Polygraph Therapy Faces Scrutiny in Child Porn Case

6-14-17 New York:

MANHATTAN (CN) — After a critical hearing in New York, a spotlight is taking shape on the utility of “therapeutic polygraphs,” a treatment the U.S. probation system has used for decades on sex offenders.

The challenge erupted from a call by Assistant U.S. Attorney Drew Rolle for the court to make sex offender Richard Llanga Moran take a polygraph as a condition of his supervised release.

After serving an 18-month sentence for possessing more than 6,000 photographs and videos of child pornography, Llanga Moran had faced regular therapy sessions as a condition of his five-year term of supervised release.

The therapist he meets with regularly has found Llanga Moran “forthcoming and engaged in sessions,” but prosecutors want a so-called lie-detector test to determine whether Llanga Moran has accepted responsibility for his crime.

Llanga Moran drew the government’s skepticism with his insistence that there is an innocent explanation for the start to his habit. He said he had been trying to download Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” on a file-sharing service, when he stumbled upon the pornography that he found “morbidly intriguing” rather than sexually arousing.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Drew Rolle wants a court-ordered polygraph, but U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto appeared reluctant to grant such relief on June 13 after putting a psychiatrist, a probation officer and several attorneys in the hot seat at a three-hour hearing. ..Continued..

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Colorado sex offender’s lie detector court win could have big impact

10-22-16 Colorado:

In a decision that could have wide-reaching impact, a federal appeals court in Colorado ruled that a convicted sex offender does not have to take a polygraph test as part of his supervised release from prison.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ finding Tuesday overruled a lower court’s decision and agrees with Brian Von Behren that the lie detector examination would violate his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Because polygraphs are used post-conviction on sex crime offenders across the nation, especially in Colorado, the appellate ruling could impact the practice’s implementation in Colorado and beyond, observers say.

David Beller, a criminal defense lawyer with the Denver firm Recht Kornfeld, said that although the ruling does not reflect a change in law, it clarifies a probationer’s right to remain silent when asked about uncharged criminal behavior unrelated to a conviction.

“This decision provides some indication that the legal community’s support for polygraphs as an appropriate and constitutional tool in the treatment of sex offenses is waning,” he added.

Von Behren in 2005 was sentenced in Colorado’s federal court to 121 months in prison and three years of supervised release for receiving and distributing child pornography.

As part of the conditions of his release, Von Behren was ordered to take a sexual history polygraph requiring him to answer four questions about whether he had ever committed illicit sex acts for which he was never charged.

If any crimes were unearthed, they were to be reported to authorities.

Von Behren declined on the basis that the polygraph violated his Fifth Amendment rights, putting him at risk of having his supervised release revoked. The 10th Circuit court agreed.

In the ruling, however, the appellate court wrote a solution to the Fifth Amendment issue would be if the polygraph were used “sensibly” as part of an offender’s probation and not in criminal prosecution.

The court covers a six-state region made up of Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah.

Polygraphs are used as part of sex offenders’ probation across the country.

In Colorado, the state’s Sex Offender Management Board standards and guidelines manual lists polygraph examinations as an important part of a thorough investigation into an offender.

The lie detector results are used in sex offender treatment to improve treatment decisions, deter an offender’s problem behavior and access information about an offender that otherwise might remain a mystery.

Jeanne M. Smith, director of Colorado’s Division of Criminal Justice, which oversees the Sex Offender Management Board, said state legal counsel will review the ruling to determine any possible response.

“Polygraph is a big part of how Colorado treats sex offenders,” said Michael Miner, a professor in the University of Minnesota’s human sexuality program and president of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. “I would assume this is going to have some impact on that if someone can in fact refuse to take the polygraph and if doing so doesn’t jeopardize their standing on probation or within a treatment program.

“It will be interesting to see how the chips fall.”

Kurt Gransee, a criminal defense lawyer in San Antonio who handles several sex crime cases each year, said he thinks attorneys across the country will use the opinion.

“It won’t be binding necessarily in other jurisdictions,” he explained. “But lawyers will go to the reasoning in this case. I think it will be pretty persuasive.”

