For the first time, police departments across Cleveland's Cuyahoga County have the chance to all follow the same rules when investigating sex crimes, reports the Cleveland Plain Dealer. A policy put together after months of work by police, prosecutors, nurses, and victim advocates will be unveiled at a news conference today. The collaboration took off at the urging of County Executive Ed FitzGerald after the Plain Dealer reported that the majority of police departments in the county -- 46 of 59 -- did not have a stand-alone policy for investigating sex crimes and that among those that did, the procedures varied widely.
Yet to be seen is how many of the cities, villages, townships, and other law enforcement agencies will embrace the recommended policy, which in 11 pages outlines steps for responding to a report of sexual assault. The policy covers such topics as which area hospitals are best suited to treat victims and collect evidence and how to gather information sensitively from victims who have undergone a traumatic attack. The policy also suggests that reports should be made on all sexual assaults. The Cuyahoga County Police Chiefs Association has approved the guidelines.
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The issue of sexual assaults on American Indian women has become one of the major sources of discord in the current debate between the White House and the House of Representatives over the latest reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, says the New York Times. One in three American Indian women have been raped or have experienced an attempted rape, says the Justice Department. Their rate of sexual assault is more than twice the national average.
Women’s advocates say no place is more dangerous than Alaska’s isolated villages, where there are no roads in or out, and where people are further cut off by undependable telephone, electrical, and Internet service. A Senate version of VAWA, passed with broad bipartisan support, would grant new powers to tribal courts to prosecute non-Indians suspected of sexually assaulting their Indian spouses or domestic partners. House Republicans and some Senate Republicans oppose the provision as a dangerous expansion of the tribal courts’ authority, and it was excluded from the version that the House passed last Wednesday.
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By Kevin Kearon
Society has little tolerance for any form of sexual abuse of children, especially in a school setting. All the more reason to remember that the only thing worse than the sexual abuse of an innocent child is a false accusation of the sexual abuse of an innocent child.
Read full entry »The Justice Department assured a federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., Thursday that it is making "a lot of progress" in clearing up a backlog of cases in which it seeks to indefinitely detain accused sexual predators, reports USA Today. The paper reported in March that the department's effort to lock up accused predators after the end of their sentences has been fraught with long delays and questionable medical determinations that kept dozens of men incarcerated without a trial for as long as five years even though they did not meet the requirements for detention.
Fourth Circuit judges have said that they are concerned by the long delays in handling those cases and have suggested that they could threaten the defendants' constitutional due process rights. During two hearings, Justice Department attorney Ian Samuel told the judges that those cases are "moving through the pipeline" and that the process for deciding who should remain in prison is "moving toward the sort of system that Congress and the BOP (Bureau of Prisons) always envisioned."
Read full entry »A new U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics study provides the most dramatic evidence yet of a nationwide, systemic crisis of sexual victimization in U.S. prisons, jails, and community corrections facilities, says the advocacy group Just Detention International. Of former state prisoners surveyed, 9.6 percent reported being sexually abused during their most recent period of detention, says “Sexual Victimization Reported by Former State Prisoners, 2008.” Gay and bisexual prisoners were disproportionately targeted in both men’s and women’s prisons; 39 percent of gay male inmates reported being assaulted by other prisoners.
Almost half (46.3 percent) of prisoners who reported to a corrections official that they had been sexually abused by a staff member were themselves written up for an infraction. When prisoners reported sexual abuse by other inmates, they were just as likely to be punished themselves (28.5 percent) as to get to talk to an investigator (28.3 percent) or to see their abuser punished (28.6 percent). More than a third (37 percent) of prisoners who reported to staff that they had been abused by another prisoner said that facility staff did not respond at all. “With such blatant retaliation for reporting abuse, it’s no wonder the vast majority of prisoner rape survivors choose to remain silent,” said Lovisa Stannow of Just Detention International. “The failure of many corrections officials to treat sexual abuse within their facilities as a serious crime — and the cynicism of punishing those who report having been abused — is simply stunning.”
