    That’s not the same, of course, but there are similarities.

    INDEED, ONE suspects there are quite a few legislators, and citizens, who would support a candidate for higher office who says the following:

    “The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”

    Frankly, it should be viewed as alarming that only the courts now appear to stand in the way of Adolf Hitler being elected governor.


     

    Church leader speaks for S.O. rights
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 13.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0049]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0049 and be sent to Alex Marbury at the above email. I will send along to the person who sent in the item.

    ---------------------------

    Sex offenders, as well as victims, need love of church to rehabilitate
    By Charles Ohrenschall

    For the Journal-Constitution
    Atlanta, Georgia

    Thursday, November 13, 2008

    As a Christian, I believe firmly in the power of redemption. My life and my faith are enriched through service to my church community, particularly in reaching out to the marginalized and the oppressed.

    I was deeply concerned to read a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial about a Georgia law that has barred people on the sex offender registry from participating in their church communities (“Sex offender statute becomes tormentor: Family’s ordeal shows how Ga. law goes way too far,” @issue, Oct. 31). I believe this law —- which is being challenged today in U.S. District Court in Atlanta —- runs counter to the church’s mission of sharing God’s love and his message of redemption.

    I have seen how meaningful participation as a member of a faith community can be a powerful rehabilitative force in the lives of those seeking redemption for past sins. But Georgia’s law severely limits this opportunity for rehabilitation while simultaneously preventing me from ministering to all members of my faith community.

    Over 10 years ago, one of our church members was convicted of a sexual offense and now has to register for the rest of his life as a sex offender in Georgia. When he started attending our church, he brought his registration requirements and prior conviction to the attention of our church board.

    Our church’s leadership has since been able to monitor this member and his involvement within the church. Together, we have ensured that he complies with his registration requirements. He never volunteers with children, nor is he ever in the presence of children unless other adults are present.

    For the last four years, this church member has served in a variety of volunteer capacities, from reading scripture aloud during service, to setting up and taking down sound equipment as needed, to helping prepare meals for the homeless. As a result of the actions of the Georgia General Assembly, he recently had to stop participating in all of these activities.

    Earlier this year, the legislature passed a law that prohibits sex offenders from working or volunteering at a church. This law makes it a crime for a person on the sex offender registry to sing in adult choir, help the pastor prepare the elements, participate in Bible study or prepare food for church functions. The consequence of violating the law is 10 to 30 years in prison. Rather than risk such a sentence, our church member has stopped participating in church activities.

    As a Christian and a father, I am very concerned about sexual abuse in our community. I do not, however, think that a law that pushes people away from the church is a good solution to this grave problem.

    Like many churches, our church has mechanisms to address the issue of sexual abuse within our community. I cannot overstate the importance of the church being responsive to the feelings and needs of existing and potential victims and survivors of sexual assault. At the same time, in order to be a truly welcoming Christian community, the church must embrace every person, even those who have been convicted of sexual assault.

    In Acts, we are taught to believe that “God shows no partiality.” We are a community because of our one Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, in whom we are also one body. “We were all baptized into one body —- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free,” we learn in Corinthians. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you.’ “

    In line with this passage, we believe that we must refrain from casting stones, and instead are called to live out Christ’s command in the Gospel of John to love one another.

    I believe that the church lives out our community by offering that same love that God offered to us. We are taught to welcome the stranger and, as Matthew writes, “the least of these.” If they can’t come to church and be welcomed, where can they go?

    The church must be a place of safety and healing for all. We must implement safety measures for the children of the church and community. We must offer pastoral care, counseling and healing to those who have suffered sexual assault. And we must help to rehabilitate people who have committed crimes.

    As a people of faith and conscience, it is imperative that we bear witness to injustice, doing what we can to promote righteous solutions in our church communities and in the state as a whole. This current law is not the answer. Let us find the right one together.

    Charles Ohrenschall is a member of the Board of Directors (Vestry) of The Church of Jesus Our Shepherd in Norcross, Georgia.
     

    Challenging ¨Condition X¨ for S.O.s in Tex.
    By Mary Sue Molnar <marysueintx@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 12.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0048]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item @0048 and be sent to Ms. Molnar at the above email - with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    ---------------------------

    IMPORTANT NOTE: Mary Sue reports that the reporting about her son is unfair and incorrect, but still thinks it´s an important article. Unfortunately, reporters make many, many mistakes. Atty. William Habern is also an RSOL signatory, and a champion of justice in ¨sex offender¨ cases.

    Criminals, advocates say Texas parole restrictions unfair to low-level offenders

    URL:http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/crime/stories/111208dnmetconditionx.3b23320.html?ocp=1

    08:33 AM CST on Wednesday, November 12, 2008
    By DIANE JENNINGS / The Dallas Morning News
    djennings@dallasnews.com

    It's called Condition X: tough restrictions on the way some criminals, mostly paroled sex offenders, must live once they're out of prison.

    Condition X determines the minutiae of their daily lives – whether they can visit a school or attend church; whether they can live with their families or in an apartment with a swimming pool; whether they can access the Internet, work at a convenience store, even whom they can date or marry.

    But a growing number of offenders are fighting back against the strict limits, which they say are most often imposed without a fair hearing, and treat low-level offenders and violent predators alike.

    "I'm not at war trying to defend sex offenders," said attorney Bill Habern, who has scored several incremental victories in court against how Condition X is imposed. "I'm at war trying to protect our Constitution."

    The current system is unfair to low-level offenders such as young people who had consensual sex with minors, said Mary Sue Molnar, co-founder of Texas Voices, a new organization devoted to changing sex offender laws.

    Ms. Molnar's son was 22 when he had sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend. He received deferred adjudication but was sent to prison several months later when he was caught with drugs and alcohol. She worries how he'll cope with the Condition X restrictions he'll face upon release.

    "You're looking at a young man who, because the place of employment is listed on the [public] registration, cannot find or keep a job – which is one of his probation or parole conditions.

    "Where is he supposed to live? You're looking at a man who cannot come up with the money for the order to pay probation fees, treatment fees, polygraph."


    Matter of due process

    Ms. Molnar and others say they're not championing pedophiles or rapists. But when someone has consensual sex with an older teen, "it is not as serious a crime as someone who has fondled a 6-year-old," she said.

    That distinction is one reason Mr. Habern and attorney Richard Gladden are determined to force state officials to give parolees more due process.

    And though their efforts mostly have been rebuffed by state judges, they're gaining some traction in federal courts:

    •In 2004, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that "Condition X" can't be imposed on parolees who haven't been convicted of a sex offense, without an "appropriate hearing."

    •In 2006, the Texas parole board quit automatically denying sex offenders access to their own children, after a lawsuit claimed the board did not give a parolee notice or a hearing.

    •Earlier this year, federal Judge Sam Sparks in Austin expressed "grave concerns over the fundamental fairness" of such parole board hearings and commented that the Texas attorney general's office, which represents state agencies, "has apparently failed to take such constitutional challenges seriously."

    Assistant Attorney General David Morales said his office "takes all constitutional challenges seriously."

    Condition X is imposed on almost all paroled sex offenders, from those who had consensual sex with an underage teen to violent pedophiles. In some instances, sex offender conditions are even imposed on offenders who don't have a conviction for a sex crime, but whose offense included a sexual aspect. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, about 90 percent of paroled sex offenders have Condition X imposed on them.


    Majority vote

    It doesn't take much to require the sweeping restrictions of Condition X – just a majority vote of a three-person panel from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. No face-to-face hearing is held before the vote. Instead, each member individually reviews a "parole packet" with information from an institutional parole officer and prison officials, and any supporting material from the inmate's friends and family.

    The system gives "someone who is getting out on parole with sex offense stuff less due process than someone who is having their driver's license suspended," said Mr. Gladden, whose business card bears a picture of the Revolutionary War-era "Don't Tread on Me" flag.

    Mr. Gladden and Mr. Habern are challenging that procedure in Judge Sparks' court.

    When board members consider putting a convict under Condition X, the inmate doesn't know what evidence is presented against him and has no opportunity to respond. He can't even be sure panel members have read his file, Judge Sparks noted.

    A parole division employee testified in one case that board members spend an average of 10 to 30 minutes reviewing materials in each case.

    "It would certainly appear that if the voting members actually reviewed the files, the ... [process] would take substantially longer than 30 minutes," the judge wrote.

    Parole board member Jose Aliseda, who is a lawyer and former county judge, said the recent court cases "have caused us to examine our policy," and the board is trying "to make sure our policies meet constitutional muster." But he said he's "sufficiently comfortable" with the current process.

    In a recent 5-4 decision in one case, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals found the system acceptable.


    Going case-by-case

    But Mr. Habern intends to keep chipping away, hoping eventually to "force the parole board to examine each individual situation" about what restrictions are needed, rather than impose blanket restrictions on all offenders.

    Mr. Gladden agreed.

    "In Texas, before your driver's license can be suspended, you have a right to an in-person hearing," he said. "You have a right to know on what grounds they're going to suspend. You have a right to be heard as to why your license should not be suspended. And you have a right to appeal from that determination.

    "And it seems to me that ... you start saying, 'What's more important – my driver's license or not being able to live with my kids?' "

    Ms. Molnar, of Texas Voices, which has about a thousand members and supporters, said the system is not set up for offenders "to reintegrate into society and be productive members of society. It's set up for them to be roadblocked at every single turn."

    Parole board member Aliseda acknowledges that the restrictions make life difficult, but "I see success stories all the time," he said. "It's not impossible and it's especially not impossible after an offender has established the trust."

    Torie Camp, deputy director of the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, a victim's advocacy group, said the restriction issue is difficult for everyone.

    "I can easily see how being a parole board member, you would want to err on the side of caution," she said. "They want to do their very best to keep the community safe."

    Balancing the offender's constitutional rights with public safety is hard, she said. But painting all sex offenders with a broad brush "does a disservice to victims of sexual assault," she said, because the restrictions become meaningless.

    Like Mr. Habern, she advocates a more individualized approach instead of the restrictions routinely recommended by the parole division and imposed by the parole board.

    "For our own community safety, we actually have to look at reasonable and fair treatment for sex offenders when they're coming back into our communities, so they can reintegrate," Ms. Camp said.

    Those concerned about the process blame the parole division and the Legislature, which crafted the sweeping laws, for the problem, not the parole board.

    "The parole division does not exercise discerning judgment," said parole attorney Gary Cohen. Mr. Cohen said he has no doubt the parole division "deliberately sat down to fashion the most minimal cursory review that they possibly could."

    Officials with the parole division declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

    Mr. Cohen has little faith that politicians will rush to protect the constitutional rights of sex offenders.

    "It's not a politically favorable position for them," he said.

    Michele Deitch, who teaches criminal justice policy at the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs, said that eventually, the courts will have to address the issue of how to balance public safety with restricting individual freedoms.

    The issue of restrictions is "affecting more and more people," she said, and the inability to live a certain way is more than an inconvenience.

    "It's very clear there's an open question. ... Clearly there's deprivation going on there that needs some kind of due process protection," Ms. Deitch said.


    By the numbers
    3,789
    Texas parolees supervised as sex offenders

    3,391
    Texas parolees subject to Condition X, the tough restrictions on the way many criminals must live once they're out of prison

    89.5%
    Percentage of sex offender parolees subject to Condition X

     

    Texas Teen Sex Laws Under Fire
    By Mary Sue Molnar <marysueintx@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 12.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0047]
     
    Refer comments to News Item #47, send to Mary Sue Molnar at the above email address, with copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    --------------------------

    Texas teenage sex laws
    under fire
    KXAN TV, Austin, Texas,
    URL: http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/crime/Texas_teenage_sex_laws_under_fire

    Critics said prison time is unfair
    Last Edited: Tuesday, 11 Nov 2008, 11:39 PM CST
    Created On: Tuesday, 11 Nov 2008, 7:04 PM CST

    Jim Swift
    AUSTIN (KXAN) - He was 17. He said he had no idea she was 13. He said she told him she was 15. So when they went to bed, it never occurred to him he was violating his state's laws regarding teenage sex. It also never occurred to him he should ask the girl for an ID. Her mother found out and she took the news hard. She contacted police. The police filed charges. Considerable legal wrangling ensued. The kid spent parts of two years in the Williamson County jail. Finally, a state district judge there laid down the law: Jean Ponzanelli was headed to prison for three years. His partner was considered a victim. She was also considered a victim when another older man also went to prison, also for having consensual sex with her. She remains free.

    As for Ponzanelli, he has some real good friends, friends like Jan Fewell, who met him through her daughters. She and her children went to bat for their friend, enlisting the help of media, lawyers and the public at large. Maybe it helped. Before prosecutors settled for three years behind bars, they had been insisting on eight. Small consolation for a young man who was forced to quit school, enroll in treatment programs with hard-core pedophiles and ultimately, climb aboard a Texas prison bus for a long and scary trip to what judges call, an "Institutional Division" facility in Huntsville.

    Fewell worked tirelessly on Ponzanelli's behalf. In the process, she came across many more people who were busy with similar campaigns. There was a national organization called, ReformSexOffenderLaws.org and a Texas group called, Texas Voices. Many of the members of both groups are family members of young people, mostly men, who ran afoul of teen sex laws, even though their partners willingly participated and sometimes initiated the sexual contact.