Court cases challenging lie detector testing for sex offenders have popped up across the nation in recent years.

In January, a New Jersey court upheld the state parole board’s use of lie detectors to monitor sex offenders in the wake of a challenge that likened the practice to coerced interrogations, NJ Advance Media reported.

Michael Woyce, the lawyer who brought that case before the court, said Wednesday that the 10th Circuit’s decision likely will play a part in a similar lie detector challenge he’s working on before the New Jersey Supreme Court.

“We’ll certainly be looking at it,” he said of the Colorado ruling. “It’s probably something we will be submitting as a supplement.”

The U.S. Justice Department can ask for further review on the case from the 10th Circuit or the Supreme Court.

But Eric Wiggam, spokesman for Colorado’s U.S. attorney’s office, which handled the case, said there were no plans to take action on the ruling. Federal prosecutors declined to comment further. ..Continued.. by Jesse Paul

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NJ Court Sets Polygraph Limits for Sex Offenders

1-21-16 New Jersey:

TRENTON, N.J. (CN) - Polygraph testing is par for the course when New Jersey releases sexual offenders on permanent supervision, but the state's parole board is barred from using such tests as evidence, a state appeals court ruled today.

The decision comes in answer to a lawsuit five convicted sex offenders brought in 2013. Linking the tests to parole-status changes in 42 percent of New Jersey cases, the offenders called parole board's use of lie-detector tests tantamount to pursuing thought crimes.

Though the New Jersey Appellate Division upheld the validity of polygraph examinations today, it did so with restrictions.

The court called the tests a "therapeutic tool" when used to help treat sex offenders but "incompetent evidence" when used to punish them.

The five convicted sexual offenders, all of whose names have been redacted from court filings, condemned the polygraph tests as unconstitutional and ineffective.

Parole board officials meanwhile presented their own experts who spoke to recent test revisions and decreasing reliance on the tests.

A lower court ruled in early 2015 that polygraphs were fine for the supervision and treatment of sex offenders, but the court declined to answer the constitutional question of whether the tests as conducted violated prisoner rights.

In its 72-page ruling, the New Jersey Appellate Division rejected the offenders' attempts to invalidate all polygraph testing by the parole board, saying the tests "assist parole officers and treatment professionals in making better-informed decisions as to supervision and treatment."

In addition to barring New Jersey from using the test results to impose sanctions or increased restrictions on monitored sex offenders, the appeals court ordered the parole board to beef up regulations protecting offenders from incriminating themselves.

The parole board's use of the tests to increase restrictions on monitored sex offenders - such as travel bans or restrictions on where a sex offender an live - "clashes with our judiciary's systemic aversion to the evidential use of polygraphs," Judge Jack Sabatino wrote for the court.

Courts in New Jersey and elsewhere have for years shied away from taking polygraph test results as gospel, noting the proven ability for certain individuals to "beat" the test and the degree of unreliability test results can have.

While most states have banned the use of lie detector test results as evidence, nearly all states use the test for post-conviction screening.

Polygraph tests typically rely on muscle and pulse sensors attached all over the subject's body. The tests are thought to have an accuracy rate as high as 90 percent, though critics have argued the error rate can be as high as 29 percent.

New Jersey's parole board has used three types of polygraphs for sexual offenders: those who proclaim their innocence; those who require so-called maintenance exams to verify that their activities outside prison comply with the terms of their supervision; and those under scrutiny by the state when it needs information about their sexual history, interests, and behaviors. After each test, the test administrator is required to go over the results with the offender.

The appellants in the case mainly objected to the maintenance exams, saying the parole board has arbitrarily tightened limitations on offenders' activities. The parole board has countered that it administers those tests only when it has a reasonable belief that the offender has been noncompliant.

Judge Sabatino said policymakers "must not lose sight of this state's long-standing judicial aversion to polygraph evidence."

But "there is a fundamental difference between the evidential use of a polygraph to prove or dispute facts in a court where a person's rights are adjudicated versus a therapeutic context," the ruling continues.

The court also ruled that the polygraph tests did not equal "custodial interrogation" - cases in which a prisoner is queried about crimes without first being warned about his right not to incriminate himself - because the parole board instructs its test examiners to administer Miranda warnings at the beginning of each session.

