Patty Wetterling lost a son to the actions of a sex offender. But she now has misgivings about a sex offender registry she helped create.

Wetterling’s son Jacob was abducted and killed in 1989 in central Minnesota by an area man. After Jacob’s disappearance, Wetterling worked to establish a sex offender registry that would help flag offenders for law enforcement. (The man who 27 years later admitted to Jacob’s abduction and killing would not have actually been on such a registry because he’d never been charged or convicted of a sex crime.)

Wetterling and others are urging the Legislature to consider reforming the registry so it doesn’t cast such a wide net, snagging a high number of juvenile offenders, some who haven’t even had a conviction or had committed more minor offenses, such as public urination.

And getting off the list is difficult. Attorney Jim Fleming, a former chief public defender in Mankato who now works in Ramsey County, told the Star Tribune that a man in his 30s came to him because he was put on the registry as a 13-year-old. His 10-year period on the list restarted after a disorderly conduct charge, and then again after another unrelated charge. Fleming had to tell the man there was no way to appeal his time on the list.

The Legislature needs to review the registry and change it so that youth who don’t belong on the list stay off of it.

Read Full Article

A spike in coronavirus-related deaths at a state-run psychiatric hospital in Fresno County has angered and alarmed patients, who blame hospital staff for a massive outbreak that infected hundreds and killed more than a dozen patients over the past six months.

One patient who spoke with The Bee said he struggled to bring attention to the outbreak at Coalinga State Hospital in Fresno County. He said he’s been “ignored” and “neglected” for one simple reason — most of the patients in Coalinga are rapists, child molesters, and sexually violent predators.

The Coalinga facility has 1,286 beds and treats sexually violent predators, offenders with mental health disorders, and a group of severely disabled people who haven’t committed crimes but represent a danger to themselves or others.

A total of 20 residents have died, including 18 in the past six months, after testing positive for COVID-19, according to the California Department of State Hospital’s patient data tracker.

Department officials said mask-wearing among staff was “strictly enforced” and that the pandemic had taken a toll on the hospital’s residents just as it had on the population at large. They added that the hospital had and continues to clean “patient care areas” and other locations within the facility frequently.

However, the hospital hasn’t explained the winter outbreak, which was among the worst in the state’s five psychiatric facilities. At least 491 patients as of last week tested positive for the virus — the second-highest tally yet recorded behind Patton State Psychiatric Hospital in San Bernardino County.

Read full article

However, given lessons learned about the linkages between moral panic and legislation in other justice contexts (e.g., juvenile “superpredators” and waiver/transfer laws), we question the degree to which public perceptions about the characteristics of persons who commit sexual offenses are accurate — particularly of juveniles who commit these types of offenses.

Specifically, we ask: If public sentiment drives public policy in a democracy, how accurate is the information they are basing their perceptions/attitudes on that ultimately frame legal responses to these juveniles? We propose here that the larger societal understanding of and reaction to youth who have committed a sexual offense has been disproportionately severe in comparison to the risk posed by these youth and what we understand about youth development and resiliency. 

Our findings from a pilot study exploring public perceptions of these youth suggest practice and policy reform efforts should continue to incorporate a substantial public education and prevention component.

Over 200,000 individuals on a sexual offense registry are there as a result of sexual offenses they committed as a youth. Many of these registrants have been incarcerated or placed on probation due to their offense and are trying to re-enter and function successfully in society. Registration requirements often include limitations on where one can live, restrictions on computer and internet access, participation in mandatory treatment and following various reporting and notification procedures (e.g., local law enforcement, neighbors).

While these responses are often presented in the spirit of accountability and community safety, they have a substantial stigmatizing effect and potentially disrupt protective factors (e.g., introducing challenges to securing employment). These collateral consequences have been a major focus of research and efforts to reform and better design responses to this category of offense.