    The legal cases not only imprisoned the teenagers, they often destroyed the families of those convicted. In some cases, after leaving prison, the young men married their partners, had children with them, and lived a normal life, except for the fact that they were listed on a state Sex Offender Registry. That creates enormous roadblocks to them finding a job, locating a place to live, taking their own kids to parks and other places where children gather.

    "The 20-year-old man who has had consensual sexual activity with his 16-year-old girlfriend has broken the law," said Texas Voices chair Mary Sue Molnar. "But, his offense is much different than 60-year-old Uncle Joe who has molested his six year-old niece. There's a huge difference here, a huge difference. The law does not differentiate."

    So Molnar, Fewell and hundreds of others are working with lawmakers in search of common sense reforms. In Texas, some changes being talked about include:

    Reducing charges in such cases to the misdemeanor crime of "sexual misconduct."
    Dropping the requirement for listing those convicted on the Texas Sex Offender Registry.
    Removing those already placed on the list.
    Designing treatment programs for them that are separate from those conducted for hard-core offenders.
    Lawmakers return to Austin in January. What will they do? Clearly there is pressure to appear "tough on crime," especially sexual crime. Fewell, now a member of Texas Voices, admits to moments of despair. Choking back tears, she said, "After Jean, you know, was sentenced, and then after, you know, he was transported, it was kind of hard, because I kind of thought like, this was a hopeless cause, that we're not going to make a difference. And, even my daughter told me, she says, 'You know, Mom, you can fight 'til the day you die and they're not going to change the law.' I told my daughter I'll die trying."

    Jean Ponzanelli is grateful. He's a bit busy these days, though, working as a janitor in the prison and counting the days. That would normally be the end of this story, but in this case, there is one more detail: Ponzanelli's parents brought him to the United States from Mexico when he was only a toddler. He said they never told him he was not an American citizen. He grew up in Round Rock, Texas, just north of Austin, living the life of an American kid.

    So, when he accepted a plea bargain, he checked a box on the form that asked if he was a citizen of this country. After that plea deal was accepted, he learned he is a citizen of Mexico. Oops, too late. When Ponzanelli is finally released from prison, he faces almost certain deportation to a strange country where he knows no one, has no friends and no prospects for a job or a life. The question his supporters can't shake: Is this really what we want to do? Is it really?

     

    Naked Runners Face S.O. Registration
    By Mary Sue Molnar <marysueintx@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 11.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0046]
     
    Comments about this news item should refer to news item No. 0046, and be sent to the above email address and copied to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    ----------------------------
    NAKED RUNNERS FACE REGISTERING AS SEX OFFENDERS
    Indecent Exposure is a Sexual Offense
    Boulder County News (Boulder, Colorado)
    Nov. 3, 2008
    by Laura Snider


    Twelve of the runners who streaked the Pearl Street Mall on Friday night wearing nothing but pumpkins on their heads will have to register as sex offenders if they are convicted of indecent exposure.

    The 10th year of the Naked Pumpkin Run started as usual — with laughter, beer and a whole lot of pumpkin carving. But the nude run, which has grown in recent years to include well over 100 people, ended with police citing 12 of the streakers for indecent exposure, a Class 1 misdemeanor. Police have warned runners in the past that the activity isn’t legal, but this is the first time officers showed up en masse to enforce the law.

    Now the ticketed runners, whose names have not yet been released, will have to register as sex offenders — a scarlet letter that could mark their professional and personal lives for years — if the charge of indecent exposure sticks.

    “It’s very nasty,” said Alexander Garlin, a local lawyer who has experience defending sex-related criminal charges. “Over the years, the system, the way of responding to individuals who are called sex offenders, ultimately has become institutionalized. There’s a whole industry around this, and certain critics have charged that the industry is too much one-size-fits-all.”

    Convicting a naked pumpkin runner of indecent exposure in court, however, may not be completely straightforward. According to state law, the prosecution must show that the defendant “knowingly exposed his genitals to the view of any person,” which is the easy part in this case, and that the exposure likely caused “affront or alarm” to someone.

    The “affront and alarm” is the obvious place to begin a defense, Garlin said. In the case of the pumpkin run, which didn’t start until nearly 11 p.m., many of the people packed onto the mall said they were there specifically to see the nude runners.

    “How does a jury figure out if someone is guilty (of affronting and alarming) beyond a reasonable doubt?” Garlin said. “I would guess the average Boulderite is not likely to be affronted or alarmed — entertained, maybe.”

    If the cited runners don’t want to test their luck in court, they could try to plead to a lesser charge. In this case, the obvious alternate would be “public indecency.”

    Oddly, public indecency may sound worse on paper — it includes doing such things in public as having sex, masturbating or fondling someone else — but it carries far less serious consequences. Public indecency is a Class 1 petty offense and does not require registration as a sex offender.

    “Public indecency has a real kicker — it’s generally nakedness plus some pretty hard-core conduct,” Garlin said.

    Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner said his officers cited the runners because “first of all, it’s illegal,” he had a high enough staffing level that night and he was concerned that the event was getting out of hand.

    “This isn’t OK,” he said. “It is against the law. You can’t do this with immunity.”

    Indecently exposed

    Nudity in Boulder isn’t exactly uncommon, and in the past couple of years a growing number of people have been questioning how nudity is dealt with by police under different circumstances. For example, why weren’t a group of naked cyclists given tickets in July when a naked jogger was cited for indecent exposure in June?

    Large naked events, such as Friday’s Naked Pumpkin Run and the Naked Bike Ride, haven’t typically drawn much police attention. But this year, a dozen people were cited with indecent exposure after jogging down the Pearl Street Mall wearing nothing but a carved pumpkin over their heads.

    Here are a few recent examples of indecent-exposure cases:

    The naked priest — June 22, 2007

    Robert Whipkey, 53, a Catholic priest, was convicted of indecent exposure after he was arrested for jogging nude around a high school track at 4:30 a.m. The reverend served at parishes in Erie, Mead and Frederick.

    The defense lawyer argued unsuccessfully that because Whipkey did not knowingly expose himself to members of the public, his conviction should be downgraded to public indecency, a petty offense that would not require Whipkey to register as a sex offender.


    The mooning nurse — Feb. 27, 2008

    A certified nurse’s assistant pleaded guilty to indecent exposure after “mooning” two co-workers while on the job at the Frasier Meadows Assisted Living Center in Boulder. Two nurses told police that Suzanne Mueffelmann, 42, of Longmont, flashed her buttocks outside the room of a Frasier Meadows resident. Mueffelmann lost her job at the facility.

    The Folsom jogger — June 21, 2008

    A 55-year-old Boulder man pleaded guilty to indecent exposure for running naked along Folsom Street several days in June.

    David Orloff, who lives on Arnett Street — one block east of Folsom and just north of Valmont Road — was arrested about 8:30 a.m. after someone reported seeing a white man with “long hair and a long beard” running nude near Folsom and Pine streets, according to a police report.

    The Naked Bike Ride — July 14, 2008

    About 60 nude cyclists pedaled through Boulder for the city’s fifth annual Naked Bike Ride to deliver the message that the United States should reduce its dependency on oil.

    Though there has been little police disruption of the event, several people have been ticketed or arrested in connection with the ride. There were some reports of complaints about the naked riders this year, including one call after the race had ended about a man who was gardening naked in the Community Gardens — where the event began — but no one was ticketed.


    Football streaker — Oct. 24, 2008

    A 17-year-old boy ran naked across the field at half-time during the high school football game pitting Boulder High against rival Fairview High.

    The student, who was streaking with a fake sword in hand to symbolize his pride in the Fairview Knights, faces a charge of indecent exposure. In the case of minors, the judge has discretion about whether a conviction for indecent exposure should also require the defendant to register as a sex offender.

    Link: i

     

    Ca.Fed Court rules some public registry of accused ¨child abusers¨ not legal
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 09.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0045]
     
    Comments should refer to News Item No. 0045, and should be sent to me, Alex Marbury, alexm60@fastmail.fm. I will send a copy of the comments, anonymously or not as you choose, to the person in California who sent the decision.
    Please see this url to read the whole decision:
    www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/ED149E6AA75C8406882574F80050B682/$file/0556467.pdf

    NOTE: The CACI referred to in this decision is separate from the regular ¨sex offender¨ registry of California, called the Megan´s Law Registry. The CACI publicly identifies those accused of child abuse. RSOL is trying to find out if other states have similar, separate registries of this kind. send info to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    OPINION of the 9th Circuit of the US Court of Appeals, California
    published Nov. 6, 2008 - Judge J.S. Bybee
    No. 05-56467, CC# CV-03-00697-JVS

    Appellants Craig and Wendy Humphries are living every
    parent’s nightmare. Accused of abuse by a rebellious child,
    they were arrested, and had their other children taken away
    from them. When a doctor confirmed that the abuse charges
    could not be true, the state dismissed the criminal case against
    them. The Humphries then petitioned the criminal court,
    which found them “factually innocent” of the charges for
    which they had been arrested, and ordered the arrest records
    sealed and destroyed. Similarly, the juvenile court dismissed
    all counts of the dependency petition as “not true.”
    Notwithstanding the findings of two California courts that
    the Humphries were “factully innocent” and the charges “not
    true,” the Humphries were identified as “substantiated” child
    abusers and placed on California’s Child Abuse Central Index
    (“the CACI”), a database of known or suspected child abusers.
    As the Humphries quickly learned, California offers no
    procedure to remove their listing on the database as suspected
    child abusers, and thus no opportunity to clear their names.
    More importantly, California makes the CACI database available
    to a broad array of government agencies, employers, and
    law enforcement entities and even requires some public and
    private groups to consult the database before making hiring,
    licensing, and custody decisions.

    This case presents the question of whether California’s
    maintenance of the CACI violates the Due Process Clause of
    the Fourteenth Amendment because identified individuals are
    not given a fair opportunity to challenge the allegations
    against them. We hold that it does.
     

    Vigilantes Targe S.O.s in CA
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 09.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0044]
     
    TO respond, refer to news item no. 0044, and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm


    -----------------------------------------------
    http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10928266

    Vigilante raids target two registered sex offenders in their Mountain
    View[CA] homes

    By Mark Gomez
    Mercury News
    Article Launched: 11/07/2008 02:46:49 PM PST

    Someone is targeting registered sex offenders in Mountain View and
    police are warning that the attacks may continue.

    The two incidents happened in the past 21/2 weeks. Police have
    not connected the crimes to a single culprit, but Mountain View police spokeswoman Liz Wylie said "we definitely have our suspicions that they are related." The victims told police they did not know their attacker, and police believe they were targeted only because of their sex-offender status.

    "We don't want to box ourselves into thinking there is one suspect,"
    Wylie said. "But it was very blatantly an attack because they are sex
    offenders."

    In the most recent case, a man forced his way into a sex offender's home Tuesday and hit him multiple times about the head with a wooden stick, police said. In the other incident, a man armed with a baseball bat placed a homemade bomb at a sex felon's front door. When confronted by a passer-by, he picked up the Molotov cocktail-type device and fled, telling the witness he was targeting the apartment because a sex offender lived there.

    Worries about violent vigilantism have persisted since the addresses of sex offenders became available online because of Megan's Law, but few cases have been have been reported. No other law enforcement agency in the Bay Area has seen similar attacks, Wylie said.

    "This is beyond vigilantism," Wylie said. "These people haven't
    committed crimes in a long time. We can't tolerate that. We don't care who the victim is."
     

    Teen Snared by S.O. Law
    By Tulsa News on 6 TV (Ok) <>
    Posted on 09.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0043]
     
    Comments may be made directly to the Tulsa TV channel at the URL listed below, or to alexm60@fastmail.fm. Refer to News Item 0043


    Teen Feels Snared In Sex Offender Law
    http://www.newson6.com/global/story.asp?s=9314835
    By Lori Fullbright, The News On 6 (Tulsa, OK)

    TULSA, OK -- An Oklahoma teenager is swept up in laws aimed at protecting kids from child predators. He must register as a sex offender for life, as the worst level offender, after having a sex with his girlfriend, who said she was his age, 16. Sex between teenagers is no longer just a moral issue, it's a legal one.

    Ricky grew up dreaming of joining the Navy and becoming a police officer. He was 16 and living in Iowa when he met a girl at a club for kids 16 to 20 years old. He says she told him she was nearly 16. They began dating and had sex. Soon after, police questioned him.

    "The cop asked me, did you have sex with her? And, I said twice. He said sign this statement and I signed it. Soon as I got done signing it, he said, sorry to let you know, she's only 13," said Ricky.

    Ricky's mother, who has recently gone blind, met with the girl's parents.

    "They said, look, we know she lied, we don't want to press charges, we just want Ricky to say away from her and I said okay," said Ricky's mom, Mary.

    But, the district attorney charged Ricky as an adult for two counts of felony sex abuse of a child. He was facing 25 years in prison, so he pleaded guilty and got a deferred sentence, which means it would expunged off his record.

    Ricky and his mother moved back to Oklahoma and learned he must register as a sex offender for life in Oklahoma as an aggravated offender, the highest level.

    That means he'll have to forget his dreams or even getting a job.

    "I read one application that said if you answer yes to sex offender, this does not make us not hire you, but, it does. If you say you're a sex offender, automatically, you're not getting a job," said Ricky.

    Ricky's record was expunged last month, but Oklahoma won't take him off the registry.

    "With the expungement, there is no plea now. It's gone, no record anymore, so no plea, why is he on this registry?" said Ricky's mother, Mary.