Another part of the ruling allows the parole board to continue its practice of disallowing offenders from having an attorney present during the test. ..Source.. by NICK RUMMELL

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Who Are Woman Sex Offenders and Why Are They Treated Like Men?

5-2-15 National:

For the first quarter of my life, I didn’t think much about sex offenders. Call it thoughtlessness or a naïve little bubble; it was probably both. This thoughtlessness might not be unique. But I began thinking about sex offenders when, at age 25, I was charged with a sex crime.

I had had sexual contact with my 17-year-old neighbor. I’m not proud of this and, if given the chance, would absolutely reverse that decision. But I slept with him once and joined the burgeoning ranks of women charged with sex offenses.

I think of these ranks both as a demographic and a way of life. These are two ways to approach this one idea, and I think they’re important to understanding the women who are caught up in these crimes.

First of all, the demographic. While women sex offenders are a low portion of the population, they do exist and in higher numbers than before 1994 (when the Jacob Wetterling Improvements Act was established). There is a trend toward sexual contact with teenage males. Often, the women are motivated by a desire for companionship or have a sense that their current adult-age relationships are unfulfilling.

In other instances, the women are prison guards or case managers who have had sex with inmates. In the state of Colorado, any incarcerated person is legally incapable of consenting to sex, so that any sexual contact he or she does have is considered a crime. Once in a while, a woman will have sexual contact with an intellectually disabled person, sometimes without realizing that this person’s consent is not actually legal.

Women very rarely have sexual contact with children younger than 13. I’ve known only two women in this category and both were motivated by other factors: anger, a history of abuse in their own childhoods, resentment, and a feeling of being trapped. Most female sex offenders aren’t motivated by power and control, which, among male offenders, is the leading motivation for sexual contact with someone before the age of puberty. Actually, regardless of the victim’s age, power and control are a much more compelling motivator for men than for women.

Of course, I don’t condone this behavior in the least. I’m not saying that women who sleep with 17-year-olds should be given a free pass or skip blithely past the consequences. But I do believe we need to rethink the way that we treat and rehabilitate these women. We need to focus less on the scintillating sexual details and more on the emotions and needs that motivated them.

Here lies perhaps the greatest injustice: in the sex offender system, women are treated exactly like men. Treatment providers aren’t given special instruction in dealing with women. The treatment programs are written for men, using statistics about male offenders and past treatment models of men. Imagine! Although women’s motivations and victims are diabolically different, they receive the same treatment model as men who rape women, prey on young children, and commit serial crimes.

At the moment, the justice system hides behind the fact that there isn’t enough research into female offenders. This is partly true: women offend at a much lower rate than men, and so studying their motivations takes a little more work. But as the sex offender laws expand to include more and more actions, there are an increasing number of women caught in sex crimes.

A lack of evidence should never be the reason for poor rehabilitation. It should be the impetus, in fact, for working harder to understand why some women commit sex crimes and how to prevent it in the future. When I asked a treatment provider for data about the effects on teenage males of sex crimes committed by women, she had one study. It was a tiny example, too: 13 males from the Midwest. Only that. In a nation that routinely penalizes women for sexual contact with teenage males, only one study existed that documented this phenomenon. By contrast, decades of research and hundreds of studies have informed the treatment material and methods for men who commit sex crimes.

Research about recidivism rates is also based primarily on male populations and varies drastically. Estimates about recidivism rates for sex offenders range from 2.5% for another sex crime to to 43% for any crime at all. But since the law doesn’t differentiate among sex offenders, these studies are nearly useless. A woman who has sex with a teenager is in the same category with a developmentally disabled person who is an exhibitionist, and those two are in the same category with a man who raped and murdered a child. The lumping-together of sex offenses creates confusion even while it feeds public hysteria.

Secondly, joining the ranks of sex offenders can also become a way of life. It affects which grocery aisle a woman walks down, whether she talks to the cashier who might be 17, whether she takes the long way around instead of driving past a liquor store, how many hours she spends preparing for a polygraph. It cuts her off from her family because she is not allowed to go places where children are. This means no family dinners, no big Christmases with extended family, no graduation ceremonies, no school plays or soccer games.