Youth tend to follow adolescent-limited sexual offending trajectories, meaning they no longer offend with little or even no intervention as they age and mature into adulthood. Longitudinal research concerning this population demonstrates that around 5% or less commit another sexual offense and juvenile offending is not predictive of adult offending. Further, paraphilia (e.g., highly deviant and persistent sexual attraction to very young children) is rare in juveniles.

Read the remainder of the piece here at Juvenile Justice Information Exchange.

The most common scam is that you may receive a call claiming that you have a warrant out for your arrest. Do not fall for that one either. Law enforcement will not call you demanding money in the form of pre-paid gift
cards or bitcoin to resolve an arrest warrant. LJC’s advice is that you do not engage with anyone claiming to be law enforcement, an IRS agent, or from the Social Security Administration. Neither the SSA nor the IRS make such phone calls which means any such call is a scam. The scammer will tell you  that your social security number is being used fraudulently and that you are subject to arrest. If you do not recognize the voice of the caller, the best advice would be to ask for a badge number and then call the agency to confirm the officer’s identify. That will outrage the scammer and they will threaten you even more. Do not be bullied because a legitimate officer will understand what you are doing.

Rick Dean

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Tuesday signed a bill that would eliminate school safety zones and certain appearance requirements in Michigan’s Sex Offender Registration Act.

The changes, made to comply with federal court orders that called the current law unenforceable, were among 80 bills passed by the Legislature during its lame duck session and signed by Whitmer on Tuesday.

The bill made several tweaks to the law, with the largest being the elimination of school safety zones, which prohibit registered sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools.

The changes also would eliminate mandates requiring immediate in-person appearances to update changes to offenders’ email addresses, street addresses or vehicle information. The new law lengthens the time period for reporting those changes and allows state police to create a more manageable system for reporting.

The legislation requires offenders to be removed from the registry if their crime had been expunged or if the individual was sentenced under the Holmes Youthful Trainee Act.

“We needed to find a way to rework it if we wanted a registry at all,” bill sponsor Rep. Jim Lower, R-Eureka Township, said upon the bill’s House passage earlier this month.

The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of appeals ruled several years ago that school zone bans and reporting requirements enacted after the initial law was passed amounted to unconstitutionally retroactive punishment. They also were “very burdensome” to the point that they resembled “the ancient punishment of banishment,” the court said.

In 2019, Detroit U.S. District Judge Robert Cleland ordered the Legislature to change the law or lose it altogether since the state essentially would be maintaining a legally unenforceable law.

If they didn’t change the law by March 20, Cleland said in February, the act would no longer be enforceable against those who offended before 2011, when the immediate reporting requirements were added. The school safety zone language was added in 2006.

Read full article

In early 2012, more than eight years ago, five people challenged Michigan’s Sex Offenders Registration Act (SORA) in court, arguing that the registry branded them as dangerous “sex offenders” without any individual review.

One was a man — we’ll call him John — who met a woman at a club open only to those 18 and older. They slept together and only later did he learn that she was actually 15. They fell in love, eventually married, and now have three kids. But due to her age, John was prosecuted and put on the sex offender registry. As a result, he has lost countless jobs, was often home­less and unable to live with his family, and couldn’t even attend his own kids’ basketball games.

Another man in the lawsuit — we’ll call him Paul — never even committed a sex offense. In 1990 when he was 20, he tried to rob a McDonald’s. But because he threatened the manager’s teenage son — an offense charged as “child kidnapping” even though it had no sexual component whatever — he was placed on the sex offender registry for life.

John and Paul won their case in 2016, when the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that SORA is unconstitutional. The court not only found that Michigan treats registrants as “moral lepers,” but it also concluded, based on a mountain of evidence, that registries don’t make people or communities safer.

As the court pointed out, registries may actually increase offending and have “at best, no impact on recidivism,” probably because they make it so “hard for registrants to get and keep a job, find housing, and reintegrate into their communities.”

