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 »Dozens of sex offenders in a federal prison in Butner, N.C., have served their time and now are being imprisoned not for what they did, but what they might...
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 »The South Carolina Supreme Court has declared lifetime GPS monitoring of sex offenders unconstitutional, says the Sentencing Law and Policy blog. In a split opinion, a majority of the court concurred with one justice who concluded that the "challenged mandatory lifetime, non reviewable satellite monitoring provision [of the law] is arbitrary."
The court ruled in an appeal by Jennifer Dykes, who contended that lifetime GPS monitoring violated five constitutional rights. An opinion that got only two of five votes by justices said the monitoring violated her "substantive due process rights." Blogger Douglas Berman of the Ohio State University law school said the ruling might "have ripple effects in at least a few other jurisdictions."
Read full entry »Child-pornography offenders are the focus of an intense debate within the legal community as to whether the federal sentences they face have become too severe, the Associated Press reports. By year's end, the U.S. Sentencing Commission plans to release a report that's likely to propose changes on child-porn sentencing guidelines. The issue "is highly charged, both emotionally and politically," said a commissioner, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell.
Many federal judges and public defenders say repeated moves by Congress to toughen the penalties over 25 years have badly skewed the guidelines, to the point where offenders who possess and distribute child pornography can go to prison for longer than those who actually rape or sexually abuse a child. Some prosecutors and members of Congress, as well as advocates for sexual-abuse victims, oppose any push for leniency. At a public hearing in February, a victim lamented to the Sentencing Commission that child pornography offenders "are being entertained by my shame and pain." The commission report will be submitted to Congress, which could shelve it or incorporate its recommendations into new legislation.
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."
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By Hannah Rappleye
Some 20 states now have civil commitment programs. But ballooning costs and court challenges are forcing many to re-assess.
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By Ted Gest
Nearly six years after the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act was enacted, the U.S. Justice Department is beginning to penalize many of the states that have failed to follow its provisions.
Read full entry »After Osama bin Laden was killed in May, the FBI started seeking fugitives who could fill his place on the bureau’s 10 Most Wanted list. The New York Times says it's more complicated than finding any old criminal who has committed a high-profile crime. The bureau has been trying to highlight dangerous fugitives who may have been hiding in plain sight but could be recognized by distinctive features.
Now bin Laden's place has been filled by Eric Toth, a Washington, D.C.-area tacher accused of possessing child porn. It was the first time since 2009 that the FBI has added a fugitive to the list. Using most-wanted posters to enlist the public’s help in catching criminals dates to J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure in the early 1930s, when the face of the notorious bank robber John Dillinger was on a “public enemies list.”
Automatically making juvenile sex offenders register with law-enforcement agencies for life and putting their names and photos on the Internet are cruel and unusual punishments, the Ohio Supreme Court said yesterday, in another rebuke of the state’s sex-offender law, the Columbus Dispatch reports. In a 5-2 decision, justices said lifelong registration and notification requirements for certain juveniles, even if they can be lifted after 25 years, are “extraordinary.”
“It will be a constant cloud, a once-every-three-month reminder to himself and the world that he cannot escape the mistakes of his youth,” Justice Paul Pfeifer wrote. The high court struck down parts of Ohio’s 2007 Adam Walsh Act, ruling that it unconstitutionally limits judges’ discretion by imposing a punishment that “lasts far longer than the jurisdiction of the juvenile court.” It was the court’s third significant blow to the law in less than two years. Justices in 2010 ruled that the reclassification of 19,000 offenders went against the separation-of-powers doctrine, and in 2011 said the law violated the prohibition against retroactive criminal punishment, which affected 7,000 offenders.
Read full entry »Virginia State Police troopers' duties to check on registered sex offenders could be shifted to unarmed civilians under a little-noticed provision in the two-year state budget pending before the General Assembly, reports the Virginian-Pilot. Tucked into the $85 billion spending blueprint is Gov. Bob McDonnell's proposal to hire 43 "non-sworn" personnel to monitor people "required to comply with the requirements of the Sex Offender Registry." Under the current system, troopers and state parole and probation officers conduct semi-annual residence and employment status checks on thousands of registered offenders.
Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling has said the switch would "free up troopers currently in that unit to get back on the roads" for patrol and other functions. However, the plan has triggered alarm bells for an organization that lobbies to change sex offender laws. Its implementation also is being watched closely by a State Police advocacy group. Mary Devoy, executive director of Reform Sex Offender Laws of Virginia, said: "We understand the state is looking to cut costs, but appointing inexperienced and insensitive rent-a-cops to conduct home and employment checks would be a big mistake."
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 »Miami city commissioners will sue the Florida Department of Corrections in an
attempt to stanch the flow of newly released sexual offenders from state
prisons to city streets and bridge underpasses, the Miami Herald reports.
Six years ago, the federal government set out to detain indefinitely some of the nation's most dangerous sex offenders, keeping them locked up even after their prison sentences had ended. The government has won court approval for detaining just 15 men, reports USA Today. Far more often, men the U.S. Justice Department called "sexually dangerous" predators remained imprisoned for years without a mandatory court hearing before the government was forced to let them go.
The Justice Department has lost or dropped cases against 61 of the 136 men it sought to detain. Some were imprisoned for more than four years without a trial before they were freed. Dozens of others are waiting for their day in court. They remain in a prison unit in Butner, N.C., where authorities and former detainees said explicit drawings of children are commonplace, but where few of the men have received any treatment for the disorders that put them there. Neither the Justice Department nor other watchdog agencies have offered any public assessment of how well the federal civil commitment law works.
Read full entry »The sex industry is moving from the streets to computer screens, and Texas authorities say their efforts to enforce the law and find and protect victims are hampered by the shift, reports the Austin American-Statesman. Detectives have made strides to fight what they describe as a modern-day form of slavery by enhancing their collaboration across jurisdictions and their use of tools on the Web, where victims are easier to hide, predators harder to catch, and evidence tougher and more time-consuming to gather.
Authorities said offline efforts are just as important, such as training officers, emergency responders and residents on how to detect potential sex trafficking circles in their own communities. At its core, social workers and detectives say that the universal model for one of the world's oldest professions remains much the same: men capitalizing on young women. The sex trade no longer is mostly girls hanging around dark city corners looking for business. It is a multibillion-dollar enterprise that has expanded to hundreds of thousands of women advertising — or being forced to advertise — their services on countless online classified ads, teen dating and social networking sites.
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