This isolation sinks deep into the bones. It makes a person unsure of herself. How do “normal” people act in this situation? What if someone finds out I committed a sex crime? Am I talking and behaving the way women my age do?

In this way, the punishment for sex crimes is partly physical, restricting a person’s movements in the community, and partly psychological, making her afraid to engage with other people.

All of this psychological pressure – the extensive restrictions, the polygraphs, the fear of losing hard-won privileges – takes an enormous toll on a person. She begins to fear public places and unfamiliar situations. She begins to look for a quick exit and excuses in case something “not allowed” would happen. She must either follow every rule perfectly (which rips away all self-esteem) or she must self-justify the choices she makes (which engrains criminal thinking, even if it wasn’t there before).

Treating sex offenders, especially women offenders, has become drastically un-therapeutic. “Treatment” revolves around complex rules, low self-esteem, and the constant fear of punishment. It does nothing to address the complex emotional choices that led people to their crimes. Rather, the justice system beats down already hurting women. ..Source.. by Sonia Van den Broek is currently living in Colorado, raising cats and hydrangea bushes. She is a free woman, which means lots of walks to local coffeeshops. In her spare time she pretends that she's good at knitting and other crafts.

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Sex assault statistics tell varying stories

2-11-2015 National:

Experts say data can be misread, create confusion

The stunning account in December in Rolling Stone magazine of a brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia capped a year in which sexual assault on campus gained real traction as a national issue.

There were high-profile allegations of assault at Columbia University and Florida State University that sparked nationwide protests. The White House published a list of institutions under federal investigation for mishandling sexual violence, released new recommendations for colleges and resources for students and launched a public awareness campaign, “It’s On Us,” intended to stem assault.

And then the Rolling Stone story collapsed. Key details in the account of Jackie, the alleged victim at UVA, didn’t hold up to scrutiny by reporters from The Washington Post and other news outlets. Rolling Stone released a statement saying its trust in Jackie was “misplaced,” then backpedaled to say that the mistakes were on the magazine, not the source.

The disintegration of the dramatic UVA story fueled a backlash against the anti-rape movement. Conservative media critics began questioning the prevalence of sexual assault on campus, calling into question especially the statistic that one in five college women sexually are assaulted and suggesting that false reporting may be much more common than advocates contend.

So what’s the truth? In the interest of fact-checking the political debate, Rocky Mountain PBS I-News analyzed current research on sexual assault among college students – its prevalence, false reporting rates and the state of campus and criminal justice for the offense.

Parsing the statistics

First, the consensus: Researchers agree that rape and sexual assault most often are committed by a person who is known to the victim, that most of these crimes happen without the use of a weapon and that the majority of rapes and sexual assaults are not reported to police.

“The notion of the stranger in the bushes with the knife, while it happens, is not the norm,” said Callie Rennison, a criminologist at the University of Colorado-Denver.

Are one in five college women sexually assaulted? That number, cited by the White House and others, is based on a 2007 Campus Sexual Assault study conducted by nonprofit research organization RTI International and funded by the Institute of Justice. An online survey from 6,800 students at two large public institutions found that roughly one in five senior women had experienced a completed sexual assault since starting college.

Controversy about the study has focused on its relatively small scope; it is not nationally representative, by definition. Christopher Krebs, the lead author of the study, said it never was meant to be.

“When you want to create a national estimate, which was never our goal, you take a much larger sample (of schools), and you would actually have to survey many fewer people at that school,” Krebs said.

Rich Lowry, of the conservative National Review, called the number “bogus” because it includes things such as attempted forced kissing.

That’s not true, Krebs said, and reflects a common misreading of the data. The one-in-five number includes only completed sexual assaults, not attempted sexual assault.

If you look at only completed rapes, Krebs said, the headline from the CSA study is that one in seven of the college seniors in the study was raped, still a stunning figure.

Studies with substantially different methods and scopes have come up with substantially different results. Most recently, a December 2014 analysis of the National Crime Victimization Survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated the rate of rape and sexual assault among college women (from 1995 to 2013) at around 6.1 per 1,000 in the previous 12 months.