    Ricky now educates teenagers as his mother works to get the law reformed.

    Police officers told The News On 6 the law started good, but as it's been added to, it's become a "screwed up mess."

    They also believe the laws must be reformed to protect children from dangerous sex offenders and also, teenagers like Ricky.

     

    S.O. Residency Rules Ineffective
    By sent by Margie Furlong <snapper1964@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 02.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0041]
     
    Please refer to News Item 0041, and send comments to the email address above, with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm. Also send comments to the author of the article (see below)

    ---------------
    Residency restrictions for sex offenders popular, but ineffective

    Sunday, October 26, 2008
    By Paula Reed Ward, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
    Despite research that shows sex offender residency requirements actually hamper the rehabilitation of offenders, jurisdictions across the country continue to pass them, including Allegheny County last year.

    Experts say the laws, which prohibit convicted sex offenders from living within a certain distance of schools, day care centers and parks, also don't work to help cut down on recidivism.

    These types of residency restrictions have been passed in at least 30 states and thousands of municipalities nationwide. Even as prosecutors, criminal justice researchers and child advocates say they don't work, parents and legislators continue to push for the tough laws.

    County Councilman Vince Gastgeb, R-Bethel Park, who was the primary author of the local bill passed in October 2007, said he wrote the law that parents wanted.

    Mr. Gastgeb said he originally intended for the restrictions to apply only to offenders whose victims were children. But after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit against the county this month, Mr. Gastgeb learned that the law actually applies to all registered sex offenders, no matter their victims' ages.

    The ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of six sex offenders who said they could not find anywhere to live because of the restrictions.

    At the time the suit was filed, Mr. Gastgeb said he would amend the law so that it applied only to sex offenders whose victims are children.

    But days later, he changed his mind.

    "I do think it's legally sound, and I do think we'll prevail in court," Mr. Gastgeb said. "So a certain section of the county is off-limits. That's the way it is.

    "There's plenty of places for people to live."

    Even if there are "plenty of places for people to live," those who have studied the issue know that residency restrictions push sex offenders outside of metropolitan areas into rural communities.

    That means less access to family, housing, employment and treatment programs, said Dr. Jill S. Levenson, a professor at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., who has been studying sex crime policy for six years.

    "At first glance, these laws sound good in theory," she said. "But it's much more complex than that."

    The visceral reaction of "not in my neighborhood," needs to be balanced with pragmatism, she said.

    Part of the problem, she continued, is that residency restrictions are often one-size-fits-all.

    They often don't distinguish among the types of crimes that have been committed, Dr. Levenson said. Just because someone is designated a sex offender under state law does not necessarily mean that that person is a sexually violent predator or a pedophile.

    Further, studies conducted by the Minnesota Department of Corrections and Colorado Department of Public Safety have not shown any correlation between sex offender recidivism and living near schools or parks.

    And though residency restrictions might prohibit a sex offender from living in a certain neighborhood, they can't keep such a person from sitting across the street from a playground.

    "They really do nothing at all to stop sex offenders from having access to children during the day," Dr. Levenson said.

    On the other hand, there is ample scientific evidence that shows residency laws do interfere with the reintegration of sex offenders into society.

    "Criminal offenders who have stable housing, stable employment and support systems in their lives, those people are less likely to go on and commit new crimes," Dr. Levenson said.

    Sex offender residency restrictions were approved in Iowa in 2002, though the law was put on hold pending the outcome of a court case. In 2005, the state Supreme Court upheld the law there.

    Law enforcement opposition

    Almost from inception, law enforcement entities have been fighting to get it repealed, said Corwin Ritchie, the executive director of the Iowa County Attorneys Association.

    The prosecutors' group issued a policy statement on the issue, outlining what it sees as numerous problems.

    In addition, residency restrictions have made it less likely for people charged with sex offenses to plead guilty, for fear that they will lose their homes.

    That means that more cases must go to trial -- potentially causing additional trauma for victims -- or more offenders go free because sex crimes can be hard to prove.

    Another important factor to be considered, Mr. Ritchie said, is the vast amount of resources being spent to enforce residency laws with few tangible results.

    In Iowa, according to his organization, the state has lost track of more than half of its registered sex offenders since restrictions went into place, making the jobs of probation and parole officers much more difficult and time-consuming.

    Also, Department of Justice research shows that at least 90 percent of children who are abused are victimized by someone they know and trust.

    "[The incidence of] stranger danger is tiny," Mr. Ritchie said. "It's tragic, but its incidence is really, really small."

    And despite public opinions to the contrary, research shows that sex offenders are among the least likely criminals to re-offend, Dr. Levenson said.

    But in Iowa, legislators don't want to hear any of that, Mr. Ritchie said.

    "We ran into the politics of it," he continued. "No one wants to be seen as soft on sex offenders.

    "It's just politically untenable."

    Soon after Iowa's law went into effect, a small panel of legislators who wrote it told Mr. Ritchie that they were wrong and that it should be overturned, he said.

    But those same lawmakers said they would not be the ones to do it, he said. Instead, they left it up to the courts.

    "They're a fearful bunch," he said. "They've done such a good job of selling it, they can't turn and go the other way."

    Advocates for repealing Iowa's law came close two sessions ago, Mr. Ritchie said. They will take up the fight again in 2009.

    "The general public doesn't really care if it's good public policy," Mr. Ritchie said.

    Parents insistent

    The decision by Mr. Gastgeb to write the local law was influenced by listening to many parents in Mt. Lebanon speak at community meetings.

    They were outraged last year to learn that a convicted sex offender was living near Howe Elementary School in the Sunset Hills neighborhood.

    Last week, parents there continued to support the residency restriction law.

    "It would be very difficult to have a whole lot of sympathy for sex offenders at all, having three children," said Kathy Graziano, who lives in the community.

    One of the reasons she feels so strongly about the restriction is that the Mt. Lebanon School District does not have a busing system. Many students walk to and from school, she said, which makes them more vulnerable.

    "There were children passing his residence at any time of the day," Ms. Graziano said. "We don't have buses . . . or designated adults that would be one more set of eyes."

    She doesn't care if local sex offenders have access to housing or jobs.

    "Then I suppose they should work out in a cornfield in the middle of Iowa," she said.

    Another neighbor, Bill Crock, who has four children, believes the residency restriction should stick.

    "From what I've read, these guys don't get better," he said. "It's a lifelong problem."

    A teacher, who also lives in the community, was the only one to express mixed feelings on the issue.

    She wouldn't give her name for fear of reprisal from her school district, but the woman said she felt sorry for the offenders.

    Though the most important thing is to protect children, she also added that sex offenders do have to live somewhere.

    That's a notion that Dr. Levenson backed up.

    "When sex offenders become homeless, they do become more difficult for probation and parole to track," she said. "That, in itself, defeats the very purpose of Megan's Law."

    Though most jurisdictions pass residency restrictions when they are introduced, the Kansas legislature in 2006 chose not to after listening to expert testimony during two days of hearings.

    "This is not about sympathy for criminal offenders," Dr. Levenson said. "Housing instability is one of the strongest indicators of recidivism in the criminal justice literature."

    If jurisdictions want to enforce some residency restrictions, Dr. Levenson suggests that it be done only after an evaluation is performed to assess the person's potential for future danger.

    Parents should not rely simply on sex offender registries to keep their children safe, she said.

    "With the reliance on sex offender registries, we do parents a disservice," she said. "They need to be aware of what to look for in anyone who spends time with their child."

    Paula Reed Ward pward@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2620.
     

    Sex Offender Law Becomes Tormentor
    By (Submitting this article: Kelly Piercy <gasoem@gmail.com>
    Posted on 01.11.2008
    Link to this news item: [0040]
     
    A MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH - The leading newspaper in the South has endorsed major reform in sex offender laws! Comment on this article to the Georgia contace, Kelly Piercy, at the above email, and send a copy to Alex Marbury, alexm60@fastmail.fm. Also, write letters to Ms. Maureen Downey at the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
    --------------------------


    OUR EDITORIAL BOARD'S OPINION
    Sex offender statute becomes tormentor
    Family’s ordeal shows how Ga. law goes way too far
    By Maureen Downey

    The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

    Friday, October 31, 2008

    Andrew Norton grew up in a brutish household. His stepfather beat him and his brothers and made them watch pornography with him. Norton was forced to sleep at the foot of the bed while his mother and stepfather had sexual relations. After the state eventually intervened and terminated parental rights, Norton was placed in a foster family when he was 13.

    Norton, now a married man with two children of his own, has since found solace in his family and his church, where he has been an active volunteer. But the state of Georgia that was once his protector has become his persecutor. After driving him out of four homes in the past four years, state officials now want to drive him out of his church as well.

    Back when he was 12 or 13, police allege, Norton committed a sex offense against his half brother (the case is still in dispute in court, roughly a dozen years later). Unless that case is resolved in his favor, Norton will be on the state’s sex offender registry for life. And that means that Norton has no life.

    The General Assembly has decreed that anyone who commits a sex offense —- even a minor one —- can’t live near schools, churches, swimming pools, school bus stops, day-care centers, parks, rec centers or skating rinks, or work around schools, churches or day-care centers.

    In 2005, Norton and his family were ordered to leave his in-laws’ house because a school was nearby. They moved to a trailer park where they spent $1,500 to render the mobile home safe for their young children, only to be required to move again because there was a swing set within 1,000 feet.

    The Nortons then found a home in Austell, where they lived for 10 months before being told to leave because it was too close to a school bus stop. When they couldn’t find another home, the family was forced to split. Norton went to a motel, while his wife and children returned to her parents’ house. Then Norton had to uproot himself again when a church was built near the motel. The reunited family has since found a rental home that complies with all the prohibitions. But officials now want to boot Norton from his church, citing a ban in state law on sex offenders serving as church volunteers.

    “During these difficult times, my church community created one of the few steady environments in my life,” Norton stated in his court declaration. “Does it mean that I cannot volunteer to participate in Bible study? Does it mean that I cannot read scripture aloud at church services?”

    Norton shared his saga to bolster a legal challenge to the state’s sex-offender law filed by the Southern Center for Human Rights, which contends the law criminalizes religious practice. The case will be heard Nov. 13 in U.S. District Court. The state has already lost several other legal challenges to the overarching law. Just this week, the state Supreme Court threw out a provision of the law that made it a felony for a sex offender to be homeless. Under the law, if a sex offender could not list a specific home address at a local sheriff’s office, he or she could be imprisoned for life.

    Under that same law, homeowners on the sex offender list could be forced to sell their homes and move if a day-care center or church moved in near them. The state Supreme Court struck down that provision last year as a violation of property rights protected by the Fifth Amendment. In its legal challenge of the law, the Southern Center intends to argue that renters deserve the same protection.

    In another inequity, the law makes no distinction between serious sexual predators and far less egregious sex-related crimes. For example, a 17-year-old who engages in consensual sex with a 15-year-old is subjected to the same severe and lifelong restrictions as a repeat child molester.

    The most notable victim of that inequity was Douglas County teen Genarlow Wilson, who was sentenced to 10 years for having oral sex with a 15-year-old when he was 17.

    A year ago this week, the state Supreme Court overturned Wilson’s conviction, freeing him after three years in jail. Today, he attends Morehouse College, where he hopes to play football next year. In its zeal to appear punitive, the Legislature has continued to enact hollow laws that do nothing to protect children from sex offenders. In 90 percent of such cases, the perpetrator is not a stranger who lives nearby, but a family member or family friend of the victim.

    Federal law does require states to maintain registries of offenders convicted of sex crimes or offenses against children. That law also requires notification of schools, day-care centers and parents when sex offenders move into a community. However, Georgia lawmakers have carried their crusade far beyond what federal law and common sense dictate, passing the most drastic limits in the country on where offenders can live or work.

    Perhaps the greatest flaw in Georgia’s approach is its stubborn refusal to acknowledge gradations in the dangers posed by sex offenders. State lawmakers did establish a board of experts to evaluate sex offenders and rank them on the risks they pose to others, but in practice the state ignores those rankings altogether.

    Of offenders evaluated thus far by the Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board, 65 percent qualify as Level One, which means they pose little threat, says therapist Susan Strickland, who chairs the board. The board opposes any residency or work restrictions for Level One offenders.

    The board has categorized 30 percent of the offenders as Level Two, a category in which residency and work requirements are justified, according to Strickland. The remaining 5 percent of offenders are truly dangerous and should be subject to all restrictions as well as lifetime monitoring, she says.

    A change in the law would allow police officers to concentrate their time and resources on tracking truly dangerous predators, some of whom have gone underground rather than comply with onerous registration rules. Instead, police find themselves hounding people such as Andrew Norton, who is trying to overcome his own heinous childhood and provide his children a better one.

    —- Maureen Downey, for the editorial board (mdowney@ajc.com)
     

    Ohio Judge Rules parts of AWA unConstitutional
    By "Thomas Jefferson" <constitutionalfights@yahoo.com>
    Posted on 30.10.2008
    Link to this news item: [0039]
     
    Comments on this article should refer to News Item No. 0039, and be sent to the above address as well as alexm60@fastmail.fm
    --------------

    Columbus Dispatch ( Columbus OH)
    Oct. 30, 2008

    Franklin County Judge Rules Parts of Adam Walsh Act Unconstitutional.