Despite the Court’s ruling, and despite the scientific consensus that registries don’t do anything to prevent sex offenses, neither the Michigan Legislature nor the executive branch did anything to reform our state’s registry. Instead, Michigan continues to waste millions of taxpayer dollars on running the registry, paying legal bills to defend it, and  incarcerating people for technical registry violations, not to mention forcing local police departments to spend scarce public safety dollars on pointless tasks like tracking whether a registrant borrows a car. That’s all money that could have been more effectively invested in survivor, prevention and rehabilitative services.

Read the rest of the piece here at the Detroit Free Press.

For 8 years I have taught a college course entitled Sex Crimes. The course uses history and theory to critically examine sex crime laws and sexual offending behavior. In the course, I aim to provide an in-depth examination of the causes and responses to sexual offending and engage students with a non-stereotypical view of offenders as well as an understanding of the many legal controls with which individuals must comply.

Each semester teaching this course, I struggle with the extreme views that students have of individuals who commit a sexual offense: the individual is a pervert, a monster, a stranger waiting to kidnap and rape a child. Students remark that individuals who commit a sex offense are sick and cannot be cured, deserve to be castrated or executed, and should be locked away forever.

What students don’t realize at the start of the semester is that a sex offender in the eyes of the law can be someone who urinated in public in a school zone, a 21-year-old who had sexual relations with his 15-year-old girlfriend whom he later married, an individual caught viewing online child pornography, an individual conversing in a chat room with someone who they think is a minor but is actually a cop, or an individual that kidnapped and raped a child (to name only a few). These are extremely varied acts in their impact, but they all fall under the umbrella term sex offender. . . .

Society refers to those who have committed a sex offense as a sexual offender as if that person is always an offender. If you played sports in college, are you considered an athlete still at 50? If you stole a candy bar from a convenience store as a child, do you remain a thief forever? If you cheated on one of your partners, are you an adulterer for life?

Part of understanding the stigma against people who have committed a sex offense is understanding language and labels. These are individuals who committed one bad act, one mistake, at one period during their life, with significant variance in seriousness across individuals. This should in no way dismiss the powerful impact of a sexual offense on the victim! An understanding of labels is simply to contemplate the social and psychological impact of a lifetime scarlet letter. So instead we talk in class about a person required to register rather than a registered sex offender as if this is their only identity; we talk about a sex offense registry instead of a sex offender registry. . . .

Overwhelmingly, Americans get information regarding crime from the media. Consequently, what is portrayed as reality is reified and disseminated by viewers. When assessing media representations of sex offenses and offenders, the result is fear, the reinforcement of stereotypes, and the perpetuation of misinformation. Representations of sex crimes have more to do with journalistic appeal than facts.

Typical sexual crimes, those that are not sensational or violent, or crimes that involve a known perpetrator to the victim, are viewed as routine and not worthy of media coverage. The media has a way of transforming atypical crimes into a perceived major societal epidemic. [emphasis is editor’s]

In the U.S., we punish harshly with minimal attempts at rehabilitation. Yet this has proven unsuccessful. The media provides distorted and salacious coverage of sex offenses, leading the public to believe they are at serious risk of a sexual violation by a repeat offender, which has a direct impact on the continued passage of harsh policies. . . .

Education may serve to influence public perception of sex offenses, offenders, and, in turn, of appropriate criminal justice responses. Research suggests that educating the public and dispelling myths regarding sex crimes may lead to support of less harsh, more rational legislation. . . .

What society needs is a basic factual understanding of sex crimes and a media that correspondingly reflects these facts. Education can translate to laws that increase public safety, maximize taxpayer dollars, and increase the potential for those convicted of an offense to live productively upon release. . . .

Read Dr. Zilney’s complete piece here at Medium.

As the coronavirus established a foothold in southern New Mexico’s Otero County Prison Facility in mid-May, state officials quietly moved 39 inmates out of the massive complex near the Texas border to another prison near Santa Fe.

The inmates shared something in common: None was a sex offender.