So why the big discrepancy? There are some glaring methodological differences between these two studies.

The first obvious one is the time span. The NCVS study measures victimization rate per 12 months, versus the entire four- or five-year span of college assessed in the CSA study.

Second, the NCVS is focused on assessing rates of crime. Rennison, a former staff member with the Bureau of Justice Statistics who has worked extensively with the NCVS data, said that means the survey probably misses some rapes and sexual assaults.

“The fact that it’s a crime survey means that if you don’t think what happened to you is a crime, you may not be willing to tell me about it,” Rennison said.

If a victim doesn’t think it’s a crime, why is it worth measuring? Why not only measure acts that the victim finds troubling enough to categorize as a crime?

The problem, Rennison said, is that misperceptions about rape – that it’s an act committed by a stranger with a weapon, for example – are common even among its victims.

“Say you’re on a date, and the individual you’re on a date with assaults you,” Rennison said. “A lot of people think, ‘That’s not really a sexual assault because I knew that person.’”

The NCVS study also asked respondents directly whether they had been raped or experienced unwanted sexual contact, while the CSA study went into graphic detail about particular acts. The CSA method was intended to cue people who might not recognize what happened to them as rape or sexual assault.

So what’s the true prevalence of sexual assault among college students? It may be lower than one in five college women, but it also is likely to be higher than what’s captured in the NCVS.

Follow-up studies are intended to address some of the critiques of previous large-scale studies and to get closer to the true rate of sexual assault among college students. Krebs at RTI is working with the Bureau of Justice Statistics to launch a survey at 10 to 15 universities this spring, with the idea of testing a method that could be replicated at any college or university.

And the Bureau of Justice Statistics is considering including more behavioral cues, especially for rape and sexual assault, in a redesigned version of the NCVS, said Michael Planty, who heads the victimization statistics unit.

How frequent is false reporting?

Sexual assault, and especially rape, frequently is committed behind closed doors and with no other witnesses apart from the accused and the accuser. A case’s credibility often rests on whether the accuser is believed.

False reporting does happen. But how often? You can find estimates varying widely from less than 1 percent to 40 percent and higher. But some of the research showing high rates of false reporting crumbles under close scrutiny.

Men’s-rights groups frequently cite a 1994 study conducted by now-retired Purdue University sociologist Eugene Kanin, using 109 rape allegations made to the police department of a small Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987. Kanin found that 41 percent of the cases were false, based on the determinations of police officials. In all those cases, he said, the accusers recanted their allegations.

Kanin’s study also has been blasted by other researchers in the field for its methodology. David Lisak, a former psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, has written that the study “violates a cardinal rule of science” by failing to describe Kanin’s efforts to evaluate the criteria of the police department.

He also questions the police department’s practice of routinely asking accusers to undergo a polygraph – a practice that has been outlawed in many states because of its potential for intimidating victims into recanting their allegations.

Other studies have based their conclusions on police departments’ determinations that rape cases are “unfounded.” But “unfounded” isn’t the same as a deliberately false rape report and can include cases, Lisak said, in which a person truthfully recounts an incident that nonetheless may not fit the legal definition of rape.

To further confuse matters, police officers in some jurisdictions have been knocked for inappropriately deeming cases “unfounded” – without an investigation – because an accuser engaged in risky behavior, delayed reporting or had inconsistencies in her account.

One of the most recent and transparent studies on false reporting was published in 2014 by Arizona State University criminologist Cassia Spohn and two co-authors. They analyzed 81 unfounded rape cases from the Los Angeles Police Department in 2008 and estimated that about 4.5 percent of the reports were false.

That’s consistent with a 2010 review of international literature by Lisak and two researchers from End Violence Against Women International, Joanne Archambault and Kimberly Lonsway, concluding that methodologically rigorous research converges at a false reporting rate of about 2 percent to 8 percent.

Despite the low rate of false reporting, few sexual assaults involving college students – or anybody else – result in a criminal conviction.