    “I anticipate that one or both of the parties in the case will appeal,” Judge Schneider said. “It won’t rest until the Court of Appeals and ultimately the Supreme Court rules on this decision. So, I encourage them to appeal. Only the Supreme Court can render the ultimate decision.”

    Under the Adam Walsh Act, which took effect Jan. 1, 2008 in Ohio, Plaintiff Toles was reclassified as a Tier III offender, requiring him to register quarterly for the rest of his life. He also became subject to community notification, under which the sheriff is required to notify his neighbors and others in the community of his residence.

    Schneider ruled that Toles, 38, is not subject to community notification because a hearing at the time of his conviction determined he was not a sexual predator.

    The judge also ruled that much of the information required on the registration form under the new law posed an unreasonable burden in Toles’ case, such as license-plate numbers of vehicles available to him, where those vehicles are usually kept, telephone numbers he uses, and “any other information required by (the state Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation) without limitation.”

    “How does anyone know what telephone numbers he might use?” Schneider wrote. “Most troubling is the open invitation to BCI to add additional requirements without limitation.“

    Although Schneider’s ruling applies only to Toles, Skendelas expects it to be “persuasive” when other Franklin County judges consider similar cases. The county public defender’s office is handling more than 500 challenges to the law, he said.
    ———————————————————————————————-
    Read this court decision here, or here.


    Synopsis:

    Court of Common Pleas, Franklin County Ohio, Judge Schneider (9 Sept 2008):

    The issue before the court was the plaintiff’s requirement to register to satisfy the requirements of the new Adam Walsh Act law (Senate Bill 10), and the County Sheriff’s obligation of community notification.

    The challenge was based on the constitutional violation of the law with respect to The Ohio Constitution, which prohibits any law from being passed retrospectively (or retro-actively) This prohibition is also included in the Ex Post Facto Clause of the United States Constitution. (see related case State of Ohio v. Cook 1998 )

    Judge Schneider found that the law was applied retrospectively but he failed to recognize that the new requirements of reporting were substantive (i.e. punishment, burdensome). This is a failure that has been seen in other courts. Judges are unable to understand the burdensome nature of the new law’s reporting requirements.

    Judge Schneider did however recognize as burdensome, some of the requirements of the new law which would require reporting of previously-not required information (travel documents, social security number, license plate of vehicles owned or used by offender, where vehicles are parked, photographs of such vehicles, professional licenses or permits, email addresses, telephone numbers, internet identifiers, and “any other information required by BCI (Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation) without limitation”).

    Furthermore, the Judge wrote that the change in classification imposes burden to the offender in restricting their ability to move without stigma and burden. Judge Schneider writes “This court concludes that these requirements constitute a new affirmative disability or restraint”.

    The Court finds that “the new registration requirements go way beyond the limits of the requirements considered by the Ohio v. Cook court. Pursuant to the Adam Walsh Act, the new registration requirements are much more detailed , much more burdensome and much less narrowly tailored and apply to all classifications of sex offenders. In fact, it is impossible for this Court of anyone else to determine exactly what the requirements are because the statute authorizes “any other information required by the bureau of criminal identification and investigation”.

    Judge Schneider concludes: “Based on the foregoing, the Court finds that the additional registration requirements beyond frequency and duration … are clearly punitive in their effect and therefore violate the Ex Post Facto Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”

    Regarding re-classification, the Court holds “that if a previously convicted sex offender had the benefit of a hearing pursuant to R.C. 2950.09 and was found by a court not to be a sexual predator, the community notification provisions of R.C. 2950.11 do not apply.” Judge Schneider continued in writing that “an offender who has been adjudged as not being a sexual predator has an expectation that he could make decisions based on that finding.”


     

    Missouri Court Limits Sex Offender Halloween Ban
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 30.10.2008
    Link to this news item: [0038]
     
    To comment, refer to News Item 0038, send to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Judge Blocks Rules Limiting Sex Offenders on Halloween
    (in Missouri)


    By CATRIN EINHORN
    Published: October 27, 2008 (New York Times, Oct. 28)
    A federal judge in Missouri on Monday temporarily blocked parts of a new state law that requires sexual offenders to remain in their homes on Halloween evening and to avoid any contact with children related to the holiday.

    The judge, Carol E. Jackson, of United States District Court in St. Louis, said the law was unclear, questioning language that prohibits “all Halloween-related contact with children” and allows sexual offenders to leave their homes from 5 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. only if they have “just cause.”

    Two issues raised by the case were whether sexual offenders could celebrate the holiday with their own children or grandchildren, for example by hanging decorations or carving pumpkins, and on what grounds they could leave home during the curfew.

    The attorney general’s office said it would appeal the order, but declined to comment further.

    Chief Judge Jackson allowed two provisions in the law to stand, requiring sexual offenders to post a sign stating “no candy or treats at this residence” and to turn off any porch lights.

    Illinois and Louisiana have also passed state laws restricting sexual offenders’ activities on Halloween, and some other states have similar agency regulations or municipal ordinances.

    Missouri’s law was enacted as part of broader legislation cracking down on sexual offenders.

    “We’re counting it as a victory that kids going trick-or-treating will be a degree safer,” said State Senator John Loudon, a Republican who sponsored the legislation, speaking of Monday’s ruling. “And then we’ll have to go back to the drawing board depending on court action.”

    The ruling came after four anonymous convicted sexual offenders sued this month, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri. They say the law is not only vague but also unfair and unconstitutional, an argument their lawyer vowed to keep pushing. “Once people have completed their sentences,” said the lawyer, Anthony E. Rothert, “you can’t go back and punish them for the same crime.”

    Detective Gary Coxen of the St. Louis County Police Department had planned to knock on doors to ensure the sexual offenders were home, but he worried they would ignore him, mistaking him for children trick-or-treating. After the ruling, he said his job would be easier; he would simply go to each house to ensure that a sign was posted and the porch lights were off. “It takes the guesswork out,” he said.

     

    A Mixed Bag in Vermont
    By anonymous <>
    Posted on 17.10.2008
    Link to this news item: [0037]
     
    Please refer to News Item 0037, and email comments to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    The Lt. Governor`s proposals are quite mixed - generally mandatory minimums are very reactionary and do not allow refined judgements on a case by case basis. But other aspects of the Lt. Gov`s comments are to be welcomed in Vermont.

    ------
    October 16, 2008 - 10:07pm
    Tom Costello speaks to state Senate Judiciary Committee about sex offender legislation in Vermont
    By Megan Stewart
    for PolitickerVT.com, a Vermont alternative news site

    Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor Tom Costello addressed the state Senate Judiciary Committee in a public hearing Thursday evening regarding the proper legal actions against sexual predators.

    In his prepared statement, Costello advocated for thoughtful legislation instead of relying on gut reactions and proposed several initiatives he supports.

    Costello, who is an attorney from Brattleboro and served five terms in the state legislature, called for the full funding and use of "Special Prosecutory Units" to aid in the investigation of cases and the rightful convictions of criminals.

    "In order to make the proper arrests, achieve meaningful convictions and keep sexual predators off the street, the most important arrow in the prosecutor's quiver is a special investigatory unit," Costello said in his speech.

    Costello also spoke in support of mandatory minimum sentencing and probation, as well as "the absolute and non-negotiable need to protect those falsely accused" and to ensure every citizen the right to a fair trial.

    The Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor concluded that he opposed extreme sentences like capital punishment and castration and said he trusted that the legislature would pass sound legislation.

    The Vermont State Senate Judiciary Committee has held meetings over the past few months about amending state sex offenders laws, which began shortly after the Brooke Bennett was kidnapped allegedly by her uncle and sex offender Michael Jacques and her subsequent death in Randolph.

    Send tips to megan.stewart@politicker.com
     

    Another ACLU suit against residency restrictions
    By Margie Furlong <snapper1964@hotmail.com>
    Posted on 15.10.2008
    Link to this news item: [0036]
     
    Refer comments to News Item No. 0036 and send email to the above address with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.
    ------------------
    ACLU sues county over sex offender restrictions
    Monday, October 06, 2008
    By Paula Reed Ward, Pittsburgh, PA, Post-Gazette
    The ACLU has filed a lawsuit over Allegheny County's restrictions on where registered sex offenders are allowed to live.

    The American Civil Liberties Union says that the county's ordinance, passed last October, "not only violates sex offenders' constitutional right against increased after-the-fact punishment and other federal and state laws, but that it interferes with Pennsylvania's carefully constructed system for tracking and supervising sex offenders and undermines public safety." The PA Institutional Law Project joined the ACLU in the suit.

    The ACLU says in the suit, filed late this afternoon, that "it is believed that, if and when published, the map will reflect that registered sex offenders will not be permitted to live virtually anywhere in the County,including the City of Pittsburgh."

    The lawsuit was filed in federal court on behalf of six sex offenders, five who are already living in the county and one who is still in prison because he cannot find a place to live.

    The ACLU is seeking a preliminary injunction to stop the ordinance from taking effect. It was supposed to take effect March 1 with the publication of a map showing where the restrictions for sex offenders would be, but that still hasn't happened. It was passed in October 2007.

    Allegheny County has not yet responded to a message seeking comment.

     

    Girl Arrested for cell phone foto of self
    By anonymous <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 15.10.2008
    Link to this news item: [0035]
     
    Send comments with reference to News Item 0035 to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    -----------------------------------------------------------
    FROM Libertarian website - unitedliberty.org
    15 Year Old Girl Faces Sex Offender Status for the Next 20 Years
    Sat, 10/11/2008
    by Brett Bittner
    According to Ohio state law, convicted child pornographers are required to carry a Tier 2 sexual offender classification, requiring registration as a sex offender for twenty years. In this case, a teen girl from Licking Valley High School is charged with illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material, a second-degree felony; and possession of criminal tools, a fifth-degree felony.

    In case you made it this far without passing judgment on “yet another child pornographer,” the girl charged is fifteen years old, her “criminal tool” was a cell phone and MMS (multimedia messaging service). Her “illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material” were nude photos of herself. Putting those together, you can deduce that she took nude photos of herself with her cell phone. The Licking County prosecutor, Ken Oswalt, has received reports of 20 similar cases among school age teens, and he has been traveling to the area schools with an assembly program that discusses the consequences of such actions.

    While the teen girl who sent these nude pictures of herself to others via MMS is not alone, she has been the only person arrested. She also spent a weekend in jail awaiting arraignment and a bond hearing. The statute she has been accused of breaking has exemptions in place that allows parents and/or guardians to take pictures of their naked children for a list of acceptable purposes. Interestingly, the statute does not provide the same exemption for the child themselves. While the consequences for her have already been laid out by the prosecutor in the charges, the recipients of her messages may be also facing prosecution for their passive role(s) in this incident.

    One thing that falls on the side of the accused girl is the discretion of the judge in the case, since the defendant’s age allows for flexibility on the “sex offender” label. Unlike most mandatory sentencing guidelines, this case allows the judge to decide based on the situation, rather than the black and white handcuffs placed on most public servant decision makers. At least the Ohio lawmakers had the foresight to build in judgment when considering sentencing, even though they omitted an exemption in this law for individuals to possess nude photos of themselves.

    What is going on in Licking County, Ohio? There is apparently a wave of teens taking and sharing nude photos of themselves and only one girl has been arrested? There are concerns among area residents that this girl is being subjected to the prosecution due to her status as a foster child. Without biological or adoptive parents to provide the resources necessary for an adequate defense, this case may be a slam dunk for the prosecution. What better way to show your are doing something about child pornography than to railroad this girl to prison for two felonies and a sex offender tag for the next twenty years?

    The story here is not only the child pornography law in place to “protect the children,” but the ill-written legislation that did not account for a person’s right to possessing pictures of themselves. It also sounds like Ken Oswalt seeks a name for himself by singling this girl out and prosecuting her, while ignoring approximately 20 others. As an act of principle, I would like to see her cleared of all charges, the law itself re-written, and an investigation into the county prosecutor, as this smells somewhat similar to the Duke rape case.

     

    McCain`s S.0. Bill to monitor email
    By Fima <estrinyefim@gmail.com>
    Posted on 15.10.2008
    Link to this news item: [0034]
     
    Send comments with reference to News Item 0034, and send to the above email address with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    ---------------------


    From WIRED, the internet free spech website - blog.wired.com

    McCain's Sex Offender E-Mail Registry Signed Into Law
    By Kevin Poulsen October 14, 2008

    Registered sex offenders will have to start providing their e-mail addresses to a national database available to social networking sites, under the misleadingly titled "Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act of 2008" — a bill authored by Senator John McCain and signed by President Bush on Monday.

    The idea behind the law (.pdf) is that a social networking site can query the database to keep registered sex offenders from signing up, and thus prevent them from preying on underage users. Needless to say, the law does nothing to stop first-time predators. But it's doubtful that even recidivists will be affected. Pedophiles looking to victimize children — a felony worth years, even decades, in prison — won't be afraid to violate this new law by using an unregistered Gmail address. And now law enforcement will have to struggle to discern whether an offender is using a disposable webmail account to commit new crimes, or just to shunt the blacklist and network with their adult friends and family.

    The idea for this law originated with Fox a few years back, after a series of child predation cases were linked to the company's MySpace service, prompting several state attorneys general to start investigating the site. Fox's feel-good fix was then adopted by McCain, who turned it into legislation.