In the days before the 39 departed the massive correctional complex where New Mexico’s only sex offender treatment program is housed, officials were still transferring sex offenders from other state prisons into Otero. It was a routine practice they had yet to stop, even though more than a dozen COVID-19 cases had already emerged elsewhere in the prison.

Six weeks later, 434 inmates — or 80% — have the virus, within a prison population that’s now entirely composed of people who, at one time or another, were convicted of a state sex offense.

Three have died. Eight more lie ill at University Hospital in El Paso.

One of New Mexico’s most crowded prisons, Otero is the only state lockup with more than one COVID-19 case. And yet no prisoner from the facility has been released early under an executive order issued by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on April 6 because sex offenders are not eligible.

Prisoners from the state’s 10 other facilities have gotten out, however, documents New Mexico In Depth obtained through a public records request show.

The revelations come through more than a week of reporting by New Mexico In Depth, and confirmation from Corrections Department spokesman Eric Harrison.

The timeline of inmate transfers as the virus crept into the prison is “really concerning,” said Lalita Moskowitz, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico.

“It indicates that Corrections knew that there was likely to be an outbreak or that there was some danger or risk to people housed in that facility,” Moskowitz said. “And they made a very clear decision about who in that facility was worth saving during a pandemic, and did so earlier than they were showing any sort of concern to the public.”

State officials didn’t seek to create a sex-offender-only prison purposely by sending the 39 inmates to Santa Fe, Harrison said. Rather, they did it “for COVID reasons,” he said, adding that they had been housed in a separate area of the Otero prison, away from the sex offenders.

“It wasn’t a specific policy change or big decision to make Otero the only sex-offender-only prison,” he said. “After that first inmate tested positive, we needed space to create a quarantine unit.”

As of Thursday, there had been no discussion in the Lujan Grisham administration about revisiting the criteria in the executive order on early release, including the provision excluding sex offenders, Harrison told NMID.

That’s despite the outbreak in Otero County.

Read the full article

I didn’t have to wait long for my answer or the proposal. On Friday of the same week, New Mexico’s attorney general, Hector Balderas, announced he wants to change a law that allowed billionaire businessman Jeffrey Epstein to avoid registering as a sex offender in the state.

Legislators need to stop doing this! Waiting for an extremely rare, headline grabbing occurrence to happen and then coming up with knee-jerk legislation to serve as a “fix”, that does nothing to fix any perceived problem and that will have no impact on Epstein but will undoubtedly punish people who have nothing to do with him. We’ve seen it happen time and time again.

After the murder of Jessica Lunsford, States across the country passed “Jessica Lunsford Acts” imposing harsh punishments for a horrific act committed by John Couey, who was never subjected to any of the Jessica Lunsford Acts and will never be. Similarly, Jesse Timmendequas, who raped and killed Megan Kanka, will never be subjected to “Megan’s Law” because he’s serving a life sentence in New Jersey. The year after the murder of Cherish Perrywinkle, Florida passed a bunch of new restrictions for persons required to register as sex offenders, making it “scorched earth”, but the target of that punishment, Donald Smith, will never experience the scorched earth because he’ll be in prison for the rest of his life, while tens of thousands of first-time, non-violent offenders are serving his punishment.

Assuming the government is now going to hand Epstein the punishment they believe he should have gotten more than a decade ago, he may never be returning to New Mexico. Still, presuming he does; his “Zorro Ranch” in New Mexico sits on thousands of acres of land and even has it’s own airstrip and airplane hangar. Do you really think the burdens of registration (like ostracism, vigilantism, finding employment and a place to live) are going to impact him? Hell no! Who will it impact? The potentially thousands of hard-working people who have paid their debt to society, redeemed themselves and are now living a law abiding life, who may decades later have to retroactively be added to the New Mexico registry and will lose their jobs, homes and families.

The post How will the Epstein case change New Mexico’s registration laws? appeared first on Florida Action Committee.