It’s hard to say how many. The best estimates are based on incomplete crime statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and social science research. An analysis by Archambault and Lonsway estimated that 5 percent to 20 percent are reported, 0.4 percent to 5.4 percent are prosecuted and just 0.2 percent to 2.8 percent result in incarceration.

But there is no national database that tracks rape reports to their final outcomes.

“This is a major problem with our criminal justice statistics,” said Spohn, the Arizona State University criminologist. ..Source.. by The Durango Herald brings you this report in partnership with Rocky Mountain PBS I-News. Learn more at rmpbs.org/news. Email Kristin Jones at kristinjones@rmpbs.org.

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Local child sex prosecutions at record rate

11-23-2014 Florida:

TAMPA — A defense contractor from Riverview is spending 30 years in prison for forcing a 16-year-old girl to have sex with him and using his computer to record their encounter.

A worship minister from Winter Garden was arrested and charged with receiving and possessing child pornography.

A former American Airlines pilot from St. Petersburg was sentenced to 21 years in prison for producing, distributing and possessing child pornography after he used two minor victims to make sexually explicit videos.

Federal prosecutors in the Middle District of Florida, which includes Tampa, prosecuted more cases involving child exploitation in the past fiscal year than any year before, according to U.S. attorney’s office records.

“It’s our most productive year ever,” U.S. Attorney Lee Bentley said.

Bentley credited a cooperative atmosphere among federal, state and local authorities for the high number of prosecutions.

“I do not believe that the prevalence of child pornography and crimes against children is higher here in Florida than elsewhere in the country,’’ Bentley said. “It’s a national problem. Law enforcement here has been particularly adept at dealing with it. It’s a huge problem nationwide.”

The cases fall under the umbrella of Project Safe Childhood, a Justice Department initiative aimed at preventing and stopping child exploitation.

In Tampa alone, federal prosecutors brought 49 Project Safe Childhood cases last year, up from 29 the previous year and 16 the year before. In the Middle District, prosecutors brought 127 cases, up from 104 the previous year and 82 the year before.

Jim Skuthan, chief assistant public defender for the district, said a substantial majority of the cases prosecuted here involve possessing, receiving or trading child pornography rather than hands-on offenses against children.

“A lot of those defendants will pass polygraph exams confirming they have never, as an adult, had inappropriate sexual contact with a minor,” he said. “Those polygraph examinations are used in risk assessments done by psychologists to determine future dangerousness or risk ..Continued.. By Elaine Silvestrini

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Feds Indict Another Person For Teaching People How To Beat Polygraph Tests

Entrapment?

11-17-2014 National:

Polygraph technology is far from infallible and has been for so long that it's practically common knowledge. And yet, the federal government still wants everyone to believe polygraphs tests separate the honest from the liars with incredibly high accuracy. So, it cracks down on those who claim to be able to help others beat the tests.

In 2012, federal agents began investigating Chad Dixon and Doug Williams, two men who sold books, videos and personal instruction sessions on beating polygraph tests. Late last year, Dixon was sentenced to eight months in prison for obstruction and wire fraud charges. The government claimed his actions jeopardized national security, pointing to a client list that included intelligence employees, law enforcement agents and sex offenders.

The government has just handed down an indictment [pdf link] of its second target -- former Oklahoma City police polygraph administrator Doug Williams.

The 69-year-old Norman, Oklahoma, man is the owner of Polygraph.com and charged customers thousands of dollars for instructions on how to beat lie detector tests administered for federal employment suitability assessments, federal security background investigations, and internal federal agency investigations, court documents show.

The government wants to see Williams locked up for fraud, claiming his polygraph-beating business allowed unqualified applicants to "obtain and maintain positions of Federal employment" and the "salary attendant to such positions."

The 23-page indictments details the fed's sting operation, which utilized two undercover agents posing as potential government employees with shady pasts. In both cases, the agents made Williams aware of past wrongdoing (over his initial objections) that should disqualify them from positions in the DHS or Border Patrol. Williams, unfortunately, decided to follow through with personally training both agents, despite his initial hesitance to knowingly assist admitted ....Continued.... by Tim Cushing

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Megan's Law 20 years later: Pros and cons of sex offender rules still debated

10-31-2014 New Jersey:

Two decades after a convicted sex offender lured a 7-year-old named Megan into his house with the promise of seeing a new puppy, then killed her, the law that bears her name remains broadly popular, but gets mixed reviews.

