News Items
Headlines About the Registry Hot Off the Presses
| |
Table of Contents
| 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 o | |