    Here, Fox's interests and McCain's converge perfectly. For any social networking site, it's much easier to check an e-mail address than to effectively police message boards and friends lists for signs of predation. And this plan allows McCain to appear tough on child predators, while opposing more serious efforts against pedophiles that offend the far right.

    In television ads he ran last month, McCain slammed a 2003 Illinois measure once supported by presidential rival Barack Obama that would have taught children how to recognize, and avoid, sexual predators. McCain called the plan "comprehensive sex education" for kindergartners.

    In other words, to McCain, teaching children to avoid predators is as bad as teaching sexually active teenagers about contraception. But setting up an e-mail database that relies on pedophiles being honest and respectful of the law — well, we can all live with that.
     

    Another good program by Stosell on ABC
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 14.10.2008
    Link to this news item: [0033]
     
    Comment with reference to News Item No. 0033, send to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    ------------
    ANOTHER GOOD PROGRAM BY JOHN STOSSEL ON ABC 20/20
    Oct. 14, 2008

    Here`s another story about teenage consensual sex that led to charges and permanent registration, although the couple married!

    The link is:

    http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/Story?id=4400537&page=2
     

    Bush signs two more bad s.o. laws
    By Margie Furlong <snapper1964@hotmail.com>
    Posted on 14.10.2008
    Link to this news item: [0032]
     
    Comments should refer to New Item 0032 and be sent to Margie (email address above) with a copy to alexm60@fastmail.fm.

    NOTE: The language in this `news` item betrays its bias, which is rather the opposite of the point of view of RSOL!
    -----------------------------
    From
    Website
    Today@PC World

    Bush Signs Two Online Predator Bills Into Law

    President Bush signed into law two bills that will make it much harder for child molesters to lurk with anonymity on the Web, especially at social networking sites.


    The new law, called the "Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act of 2008" or the "KIDS Act of 2008," requires registered sex offenders to provide "Internet identifiers", including e-mail addresses, to state sex offender registries. Those identifiers will also be used by social networking sites (presumably at the request of authorities) to identify suspect users at the National Sex Offender Registry.

    As social networking became the huge phenomenon that it is, news reports began showing up documenting the ease at which predators could contact minors, and even arrange offline meetings with them, at social networking sites. The new law can be seen as a direct response to those cases.

    Bush also signed the "PROTECT Our Children Act of 2008," which requires the Department of Justice to create and implement a national strategy, as well as a new task force, for tracking down predators on the Web and prosecuting them.

     

    Nevada Federal Court victory for S.O.s
    By Megan <megan@cfcamerica.org>
    Posted on 14.10.2008
    Link to this news item: [0031]
     
    VIDEO on Nevada Federal Court Victory by ACLU for `sex offenders`
    Comments to both the email above and to alexm60@fastmail.fm, refer to blog 0031

    Here`s the URL for the youtube video, rebroadcasting a TV news program:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYTqDHcsFWk
     

    Challenge to Long Beach Residency Laws
    By Paul Eakins <paul.eakins@presstelegram.com>
    Posted on 14.10.2008
    Link to this news item: [0030]
     
    Comments to this news item should refer to News Item 0030. Send comments to the reporter at the Long Beach Press Telegram (above) and to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    -----------


    Sex offenders file civil rights lawsuit
    COURTS: Attorneys say L.B. law restricting where their clients may live or loiter violates Constitution.
    By Paul Eakins, Staff Writer
    LONG BEACH PRESS TELGRAM (California)
    10/09/2008


    LONG BEACH - Attorneys representing 35 registered sex offenders filed a civil rights lawsuit this week aimed at a strict sex offender ordinance that the City Council passed in March.

    The lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court in Long Beach, says the city's sex offender ordinance violates Constitutional rights and is too vague. The measure builds on existing state law to restrict where sex offenders may live or loiter, but city officials suspended enforcement of the ordinance in April.

    "Basically it's not being enforced," City Attorney Robert Shannon said. "Why they chose to serve the lawsuit at this time is unclear to me."

    Shannon said his office is reviewing the lawsuit and that he will consult with the council in closed session Oct. 21.

    Shannon suspended enforcement of the ordinance so the city could reconsider aspects of the ordinance, he said at the time, but he has yet to return the legislation to the council.

    Among the violations alleged by the lawsuit is that the ordinance violates the constitutional ex post facto clause. The clause prevents someone convicted of a crime from facing new or greater punishments than what was allowed at the time of the crime.

    "It's adding punishments, not only telling them where they can and cannot be, but telling them where they can and cannot live," said Sarah Stockwell, a Fountain Valley attorney who is one of three lawyers representing the sex


    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Advertisement

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    offenders.
    Stockwell said her clients, whose names aren't used in the lawsuit, are seeking to have the ordinance declared unconstitutional and may seek damages if they are forced to move.

    While a state law called Jessica's Law restricts where registered sex offenders who were convicted since November 2006 may live, the law isn't retroactive. Long Beach's ordinance affects all registered sex offenders in the city, regardless of when they committed their crimes.

    The lawsuit also says the ordinance violates due process and the takings clause of the state and U.S. constitutions by forcing people from their homes.

    "It restricts their freedom," Stockwell said. "We're talking about people who have been released from custody for anywhere from a couple years to 50 years."

    Under Long Beach's ordinance, no more than one sex offender can live in a single structure (e.g. apartment or duplex building, or single-family dwelling) unless the sex offenders are related by blood, marriage or adoption.

    Furthermore, no property owner or manager may knowingly rent any unit within a multi-

    family building to more than one sex offender, and no more than one sex offender can stay in a single room at a hotel, motel or inn.

    The ordinance creates "residential exclusion zones" - a 2,000-foot radius around child-care centers, parks and schools - where sex offenders aren't allowed to live. In this densely populated city, that provision made most of Long Beach off-limits to sex offenders.

    The ordinance also establishes "child safety zones" within 300 feet of areas where children congregate and where sex offenders may not loiter. This provision is one aspect of the ordinance that the lawsuit claims is too vague and ambiguous.

    Council members passed the ordinance after Alamitos Beach residents became outraged over the discovery of an apartment building housing more than a dozen sex offenders in their neighborhood.

    paul.eakins@presstelegram.com, 562-499-1278

     

    College welcomes sex offenders to enroll
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 10.10.2008
    Link to this news item: [0029]
     
    COLLEGE WELCOMES `SEX OFFENDERS`
    Please send comments to me, alexm60@fastmail.fm, and refer to News Item No. 0029

    ------------------------------------------------------
    Pasadena City College COURIOR
    PCC President Supports Ex-Sex Offenders as Students
    by Barbara Beaser
    10/6/08 Section: News

    PCC President Paulette Perfumo supported allowing registered sex offenders to enroll as students in a news conference with journalism students Thursday.

    "Community colleges, and actually even four year universities, have always been about helping people rebuild their lives," Perfumo said. She went on to say that incidents like the arrest of PCC football player and registered sex offender Darryl Stephens ought to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

    "I think the demarcation really comes in, in terms of this is that a person must be responsible once they get here," she said. Perfumo's views on the matter reflect those of Senator Jack Scott, former PCC president who spoke Wednesday during Flex Day.

    She also spoke about increased enrollment and decreased funding, and the seemingly endless construction being done on campus.

    Perfumo also stated that there was a significant increase in enrollment this semester, up 4.5 percent from this time last year. "When there is a downturn in the economy, our enrollment surges," she said.

    But the increase in enrollment was not matched by the 85-day-late state budget. Perfumo, in an attempt to keep all enrolled students, urged the deans of every division to accept as many additional students as possible into their classes.

    "If there was an extra seat, they took an extra student," she said, "so that we could absorb a lot of that growth, and not have to cancel sections and turn students away."

    Perfumo believes that the fundamental difference between having a job and not having a job is education, and looks for additional revenue to prevent students being refused educational opportunities.

    "Community colleges are the economic engine of our country," she said, more than once.

    In addition, Perfumo acknowledged the crowded conditions of the campus and that earlier in the week they did not have a space big enough to accommodate all the employees to have lunch together in one place. "We didn't have the big cafeteria in the campus center because it's offline right now," she said.

    She said there was more construction being done in this year of the Measure P Bond Project than in any other year, but assured the class that it would all be worth it.

    "If you can't pick up on my passion about this, then you'll never get it," she said.
     

    People taken off the Registry in Ct!
    By anonymous <>
    Posted on 05.10.2008
    Link to this news item: [0028]
     
    Note - People in Connecticut are urged to write letters to the editor expressing support for this and for Rep.Michael Lawlor`s suggestion that others be taken off, too. We should watch for the predictable right wing onslaught of people who say the law should be amended so this doesn`t happen. But for now, it`s good news!
    Refer to News Item 0028 and send comments to alexm60@fastmail.fm

    ----------------------
    HARTFORD COURANT
    www.courant.com/news/education/hc-sexoffender1003.art
    74 Sex Offenders Due To Leave State Registry
    By CHRISTINE DEMPSEY
    October 3, 2008
    The sexual abuse started as groping when she was 13. He was 34.

    Within six months, they were having sex every other day, she said. Years later, in 1996, as a young adult, she told her story to Torrington police.

    Her abuser, Robert Steven Daley, was convicted in 1997 of second-degree sexual assault and sentenced to a year in jail and probation. He also was ordered to register as a sex offender upon his release.

    Now Daley is one of 74 sex offenders whose names are scheduled to come off the sex offender registry before the end of the year.

    Daley's name is scheduled to be erased from the list Dec. 22, according to the state police. By the end of October, 29 names will have been removed. In the next year, 153 names are expected to be purged. As of Tuesday, the list had 5,099 names on it, said Lt. Sam Izzarelli of the Connecticut State Police sex offender registry unit.

    The purpose of the 10-year provision is to recognize that — as disturbing as sexual assaults may be — not all of the people who commit them are threats to public safety, said state Rep. Michael Lawlor, D- East Haven, co-chairman of the legislature's judiciary committee.

    Lawlor cited as an example an 18-year-old who carries on a high school romance with a 15-year-old girl, which is a violation of state law, but they marry and start a family. That man should not be viewed in the same light as other sex offenders, he said.

    Under the law, those convicted of a "sexually violent offense" and repeat offenders register for life. An offense classified as a "criminal offense against a victim who is a minor" or a "nonviolent sexual offense" requires a 10-year registration.

    Lawlor would like to see the registry pared further. He supports putting only the most dangerous sex offenders on the list, which has doubled in size since 2003.

    "There are so many names, it's hard to decide who's really dangerous and who's not," said Lawlor, who also is an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven and a former prosecutor.

    Attorney Al Mencuccini, who initially represented Daley, said he thinks the 10-year clause makes sense.

    "I'm not sure a person should be labeled the rest of their life for something that happened a long time ago," he said. Being on the sex offender registry, which is easily accessed on the Internet, is like having a scarlet letter, he said. "That's a brand we don't even put on people who have murdered someone."

    As for Daley, he has memorized the date, Dec. 22, when his name comes off the list.

    He acknowledged in a telephone interview Thursday that he made a mistake in having sexual relations with the girl. But he said their involvement started when she was 17, not 13, and "she initiated it."

    As for people who have sex with minors — children under 16 — he said, "Anyone who molested a child shouldn't come off the list."

    Courant Senior Information Specialist Tina Bachetti contributed to this report.

     

    Fed. Court in Indiana rules against computer searches
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 27.09.2008
    Link to this news item: [0027]
     
    NOTE: Somehow we missed this important Federal case this summer.

    To comment, please refer to news item 0027 and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    ---------------------------------------------
    From, ABA Journal: Law News Now Magazine
    Fourth Amendment
    Sex Offender Computer Search Law is Unconstitutional, Judge Says
    Posted Jun 25, 2008, 12:40 pm CDT
    By Martha Neil

    A federal judge yesterday struck down a major portion of a revised Indiana sex offender registry law, saying that the state went too far in requiring that convicted sex offenders, after they serve their sentences and any parole or probation, agree to have their computers and Internet use monitored.

    Siding with the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, which filed the class action on behalf of convicted sex offenders, U.S. District Judge David Hamilton ruled that the newly revised law could not be enforced, as far as computer and Internet use monitoring is concerned, reports the Indianapolis Star.

    “These plaintiffs have rights under the Fourth Amendment,” the Indianapolis-based judge says in a written opinion. “The state may not force them to waive those rights under threat of criminal prosecution for failing to do so.”

     

    Mom S.O. arrested picking up son at school
    By anonymous <>
    Posted on 21.09.2008
    Link to this news item: [0026]
     
    Comments to this, refer to News Item 0026, send to alexm60@fastmail.fm I've appended a very strong comment from the grandmother - don't always believe what you see in the media!
    Alex
    ------------------------------------
    KSDK TV, Channel 5, St. Louis, Mo.
    By Sharon Stevens

    KSDK -- Madison County deputies arrested a convicted sex offender who picked up her child at school without notifying school officials.

    Thirty-one-year-old Callie Wilson of Pontoon Beach was charged with unlawful presence within a school zone.

    Wilson's three children were students at Mitchell Elementary School. She and her husband withdrew them from Mitchell Tuesday, four days after the arrest.

    Wilson, who also goes by the name 'Callie Coy,' was arrested at her home on Friday, not long after she was told to leave Mitchell Elementary School.

    Initially, Granite City school officials did not know that Wilson, 31, was a registered sex offender.

    "She's used a number of names so it was a very difficult situation. There are three different names for three different children," said Harry Briggs, superintendent of the Granite City School District.