Megan’s Law was proposed within days of the murder of Megan Kanka and signed into law on Oct. 31, 1994, just three months after the girl was raped and strangled by the man who lived in the house across the street from her home in Mercer County.

Megan’s Place, a memorial park for Megan Kanka, was created on the site of the house where her killer lived in Hamilton Township.

Prosecutors and victims’ activists praise it. Defense lawyers and civil rights activists say it labels people as dangerous who pose little danger to society and was enacted in a wave of public outrage. There is scant evidence, they say, that it has done any good.

Still, the law, and others like it, have been enacted by all 50 states and the federal government, largely as a result of what happened in a quiet New Jersey neighborhood.

The last time anyone saw Megan Kanka alive was late in the day on July 29, 1994. She was talking to a man who was washing his car in the driveway across the street. The next day, following a frantic search, her body was found in a park about three miles away.

Almost immediately, Jesse K. Timmendequas, 33, was arrested and confessed. Only then did Megan’s family and neighbors learn that the man who lived across the street was a convicted sex offender. And two men who lived in the house with him also had been convicted of sex crimes against children.

The reaction was swift and forceful. In Hamilton Township, Megan’s hometown, a crowd of thousands gathered for a candlelight vigil to show support for a new law that would require neighborhood notification when a sex offender moves into an area.

“Light your candles on your porches and think of my little girl,’’ Megan’s tearful mother, Maureen, said. “Be irate. Write your senators, your representatives, the president. Let them know how angry you are.” Two days later, Megan was buried.

Some lawyers and civil rights activists warned of a lynch mob mentality and said such laws would amount to hanging scarlet letters around the necks of ex-offenders.

But the laws have survived a series of court challenges over the years, and have been expanded to include more offenders.

New Jersey now has more than 15,000 registered sex offenders. About 4,085 of them — including 140 in Bergen County and 383 in Passaic County — have been categorized as moderate to high-risk offenders, and are listed on a state police website.

“We think it has been successful in many ways,” said Laura Ahern, executive director of Parents for Megan’s Law and the Crime Victims Center. “It helps law enforcement, and parents can use it to prevent their child from having a relationship with someone who could victimize them.”

Ray Flood, a Hackensack defense attorney, said the law is appropriate for violent and repetitive sex offenders, “but there are so many defendants who will never re-offend and never need the Megan’s Law stigma. Perhaps on the 20th anniversary of the law, there should be a study to provide more flexibility.”

Megan’s Law requires that convicted sex offenders register with authorities, and that communities be notified when a sex offender moves into the neighborhood. New Jersey’s online registry provides the sex offenders’ names, addresses and photographs along with other identifying information.

It also provides information about the offender’s conviction and a description of the offense, such as, “Subject sexually assaulted a juvenile female,” or “Subject sexually assaulted several boys. Boys ranged in age from 8 years through 15 years.”

Information about sex offenders who are considered a lower risk is available only to law enforcement. Some community organizations — like schools — are also notified.

Soon after it was enacted, Megan’s Law faced a series of legal challenges from public defenders, civil liberties advocates and others who questioned its constitutionality. Federal and state courts have been mostly consistent in rejecting the arguments, ruling that public safety concerns outweigh the privacy or equal-protection claims of sex offenders.

But a sharp debate continues about whether the law accomplishes its goal: notifying the public about sex offenders in their neighborhoods so that people can take precautions, and reducing the likelihood that sex offenders will re-offend.

A 2008 study funded by the U.S. Justice Department concluded that Megan’s Law had no effect on preventing first-time sex offenses or on re-offending. “Despite widespread community support for these laws, there is virtually no evidence to their effectiveness,” the authors wrote.

Lisa Squitieri, who heads the sex crimes unit at the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office, said Megan’s Law “has been effective for what it was intended to be. It puts the sex offenders on notice and notifies the public. It does that job.”

Ahern, of Parents for Megan’s Law, said it should be expanded to require that information on all registered sex offenders, not just those considered high risk, be available on the Internet.