Read full entry »The Manhattan district attorney using a sex trafficking charge, added to New York State law five years ago, that is helping to redefine how law enforcement...
Read full entry »Forty years after the creation of Title IX, the federal gender-equity law that made headlines mostly on the sports pages, it is now transforming how colleges must respond to allegations of sexual violence, reports USA Today. The reasoning: Title IX's key language, running barely 30 words, forbids sex-based discrimination that denies access to educational opportunity. It's long established that sexual discrimination and harassment can create an atmosphere that denies women their right to education. What's newer is applying the logic to even a single episode of sexual assault.
Typically, colleges enjoy wide leeway in responding to student misconduct, whether that means using a disciplinary board to enforce their own rules or simply punting the matter to law enforcement. But as Title IX is now interpreted — and would be reinforced under a new version of the Violence Against Women Act awaiting a Senate vote — colleges must respond if a sexual assault is reported, even if prosecutors refuse to get involved. Moreover, they face often precise instructions from the government for conducting their investigations and proceedings, and even the standard of proof to use. Victims' advocates welcome what they call an overdue push for colleges to take seriously a problem they've long swept under the rug.
Read full entry »Some states are wrangling with the question of how to make sex registry fair and reasonable while complying with federal mandates, reports Stateline. In Missouri, one of only 15 states that has substantially complied with the federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, Republican Rep. Rodney Schad has crafted legislation to create a tier system so that only the most dangerous offenders are listed publicly. Currently, anyone convicted of any type of sex crime, from public urination to child molestation, is placed on the list. "There's no way to tell who's dangerous and who isn't," says Schad.
Missouri is not the only state pushing back against the strictest registry requirements. Georgia, which had one of the toughest sex offender laws in the nation, scaled back its registration requirements in 2010 for people who had committed crimes such as false imprisonment or non-sexual kidnapping. This immediately removed 819 people from the registry. "What you're seeing with Missouri and other states that are coming into compliance," says Elizabeth Pyke, director of government affairs at the National Criminal Justice Association, "is that they're trying to get to that balance between what they feel is a good system for their state and what keeps them in line with the national rules."
Read full entry »The U.S. Secret Service has placed 11 agents on administrative leave amid allegations that the men brought prostitutes to their hotel rooms in Cartagena, Colombia, on Wednesday night and that a dispute ensued with one of the women over payment, the Washington Post reports. Secret Service Assistant Director Paul Morrissey said the agents had violated the service’s “zero-tolerance policy on personal misconduct” during their trip to prepare for President Obama’s arrival at an international summit.
Rep. Peter King (R-NY), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said Secret Service officials conducting an internal investigation told him that the staff at the Hotel Caribe summoned local police after discovering a woman in the room of one agent after 7 a.m., against the hotel’s policy for visitors of paying guests. King praised the agency for removing the men, but he added that “everything they did was a violation of proper conduct.” He said, “First of all, to be getting involved with prostitutes in a foreign country can leave yourself vulnerable to blackmail and threats. To be bringing prostitutes or almost anyone into a security zone when you’re supposed to protect the president is totally wrong.”
Read full entry »Authorities fear that an Indiana man arrested on a single count of sexual exploitation of children might figure in a nationwide case of Internet sex crime with perhaps hundreds of young victims. If true, says the Indianapolis Star, it would rank as one of the broadest cases of "sextortion" on record, federal officials say. The FBI and U.S. attorney's office released a police booking mug shot of Richard Leon Finkbiner, hoping his photo can generate leads that will allow them to identify children pictured in thousands of sexually explicit videos that authorities say they found on Finkbiner's computer.
Finkbiner, 39, was arrested at his Brazil, In., home. Federal officials were led to Finkbiner through complaints from two 14-year-old boys, who went to police in their home states of Michigan and Maryland saying they were victims of what authorities call "sextortion." Sextortion is the blackmailing of people by threatening to publicly disclose sexually explicit photos of them. Finkbiner was arrested Friday. After being shown a photo of one of the boys by police, Finkbiner told authorities "he had induced or coerced the production of videos and images of so many people engaged in sexually explicit conduct that he could not readily recognize every individual." The FBI says he confessed to the Internet sexual exploitation of "at least 100 individuals."