    The district got a tip about Wilson and once it was verified that she was on the sex offender list, Briggs sent her a stern letter, making it clear she was only allowed on campus at certain times and needed district permission for others.

    On Friday, Wilson showed up at an unauthorized time and school officials immediately contacted police.

    The school advised deputies that Wilson came to the school to pick up her son at 9:40 a.m. She was not allowed within 500 feet of the school while other children were present.

    Officials said Wilson was convicted at age 19 in a pornography case.

    The sheriff said Wilson was told that she was only allowed to be at the school with written authorization from the school. Wilson was transported to the Madison County Jail where she was held pending formal charges. Her bond was set at $25,000.

    Wilson was charged with a class four felony and if convicted, could receive probation.

    Wilson declined to comment on the matter.

    KSDK
    -----------
    Comment from
    GRANDMALOVEC
    People! People! People!
    If we believe everything we read in the news, we are in a sad state! I have been reading all sorts of inaccurate information about Callie and I'd like to tell you the true story:
    1)Callie does NOT have any aliases. She has had three last names in her life: a maiden name, her first married name, and her current married name. No aliases! Is that clear now?
    2)She was 16 at the time of the occurence, NOT 19. Her sister was 13. So, SHE was 16, her SISTER was 13. Got it?
    3)Photos were taken of these minor sisters by an adult male. By the time they caught this man years later, she was 19 and was charged (which in itself makes no sense to me).
    4) There was NO 13 year old boy involved. She hurt NO ONE! She made a mistake in posing for pictures, but, again, she hurt no one!
    5) You ask why it has taken her lawyer so long to get her name taken off this list. If you have ever dealt with lawyers, you know how slow they move. So, this is an excellent question for her lawyer!
    6)Callie is a grown woman, 31 years old as of August 5, not May 5. She is married and she and her husband are raising three children. They are good people and are doing their very best! She should have NEVER been on the "sexual offenders" list to begin with, as she was a minor when it happened.
    7) There should be separate "sex offenders" lists...One for those who actually hurt children or others and ANOTHER LIST for those, like Callie, who pose for photos and never hurt anyone! If there is only one list, people jump to conclusions that are false. She is not now and never has been a threat to anyone!
    So, please remember: All stories reported in the news are not always accurate or complete. Please don't rush to judge someone you don't even know. Please consider that alot of make mistakes at a young age. And, PLEASE remember...she never hurt anyone.

     

    Supreme Court May Review Death Decision for S.O.s
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 19.09.2008
    Link to this news item: [0025]
     
    If you comment, refer to News Item No. 0025, and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm
    -------------------------------------------------
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/washington/09brfs-SUPREMECOURT_BRF.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

    Supreme Court Might Revisit Case

    By ADAM LIPTAK, New York Times
    Published: September 8, 2008
    In an indication that it may revisit a June decision banning the death penalty for child rapists, the Supreme Court asked the parties in the case and the United States solicitor general to submit supplemental briefs. The decision, Kennedy v. Louisiana, had overlooked a 2006 federal law making child rape a capital crime under military law. The unsigned order asked for briefs “addressing not only whether rehearing should be granted but also the merits” of whether the recent law should alter the five-justice majority’s conclusion that there is a national consensus against capital punishment in such cases.

     

    Sex Police Video Married Couple´s Sex in Nursing Home
    By Ryan J. Foley, Associated Press <>
    Posted on 12.09.2008
    Link to this news item: [0024]
     
    The sex police appear to have hit a new low by video taping a married couple having sex in a nursing home! To comment to this article, refer to News Item 0024, and send to alexm60@fastmail.fm.
    -----------------------------------------------------

    COURT SAYS PRIVACY VIOLATED IN SEX CASE
    By Ryan J. Foley, Associated Press | September 12, 2008

    MADISON, Wis. - Police who videotaped a man having sex with his comatose wife in her nursing home room violated his constitutional rights, an appeals court ruled yesterday.

    David W. Johnson, 59, had an expectation to privacy when he visited his wife, a stroke victim, at Divine Savior Nursing Home in Portage, the District 4 Court of Appeals ruled. Therefore, police violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches when they installed a hidden video camera in the room, the court said.

    "We are satisfied that Johnson's expectation of privacy while visiting his wife in her nursing home room is one that society would recognize as reasonable," the unanimous three-judge panel wrote.

    The ruling means prosecutors cannot introduce the videotapes as evidence in their case against Johnson, who is charged with felony sexual assault for having intercourse with his wife without her consent at least three times in 2005. Johnson's attorney, Christopher Kelly, said his client would visit his now 54-year-old wife every day, reading her the Bible and moving her arms and legs so her muscles wouldn't atrophy.

    The woman's sister is upset that prosecutors brought charges against him, Kelly said. "She believes her sister's husband was merely expressing his love for his wife and was trying everything he could to bring her back to consciousness," Kelly said.

    The couple married in 1988 and had no children, Kelly said.

    Kelly said he believed prosecutors would be forced to drop the charges without the evidence on the tapes and thought the appeals court made "a pretty obvious call."

    Johnson's wife was admitted to the nursing home after suffering a stroke.
     

    ACLU Challenges Indiana ban on parks for S.O.s
    By Courrier Journal of Louisville <>
    Posted on 27.08.2008
    Link to this news item: [0023]
     
    From the Associated Press, August 26, 2008
    Judge to Rule on Park Ban for Sex Offenders
    Courrier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky

    JEFFERSONVILLE, Ind. - An ordinance that prevents a convicted sex offender from watching his son play baseball in a city park is unconstitutional, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union argued.

    But the attorney who wrote Jeffersonville's sex offender ordinance said that use of parks is not a fundamental right and constitutional protections don't apply.

    Eric Dowdell, 36, is contesting the ordinance in Clark Superior Court. He twice has been denied exemptions from the ordinance to allow him to watch his son play baseball in a park in the Ohio River city.

    Dowdell was put on the state sex-offender registry after admitting that he engaged in sexual activity with a 13-year-old girl when he was 21, according to court records. He was given a three-year suspended sentence. He completed a 10-year term on the registry in 2006.



    Ken Falk, legal director of the ACLU of Indiana, argued during a hearing Monday that the park rule "bans people who have had no offense in a park" and violates Dowdell's "rights to personal autonomy." He also told Judge Vicki Carmichael there is no evidence that Dowdell presents a particular risk to children in the park.

    Attorney Larry Wilder, who wrote the ordinance, argued that cities have the authority to make laws protecting their citizens in city parks.

    Carmichael said she would issue a decision after Sept. 12, the deadline for both sides to submit final documents.

    Dowdell has previously sought exemptions from the ordinance. In 2007, a waiver was denied because he had not provided all the required documents. A judge denied an exemption earlier this year due to three battery charges against Dowdell since his 1996 sex offense.

    Falk said those offenses have no bearing on whether the parks ordinance is constitutional.

    ------

    Information from: The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky., http://www.courier-journal.com
     

    Major Nevada Challenge to Adam Walsh Act
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 20.08.2008
    Link to this news item: [0021]
     
    CONVICTED SEX OFFENDERS CHALLENGE NEVADA LAWS
    by Ken Ritter, Associated Press
    ChicagoTribune.com
    August 20, 2008

    LAS VEGAS (AP) _ Eager to protect children from sexual predators, Nevada and other states across the nation are adopting laws that publicize the names of offenders on the Internet.

    But sex offenders say they have rights, too, and argue it's wrong to lump those guilty of minor offenses with the worst offenders. Some are challenging the laws.

    "People think that imposing these draconian retroactive laws are a way to keep their children safe," said Margaret McLetchie, an American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada lawyer.

    McLetchie and Robert Langford, who represent 27 unnamed plaintiffs in a federal civil rights lawsuit, want to block two sex-offender laws from taking effect in Nevada.

    The laws, which they say are unconstitutional, were tailored to meet standards under the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which President Bush signed in 2006.

    Nevada was among the first to pass the laws that would allow the state to post on the Internet the names, photos, home and work addresses and vehicle descriptions of offenders who've served probation or prison sentences on convictions as far back as 1956.

    McLetchie said the measures mix serious sex offenders with people convicted of misdemeanors such as public nudity and could subject them to violence from neighbors who see their names and photos.

    "These laws don't provide public safety, they only demonize a particular group," she said.

    But Binu Palal, the deputy state attorney general arguing the case for Nevada, said the law is constitutional and U.S. Supreme Court rulings from 2002 limit sex offenders' ability to block the release information about their crimes.

    "The system is based on the fact of conviction," Palal said. "Informing the public of a true fact is not considered punishment."

    U.S. District Court Judge James Mahan is scheduled to hear arguments Sept. 10 in the Nevada lawsuit. He is being asked to make permanent a temporary ban he imposed that stopped the law from taking effect July 1.

    Mahan has expressed concerns that if Nevada posted its list of 4,941 people convicted of sex crimes since 1956, there would be no way to restore their privacy if the law was later found to be flawed.

    Once posted, the judge said, "the cat's out of the bag."

    His ruling is expected to be watched closely in states that have adopted or are considering provisions of the Adam Walsh Act, named for a 6-year-old Florida boy abducted and killed in 1981. He was the son of John Walsh, star of television's "America's Most Wanted."

    Implementation has been challenged in some states, including Florida and Ohio.

    "We've objected since it was first introduced in the Legislature," said Amy Borror, spokeswoman for the Ohio public defender's office in Columbus. "We believe it's unconstitutional when it's applied retroactively. Even going forward, it's bad policy."

    Borror noted similarities between the Ohio and Nevada laws, and said officials in Ohio were watching the Nevada case with interest.

    The Ohio registry went into effect Jan. 1 despite objections that it punished offenders twice, broke plea deals and represented a violation of states' rights by Congress. Furthermore, by creating the registry, the state Legislature usurped powers reserved to the courts, Borror said.

    "We used to have a system where a judge made a decision about an offender's risk to re-offend," she said. "Now it's based only on the offense that they're convicted of, not on any future risk."

    The federal law sets a July 2009 deadline for enactment, and threatens states with the loss of federal grant money if they fail to adopt it. In Nevada, officials told lawmakers the state stood to lose $300,000 a year if they failed to adopt the law.

    Langford said he believed Nevada lawmakers knew the law would change the lives of convicted offenders, but didn't consider the breadth of the measures or the increased costs of enforcing them.

    "Nobody wants to say they're for sex offenders," Langford said.

    The plaintiffs in the Nevada lawsuit include a construction company manager, a tow truck operator and a grandfather, according to court documents. They are not identified by name.

    Most say in court documents that they served sentences ranging from probation to prison time in plea agreements that predated passage of laws redefining a sex offender.

    The plaintiffs claim the law is broad enough now to apply to a wide range of offenses ranging from child molestation to rape to theft of a pornographic magazine from a store.

    Police Capt. Vincent Cannito, commander of the Las Vegas police sex crimes unit, said reclassification added about 1,800 people to a list of 2,200 offenders in Las Vegas and surrounding Clark County, home to about 2 million people.

    Cannito said he has no sympathy for offenders who would have to check in more frequently with probation officers, or might be forced to move away from areas near schools or parks.

    "Remember, it's the offender who decided to go out and commit the crime that they did," Cannito said. "This increases the standards and raises the level of accountability of those individuals who have been convicted of sex crimes, and it raises the ability of law enforcement to further protect the community."

    Offenders complain that reclassification is unfair.

    One plaintiff, identified as Doe 2 in court documents, said neither he nor his attorney at the time understood that lifetime supervision would apply after he pleaded guilty in 2001 to a sex offense, or that he would continue to be banned from going to parks or schools.

    He said that during an acrimonious divorce his ex-wife accused him of sexually assaulting her 14-year-old daughter. He faced five felony charges but pleaded guilty to one count of attempted lewdness with a minor under 14, and was sentenced to 5 years probation.

    "I never touched my stepdaughter or any other child inappropriately," he said in the affidavit, which says he took a plea deal to spare his children the embarrassment of a trial. "I was not told that there would be any restrictions on me whatsoever after I was done with probation."

    He now lives with his second wife, his adult adopted stepdaughter, his 15-year-old son and the couple's 5-year-old son in Las Vegas. He said he fears for his family's safety and his job if he is identified publicly as a sex offender.

    "I have done everything I can to comply with the law, and be a good citizen," he says in the affidavit. "I would never hurt anyone. But none of that matters now."

     

    Stossel on Keeps Exposing Unust Sex Laws
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 20.08.2008
    Link to this news item: [0020]
     
    John Stossel of ABC news keeps on exposing America´s unjust sex laws and their uneven enforcement. We urge all RSOL participants to watch his show every Friday night - for some important examples, go to this link:

    http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/Stossel/story?id=5390158&page=1
     

    NPR Item on PA Man who housed rso.s
    By alex marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 17.08.2008
    Link to this news item: [0019]
     
    GREAT RADIO ITEM ON LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA EX-REP WHO TOOK IN SEX OFFENDERS.


    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93644097&sc=emaf

    I urge all RSOL participants to listen to this - and to give support to this Christian, conservative with a conscience! Let me know your feedback. Alex
     

    S.O. Laws Cruel & Unusual
    By Judith Levine <>
    Posted on 17.08.2008
    Link to this news item: [0018]
     
    Cruel and Unusual
    BY JUDITH LEVINE [08.13.08]
    Seven Days, Vermont´s Independent Voice
    Burlington, Vermont
    http://www.7dvt.com/2008cruel-and-unusual

    KEY QUOTE:
    LAWS BORN IN HYSTERIA ARE SYMBOLIC INSTRUMENTS FASHIONED IN RESPONE TO CONFUSION, ANXIETY, TERROR & RAGE. THEY ARE CRAFTED BECAUSE THE INEXPLICABLE DEMANDS EXPLANATION....AT BEST SUCH LAWS CALM A RESTIVE PUBLIC. AT WORST, THEY MAKE THE PUBLIC CRAZIER.

    Hysteria, said Elia Kazan, “is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and
    secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it.” Kazan was wrong about a lot of things — for instance, his decision to inflame anti-communist
    hysteria by naming names of alleged pinkos during McCarthy’s Hollywood inquisitions. But he was really wrong about this.

    I come to this insight painfully, having spent almost three decades
    carrying buckets of facts to try to quell America’s blazing sex panic. But as I witness the latest flare-up of panic in Vermont, I conclude: Facts have nothing to do with it.

    Hysteria is often catalyzed by a grisly event — this time the kidnapping of 12-year-old Brooke Bennett, allegedly by her 42-year-old uncle Michael Jacques. (So far he has not been charged with the girl’s apparent murder.) The event is then sensationalized by the press — this time, rumors of an Internet “child-sex ring” that turned out to be Jacques’ ruse to hoodwink the police. The hint of sex fans the hysteria, which needs no further proof that its object is real (we don’t know yet if Jacques raped Brooke, either). Emotion fuels emotion. Reason and rights are thrown on the bonfire, surrogates of the offenders themselves.

    Often the catalyzing crime is not preventable or predictable. But
    mistakes are nevertheless investigated, fingers pointed. Blame is turned to political advantage. In Vermont, Governor Jim Douglas stumps as the tough-on-crime candidate. With his Fox confederate Bill O’Reilly slavering from afar, he flogs Jessica’s Law, a vastly expanded sex offender registry, civil commitment, chemical castration and the death penalty.

    Barre passes the first sex-offender residency restriction, barring
    former offenders from living within 1000 feet of a school or park —
    three-quarters of the city. A week later, Rutland Mayor Christopher
    Louras allows that he hasn’t conducted any research into the efficacy of such laws, but calls for the same ordinance in his city.

    In Rutland as in Barre, the aldermen pass the ordinance unanimously. The police, the administration and the people cheer. One Barre resident proposes to the TV camera that the scum be exiled to their own childless “mini-state.”

    Not to let an opportunity pass, Attorney General William Sorrell and the state’s attorneys pull out their wish list of measures stacking the criminal justice system in the prosecution’s favor. The five-point package contains a rule allowing the defendant’s prior convictions into court as evidence. Another prohibits defense attorneys from deposing the accuser before the trial. Bennington County State’s Attorney Erica Marthage explains the latter: The process is so unpleasant that the “victim” sometimes backs out, and the case must be dropped. The prosecutors also want police to collect DNA samples from every arrestee and keep the samples for good, even if the person is let go without charges.

    The Senate Judiciary Committee launches a series of six public hearings on sex-crime fighting. Chairman Dick Sears, a Democrat, hints that he is amenable to the prosecutors’ proposals. Committee members voice no concerns that the rules changes eviscerate the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment guarantees of a fair trial “by an impartial jury” and the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.” Presented with past bad acts, juries tend to conclude that the guy committed this one, too. And without a pre-trial deposition, the defense attorney can’t gather the information to prepare a case, uncover inconsistencies in the accuser’s story — or, hearing credible claims, counsel a client to plead to a lesser charge.

    The committee is mum on the specter of local police deciding to draw
    blood from the arms of anybody they pick up. Only the ACLU expresses
    alarm at the state holding an archive of the bodily codes of its
    citizens, guilty or innocent.

    As the flames of hysteria leap higher, opponents schlep facts to the
    conflagration. Victims’ rights advocates warn that residency bans send offenders underground, away from crime-preventive social life and surveillance. They point out that keeping offenders away from
    playgrounds does nothing to stop the vast majority of child abuse, which is perpetrated by the family and friends of the victims.
    Twenty-five-year minimum sentences like those in Jessica’s Law, they
    note, may prevent victims from coming forward, for no matter what Daddy did, it is the rare child who wants to be responsible for sending him up the river forever. Some prosecutors warn that mandatory minima deprive the state of the plea bargain, crucial to getting convictions in cases that are rife with reasonable doubt.

    Vermont ACLU Executive Director Allen Gilbert sums up the opposition’s argument to the latest wave of sex crimes bills: “The problem . . . is that there’s absolutely no evidence they work.”

    But Gilbert is looking for evidence in the wrong places. We aren’t
    talking about practical public-policy solutions to realistically
    assessed problems. Vermont is not in the grip of a sex crime wave. The Department of Corrections keeps close tabs on released prisoners.
    Recidivism of sex offenders is low. Crimes like Jacques’, thankfully,
    are ghastly aberrations, so rare as to be statistically almost
    nonexistent.

    Instead, we are talking about perceived perils and heightened emotion. Laws born in hysteria are symbolic instruments fashioned in response to confusion, anxiety, terror and rage. They are crafted because the inexplicable demands explanation. It demands that something be done.

    The label “predator” — even the more neutral “sex offender” — provides both explanation and a signpost to action. It tells us why Brooke died: because Jacques is that kind of creature. It informs us of what to do: hunt the creature down, cage it, mutilate it, kill it.

    At best, such laws calm a restive public. At worst, they make the public crazier. But a grateful public or a vengeful public — both are
    politically useful.

    The laws, in other words, work brilliantly.

    Friends tell me not to worry. Vermont is a rational place, a smart
    place, a place that eventually finds a moderate solution. As Speaker of the House, Gaye Symington held off civil commitment. House Judiciary Committee Chair Bill Lippert has stood staunchly in the face of Bill O’Reilly’s vilification. Vermont still doesn’t have capital punishment.

    But relentless calls for extreme penalties for sex offenders wear down resistance.

    In response to the governor’s goading, now Democratic gubernatorial
    candidate Symington has vowed that if elected she will launch a
    “thoughtful review” of state sex crimes laws. What is left to review? On her watch, the Democratic majority substantially increased prison sentences for all levels of sex crimes (including life for second and third convictions for “lewd and lascivious” conduct, which includes brief touching and hands-off crimes such as flashing). It created an Internet sex offender registry and steadily boosted reporting requirements for more ex-offenders, as well as police surveillance and penalties for violation of probation. A “high-risk” registered sex offender who fails immediately to report a change of address or the purchase of a car faces getting locked up again — potentially for life. The legislature has created special sex crimes investigatory units, which will presumably yield more convictions. At the same time, it has allowed crippling cutbacks to the public defenders’ office. The crimes
    haven’t gotten worse. Only the political pressure has.

    Hysteria gets what it wants. Draconian punishments start to make the
    merely cruel and unusual seem moderate.

    Referring to the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act,
    which requires all states to vastly expand their sex-offender
    registries, Dick Sears told a reporter: “The idea [of the Act] seems to be that most sex offenders have to be on the Internet [registry]. I don’t think a lot of [legislators] have a problem with that.”

    “Most sex offenders,” under the Act, include people as young as 14. The Act also creates pages and pages of new federal crimes and doubles or triples mandatory minima and statutory damages.

    But compared with death by lethal injection, what’s so bad about life in prison? Compared with life in prison, what’s so awful about having your face posted on a globally accessible Internet list of sex monsters, and, with it, the permanent impossibility of finding housing, decent work, friendship, or hope — even if you were 14 when you committed the act?

    Pretty soon, no penalty of a sex offender is considered cruel and
    unusual enough. When the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment for the rape of a child is unconstitutional, both presidential candidates expressed disappointment in the decision.

    “Everything should be on the table,” Sorrell told Vermont Public Radio when asked what sex-crimes laws the state should consider.

    And while radical penalties become mainstream, formerly mainstream
    arguments against those penalties become radical. For instance: A
    defendant is not always an offender; an accuser is not always a victim. People lie about sexual assault, and they coach children to lie. Sometimes it is the contemplation of sending an innocent man or woman to prison — not traumatic memories of a real crime — that causes an accuser to scotch a complaint.

    Some arguments can no longer be uttered. Here’s one: Being subject to a “lewd and lascivious” act won’t destroy your life, yet the offense can carry a life sentence. Where sex offenses against children are concerned, rarely does the punishment fit the crime.

    Facts don’t cool emotions. Maybe only other emotions can. I can’t at the moment think what these would be. Compassion? The idea that everyone, even a rapist-murderer, deserves to be treated as a human being?

    Spare the poison darts, readers. I already know that sentiment makes me a bleeding heart, a pedophile lover, and an accomplice child killer.

    I also know that as long as terror and hatred persist — and as long as these emotions are fanned — the laws will keep coming, and their
    severity will keep mounting. Once they are on the books, the statutes
    are likely to stay. Even decades after this hysteria is tamped,
    politicians will be wary of broaching repeal. Wisely, they will fear the flammable fumes that might be released if the old feelings are stirred, like toxic gases lying inert in a mineshaft.

    JUDITH LEVINE
     

    Lancaster sex offenders under seige
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 05.08.2008
    Link to this news item: [0017]
     
    UNDER SIEGE
    by Paul Franz pfranz@lnpnews.com
    Lancaster Sunday News
    Marietta, Pennsylvania
    Aug 03, 2008

    Tom Armstrong believes sex offenders have become the ‘lepers of our
    society.’ He believes men like the three he invited into his Mareitta
    home can change. His words can’t convince those protesting in front of his house. "The true measure of a community is how it treats its weakest," said Richard Owen, one of the three convicted sex offenders who live in former state representative Tom Armstrong's Marietta home. While he spoke, 15 sign-carrying protesters gathered on the sidewalk outside the house in the 700 block of East Market Street.

    Owen, 51, said Saturday he wasn't upset by outrage over his arrival in Marietta, but criticized the way the American legal system treats sex offenders. He moved to Lancaster County in 2001 hoping to begin anew, but his life here has been troubled. Owen spent a year in Lancaster County Prison from May 2007 to April of this year only because he couldn't find approved housing. By that time, he had already served out his 20-year prison sentence for rape in the state of Illinois. "There is a dire problem," he said. "It's designed to lock you up and throw away the key and not worry about the problems later." "They've become the lepers of our society," Armstrong said.

    Owen was charged with rape in 1981, he said, after he was caught with a woman by her husband. A week later, Owen said, the wife filed a rape charge against him.

    Paul W. Studdard, a former science librarian at Millersville University, was convicted of possessing child pornography on school computers. Richard Glen Barker was convicted of aggravated indecent assault of a minor. Both Studdard and Barker were at the house Saturday but declined to comment.

    "People can change," Armstrong said. Since moving into the large three-story blue-sided house in early June, the men have lived with Armstrong and his son. Armstrong said his daughter and wife are away taking care of his ill mother-in-law, who is in hospice care.
    Armstrong said his family has been supportive of his decision to house the men. And, he added, he hasn't just picked up any ex-convict who has come to him for help. "They have to prove they want to change," he said.

    Armstrong said he is a mentor to the men and accompanies them shopping, and on church visits. "I have access to everyone's room and I haven't seen a single thing happen," he said. "I really believe Richard has been brought into this by God," Armstrong said. "He's a good man."

    Others disagree. The protesters gathered in front of Armstrong's house around 10:30 a.m. Saturday. Many voiced concerns over the safety of children in the community. "I have children," Shelly Evans said, "Marietta children walk to school and it worries me. We can't be there to keep an eye on them all day long. "We're out here to protect our kids."

    Armstrong argues that the current situation is safer than if the three men were somewhere else. "There's a lot of light coming in here. This is God's house," Armstrong said. "If anything, it's the complete opposite. It's one of the safest houses."....

    Armstrong has worked for eight years with the nonprofit Justice and
    Mercy group and said he is a mentor for seven other convicts in the
    county. He really began to pay attention to reforming ex-convicts after his brother, Max, was convicted of exposing himself to schoolgirls in Millersville in 1997. "It really opened my eyes," he said.

    Protesters were courteous and stood outside on the sidewalk holding
    signs and placards. Some passing cars honked their horns in apparent
    support of the protesters. "We took a vote; you lost!" and "Hit the road!" read some of the signs. "I'm against what Armstrong is doing to the town of Marietta," said Mark Jardel. "He's bringing in individuals who don't reflect the community here. He just doesn't care about the children or the community."

    Owen walked outside several times and waved to the protesters, who
    largely ignored him. At one point, Owen started taking pictures of the protesters, saying he was putting together an album of all the newspaper articles and events in this controversy. A police officer in a cruiser kept watch at the end of the block. Armstrong had set out a cooler with sodas for the protesters earlier in the morning.
    An Old Testament verse from the book of Jeremiah printed on cardboard
    above the cooler read: "For I will forgive their wickedness and will
    remember their sin no more." Below the verse, the message was:
    "If God be for us, who can be against us?"

    "I don't think they have the full picture," Armstrong said of his
    opponents, adding that he thought he has gotten more support than
    opposition for his actions. "I just want to congratulate you on what you're doing. Those [protesters] are all wrong," said a female supporter in a message left on Armstrong's answering machine. "They deserve to have the right [to live] somewhere. Everyone deserves to have the right to have another chance."