Read full entry »The Missouri House gave initial approval to legislation that could drastically cut back the state’s sex offender registry rolls, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The proposal faces further votes before it becomes law, but it received overwhelmingly bi-partisan support. The legislation would eliminate mandatory sex offender registry for some crimes including promoting obscenity, and it would create a way for sex offenders to come off the list early based on the severity of offenses.
Representatives say the bill is an attempt to trim back what they see as the state's far-reaching sex offender registry laws. Currently, Missouri has more than 12,000 people on its sex offender registry. Crimes range from extreme rape cases to consensual sex with minors. The new law could cut as many as 5,000 people in its first year and 1,000 people each year after, according to a fiscal study.
Read full entry »Jury selection is to start next week in the case of Monsignor William Lynn, formerly the Archdiocese of Philadelphia's point person for allegations of clerical abuse, NPR reports. "He willingly oversaw numerous reports of child sex abuse," says Cardozo law Prof. Marci Hamilton. "And he willingly put these men in positions where they had second, third, fourth opportunities to abuse children in new settings." In most cases, the statute of limitations barred criminal charges. two cases have not expired, and prosecutors say Lynn criminally endangered two young men, allegedly raped when they were 10 and 14, by looking the other way.
Although other senior Catholic officials have been criminally charged for allegedly covering up sex abuse claims, Lynn is the first to go to trial. "Church people are watching this around the country very, very closely," says Nicholas Cafardi, dean emeritus and law professor at Duquesne Law School in Pittsburgh.
Read full entry »Amid successes in New York City’s fight to drive down crime, street prostitution is a stubborn exception, reports the New York Times. Though the police deploy various stings and strategies to clean up neighborhoods, prostitution-related arrests are logged at a fairly steady clip, averaging around 4,200 per year since 2006. Market forces and the Internet have pushed some sex work off the street, to where clients with more time and more money go.
Such indoor workers include escorts, who work in brothels or independently, in their own homes; strippers who connect with prospective clients in bars and make dates for later meetings; and dominatrixes, according to a report by the Urban Justice Center’s Sex Workers Project. This has not diminished the vibrancy and persistence of the old-fashioned street hustle. Using decoys armed with remote audio systems and aided by “arrest teams” and undercover officers, New York police over three days last month made 195 arrests and seized 55 vehicles in what police officials called Operation Losing Proposition. The crackdown spanned all five boroughs in 28 precincts.
Read full entry »As law enforcement officers and policy makers toughen prosecutions for the distribution and possession of child pornography, they are encountering increasing resistance from federal judges in what has become a caustic conflict over the appropriate punishment for a heinous crime, the Boston Globe reports. In 2010, federal judges deviated below advisory sentencing guidelines in child porn cases 43 percent of the time, copared with 18 percent for other crimes, says the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
The sexual abuse of pupils at Miramonte Elementary School in Los Angeles fits the pattern of other similar cases: vulnerable children, plied with attention and gifts and groomed to trust adult predators, reports USA Today. At Miramonte, the victims could hardly have been more disadvantaged: The 1,400 students are virtually all from poor Latino homes, a majority from immigrant families where English isn't spoken at home, and some with parents lacking legal immigrant status. It's a voiceless community where fear is ingrained — fear of authority, fear of the police, fear of immigration enforcement, fear of retribution.
The hard-pressed barrio school is just the kind of place where an adult with bad intentions could take advantage of a child, knowing there was little chance a victimized family would report the acts. Or if they did, little chance they would be believed. "You have lots of the very poor who don't even know what their rights are," says Martha Escutia, a former state senator who once represented the neighborhood. "You have the undercurrent of immigration, undercurrent of poverty. Miramonte is not Malibu. It's not a sophisticated community. It's a perfect recipe for a predator."
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