    Armstrong said he has received a lot of anonymous support, but also
    direct support from local churches and charities. He said that Marietta Community Chapel has told him the men are welcome at their church.

    Three protesters were still outside Armstrong's home around 12:30 p.m. One engaged Armstrong in a heated argument as he walked in front of his home. "Their actions define how they think," the protester said. "You don't know them, they're good men," Armstrong replied. "Twelve people don't represent the mind-set of Marietta," Owen said. "It's unfortunate that people can get locked into their fears and judgments, but they have a right to express themselves."

    Armstrong moved the three men into his house in early June after they
    had left a halfway house in Conestoga Township. Controversy surrounded the complex where they lived on Main Street. Residents and zoning officials pressured Armstrong to move the men out
    because the halfway house didn't comply with township zoning
    regulations. He denied the men were "run out of town" in Conestoga, saying that the move was more of a consideration of transportation problems.

    Marietta residents found out that the men had moved into Armstrong's
    home via the Pennsylvania Megan's Law Web site, which is maintained by the Pennsylvania State Police and lists offenders by their addresses.

    Convicted sex offenders who live, work or attend school in the state are required to register on the Web site. A cease-and-desist order issued by the borough on June 16 notified Armstrong that housing unrelated adults in his home is not permitted. Armstrong appealed the order.

    A hearing on Armstrong's appeal will be heard by the borough Zoning
    Hearing Board at 7 p.m.,Wednesday, Aug. 6, at the Marietta Community
    House, 264 W. Market St....... Armstrong was confident that he'll win the appeal. "I know I'm safe," he said. "We have Supreme Court law on our side and town precedent." In the 1980s, he said, Marietta allowed three unrelated war veterans to stay at Armstrong's house in a similar capacity. If the town rules against Armstrong Wednesday, he said he'll appeal.


    Paul Franz is a Sunday News staff writer. Contact him at
    pfranz@lnpnews.com
     

    Convicted Sex Offenders, the Other View
    By Diane Diamond <diane@dianedimond.net>
    Posted on 04.08.2008
    Link to this news item: [0016]
     
    From the Internet Daily, The Huffington Post, August 4, 2008

    CONVICTED SEX OFFENDERS: THE OTHER VIEW
    by Diane Dimond

    David is a convicted child molester, a registered sex offender, who has served his time and currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

    So what should society do with him now that he's out? Watch him like a hawk? Well, that's already being done via the registry through which he must regularly report his every lifestyle move - where he lives, where he works, what car he drives, where he spends his time.

    For many of us the quick answer would be, "Lock him up and throw away the key!" And until I met David I would have joined in that chorus. Once a sex offender always a sex offender - that's been my mantra.

    To make a very long story short David's estranged wife accused him of sexually touching their 5 year old daughter during a visitation. Their 7 year old son allegedly saw it happen during a naptime when all three of them had laid down to take a quick snooze. At trial stories changed, physical examinations proved nothing wrong but David was sentenced to six years in prison. He says everything you've heard about life inside for a convicted child molester is true, it's the hardest time you can do. David says he never ever would have done what he was charged with.

    Now that he's free his children, who live with his mother-in-law, don't talk to him. His troubled ex-wife died of a methadone overdose while he was serving time.

    David is getting on with his life. For the last two years he's been diligently working a job where they don't mind his past, going to church, showing up for his court mandated checks like clockwork and spending time with Alice.

    Alice is how I come to know David. She is a remarkable woman who at the age of 79 gently tells me I've had it all wrong about convicted molesters.

    The media, Alice politely scolded me, never talks the convicted innocent or the released offender who truly wants opportunities to live a better life - a job, a place to live, a break from society - none of which comes easy to them.

    "It doesn't matter to me what they did," Alice said while stressing the faith she and her late husband, Pastor Don, shared. "My mission is to make sure they don't re-offend."

    "We have redefined the word rape in this country," she told me as she detailed what she'd learned in recent classes about the eight levels of sex offenses we punish. Many include the kind of behavior that teenagers often engage in: Removal of an item of clothing, skin-on-skin contact, non-penetrating acts. Alice and I discussed the case of 17 year old honor student Genarlow Wilson of Georgia who got 10 years for engaging in an oral act with a willing 15 year old girl at a New Year's Eve party. His life was ruined.

    In her quiet, dignified way Alice says the media fans the flames of ignorance. Reporters stress only the most extreme accounts of perverts who kidnap and kill children. They don't adequately explain flimsy trial evidence or today's rampant zeal to convict at even a hint of inappropriate behavior.

    Alice followed in Pastor Don's footsteps, visiting the convicted in prison. Her grown children think she's "losing her marbles" as she meets and becomes involved with more of these convicts, determined to help them when they get out.

    "I believe God can change anyone's life," she explained.

    Take cross country truck driver Robert, for example. Alice says he had sex with a mature looking 16 year old waitress. He gets out next year after serving 10 years. Inside prison he's been attacked several times and now must walk with a cane.

    Jose served 10 years for something he did with a minor when he was 16. When he was released he wanted to go live with his Dad but the courts said no since Dad had a 30 year old felony on his record. Nothing comes easy for these convicts.

    And back to David. When he recently showed up for his regular 90 day check-in he was suddenly handcuffed and told there were two warrants for his arrest. Never mind that the spelling of the last name, the date of birth and social security number didn't match David's. He was taken into custody and it was Alice who was there to pick him up when the snafu was finally figured out.

    "Alice gives me the benefit of the doubt," David says. "That holds me up to a higher standard and makes me want to life a better life."

    Maybe we could all learn a lesson from Alice. She and David have given me a reason to re-think my mantra.

    Diane Dimond's official website is http://DianeDimond.net She can be reached directly at Diane@DianeDimond.net




     

    Ponzarelli Case - Tragedy in Texas
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 31.07.2008
    Link to this news item: [0015]
     
    TRAGEDY IN TEXAS
    Here is the sad story of Jean Ponzanelli´s sentence. In my opinion, this is another ¨plea bargain¨ engineered by a ¨public defender¨ - and it is no bargain at all! Jean was 17 when arrested, he´s 19 now, and after 3 years in prison, he´ll be deported - all for consensual sex between two teens!

    If you can, please go to KXAN.com and send your comments. So far, there are many comments denouncing Jean´s sentence as unjust, including some really good ones from Mary Sue, the RSOL Texas contact, and from Jan Fewell, a local, very brave woman who has championed Jean´s case. And Jean is not alone! At least 6 other teenaged boys in Williamson County Texas have received similar or longer sentences for consensual sex with other teens. Justice in America!?

    You may also email Jan Fewell - msfewell@sbcglobal.net - to find out more and to offer your support to her in this difficult and sometimes lonely struggle in Texas!
    Alex Marbury

    From Texas TV station, KXAN, July 30, 2008

    AUSTIN, Texas (KXAN) -- A 20-year-old Williamson County man was sentenced on Wednesday to three years in a state penitentiary for attempted sexual assault of a child.

    Jean Karlo Ponzanelli confessed to State District Judge Burt Carnes that he was guilty of the charge of "attempted sexual assault" on a 13-year-old Round Rock girl when he was 17 years old.

    The defendant's supporters argued the girl lied about her age, telling Ponzanelli she was actually 15 when they had consensual sex. Had she actually been 15, Ponzanelli could have fallen into a "Romeo and Juliet" exception to the law, making prosecution unlikely. Instead, the girl was actually 13 years old.

    Originally, Ponzanelli was charged with "aggravated sexual assault on a child," and a conviction on that charge could have resulted in a sentence of 5 to 99 years. In a plea bargain agreement reached on Wednesday, prosecutors accepted a guilty plea to the reduced attempted assault charge, and Ponzanelli was placed on probation.

    Critics, however, said the requirements of that probation were excessively harsh and he was "set up to fail."

    When Ponzanelli violated terms of his probation, he was arrested again and the state asked the court to send him to prison. Courthouse sources said prosecutors offered an eight-year sentence, but during a docket call on Wednesday in Carnes 368th District Court, negotiations continued between court-appointed defense attorney Keith Lauerman and Assistant District Attorney Phil Grant. The talks resulted in an offer of three years in prison, which Ponzanelli accepted.

    Complicating matters, Ponzanelli accepted the original plea bargain, not knowing that he is not classified as an American citizen.

    In a telephone interview, he told KXAN Austin News that his parents, an Italian man and a Mexican woman, brought him to the U.S. when he was a toddler. He said they never told him he was not an American, and he grew up thinking he was.

    Because Ponzanelli is not an American citizen, he is subject to deportation to Mexico when his prison term is over. Although he is fluent in Spanish, Ponzanelli has never lived in Mexico and worries about making a life for himself there.

    Friends and family of other defendants around the state in similar situations said they will lobby state lawmakers to change the law when they convene in Austin next January.

    Lauerman told Austin News he will "make myself available" to help with the cause.

    Prominent Austin attorney Jim Sawyer, who represented Ponzanelli at one point, has spoken out in favor of tweaking the law.

    Sawyer said, despite what he called "good intentions" behind the law, too many young people are getting unfairly caught up in its harsh requirements.

    KXAN Austin News reporter Jim Swift will report on Wednesday's developments in the Ponzanelli case and the implications for possible changes in the law on the 10 p.m. newscas

    Do you agree with Ponzanelli's sentence in this case? Why or why not?
    Contact the KXAN.com Feedback Forum at www.kxan.com., filling out their feedback form and submitting your comment.


     

    SO CLEAR VIDEO ON LUBBOCK TV WITCHHUNT
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 26.07.2008
    Link to this news item: [0014]
     
    The So Clear media group has done a Google video with Tom Madison to critique the trashy Lubbock TV 11 witchhunt against ¨sex offenders,¨ which placed their places of emplyment on tv: we congratulate SoClear for the rapid response, and urge people to see the video. Here´s the url:


    go to:

    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4424664413053492160&hl=en
     

    Penn. to join 24 other states in GPS for SO´s
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 23.07.2008
    Link to this news item: [0013]
     
    By MARTHA RAFFAELE, Associated Press Writer
    July 23, 2008

    HARRISBURG, Pa. - Pennsylvania's auditor general wants his state to join the estimated two dozen others that track some released sex offenders with global positioning satellite technology (GPS).

    Auditor General Jack Wagner on Tuesday urged state lawmakers to require at least five years of GPS monitoring for sex offenders who do not comply with Megan's Law, which requires them to register their address with state police upon their release from prison.

    The law also should be revised to mandate similar tracking of sexually violent predators whose victims are children immediately after they are released, Wagner said.

    Wagner, who is seeking re-election this year to a second four-year term, previously criticized the state's Megan's Law enforcement in a 2006 audit that found state police had not verified the whereabouts of hundreds of sex offenders.

    State law currently allows, but does not mandate, the use of sex offender GPS monitoring by county probation authorities and the state Board of Probation and Parole.

    At least 24 other states have laws requiring GPS monitoring of certain sex offenders, and 14 of Pennsylvania's 67 counties are using GPS tracking for that purpose, Wagner said.

    Gov. Ed Rendell's administration had no immediate comment on Wagner's recommendations. Spokesmen for Rendell and the state police said their offices needed to evaluate them.

    Republican Sens. Jane Orie and John Rafferty said they are planning to introduce legislation that would require wider use of GPS tracking. They said they hope a bill will be considered when the Legislature returns to Harrisburg in the fall.

    The recommendations were included in a report Wagner released at a Capitol news conference. Auditors determined in early June that the state lost track of more than 900 sex offenders, or about 10 percent of all registered sex offenders, based on apparently outdated addresses in Pennsylvania's Megan's Law registry.

    "This is very disturbing to me ... and should be to every Pennsylvanian, and quite frankly, is unacceptable," Wagner said.

    GPS systems allow tracking of offenders using a monitor attached to an ankle bracelet and a small tracking device that offenders must carry with them whenever they leave the house. The device transmits information that allows authorities to view an offender's location on a computerized map.

    The probation and parole board is preparing to embark in the coming weeks on a pilot program to test the equipment of eight GPS vendors, spokeswoman Sherry Tate said. She did not know where the testing would be performed or how many sex offenders would be involved.

    A previous test program that ran between October 2005 and June 2006 was riddled with problems, such as lost or blocked signals, she said. "We found the technology was not sufficient at the time," Tate said.

    Counties that use GPS tracking typically pay for it by charging sex offenders one-time hookup fees of $30 to $50 and daily rates of $5 to $20 to cover the equipment costs, Wagner said.

     

    Nevada SO Laws Criticized
    By Alex Marbury <alexm60@fastmail.fm>
    Posted on 10.07.2008
    Link to this news item: [0012]
     

    Sex offender law controversial:
    Will the change in Nevada sex offenders laws really protect?

    July 7, 2008
    By by F.T. Norton
    Appeal Staff Writer,

    If a new Nevada law concerning sex offenders goes into effect, Carson
    City will go from zero, to an estimated 23, Tier 3 offenders - a term
    once used to identify an offender who was believed most likely to commit a sexual crime again.

    The increase in Tier 3 offenders won't be because those people suddenly moved here. They've lived here all along, deemed either Tier 2, "moderate risk" or Tier 1, "low risk" under Nevada's former system based on a individual assessment of an offender's risk to the community.

    Buckling under the pressure to enact the federal Adam Walsh Child
    Protection and Safety Act rather than lose out on tens of thousands of dollars in federal funding, Nevada legislators adopted the new system which replaces the individualized