Sex offenders are assigned to one of three tiers, based on their risk of re-offending. The risk assessment is done by a Superior Court judge. Those put in the top two tiers are placed on the Internet registry.

“Government should not be making a determination of risk,” Ahern said. “Just give the information to the community, and individuals can make their own determination.”

State Sen. Linda Greenstein, D-Mercer, is a co-sponsor of a bill that would do just that. Introduced in March, the bill has been referred to the Senate Law and Public Safety Committee.

“It would do away with the risk-based system,” she said. “It’s effective and fiscally prudent.” If the bill becomes law, she said, the list of offenders on the New Jersey Internet registry would rise from about 4,000 to over 15,000.

Joseph Del Russo, a retired Passaic County sex-crimes prosecutor, said the bill would modernize Megan’s Law and make the information more accessible in an age where people increasingly get their information from the Internet. But he predicted that if the measure becomes law, it will face constitutional challenges.

Megan’s Law, he said, should not be seen as a stand-alone mechanism to deter recidivism. It should be used as part of a comprehensive approach that includes strict probation for sex offenders. Some sex offenders who are on probation are even required to undergo polygraph tests and wear ankle bracelets to monitor their movement, he said.

Opposition comes from many quarters, including Fletcher Duddy, director of the special hearings unit at the state’s Office of the Public Defender, who thinks it would be a mistake to list all sex offenders on the Internet.

“It dilutes the system when you put thousands and thousands of people on the list,” he said. “The public would have no way of determining who poses a serious risk and who doesn’t.”

Overall, Megan’s Law has been counter-productive and should be scrapped, he said.

“The intent of Megan’s Law is good and laudable,” Duddy said. “Reducing sexual-offense recidivism is a noble goal. But in reality, the law doesn’t do that. Making sex offenders pariahs in modern-day society, making it impossible for them to find work or a place to live, actually increases their likelihood of recidivism.”

Many defendants who pose no risk to the community end up being registered as sex offenders, he said. The most common types are those who are convicted of statutory rape, in which an otherwise consensual relationship is defined by law as rape because the victim is under the age of 16, and the offender is at least four years older.

“You have someone who is 19 or 20, having a relationship with someone who is 15,” he said. “The person frankly didn’t even know he was doing something wrong, and even their families knew about it. That is a very, very common fact pattern.”

The older partner in such relationships would then be required to register under Megan’s Law, although he or she has no tendency to sexually victimize others, he said. “Now he is classified as a predator and lumped together with dangerous pedophiles.”

Joseph Rem, a Hackensack defense attorney, agreed.

“I think it is often applied to people who do not represent any threat to the community, and that is unfortunate,” he said. “To those who are listed on the Internet, Megan’s Law is the 21st-century scarlet letter.”

Timmendequas, now 53, was convicted of Megan Kanka’s murder and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to life without parole when New Jersey abolished the death penalty in 2007. He remains behind bars in a maximum security prison in Trenton.

Maureen and Richard Kanka have spent the 20 years since their daughter’s death pushing for laws to keep children safe from sexual predators. They still live in the house in Mercer County. Across the street is a quiet, verdant park where the house of her killer once stood. It’s called Megan’s Place. The centerpiece is a hopscotch grid. ..Source.. by KIBRET MARKOS

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Sex offenders offended by lie tests

9-29-2014 New Jersey:

TRENTON — Convicted sex offenders on the streets of New Jersey are asking Mercer County’s top judge to block parole officers from giving them polygraph tests to make sure they’re staying out of trouble.

A convicted child molester, identified only as J.B. in court papers, is contending that because lie detector tests aren’t reliable enough for use at a trial, they can’t be used to lock up a parolee for a new violation.

J.B. was part of a wider class-action lawsuit by Jersey sex offenders that argued that restrictions on them using social media and submitting to lie testing were violations of their constitutional rights.

In a lengthy opinion written by Superior Court Judge Jack Sabatino, virtually all the molester constitutional arguments were shot down. The appeals panel ruled, in short, that public safety outweighed the molesters’ rights.

“Nevertheless,’’ Sabatino wrote, “appellants have at least preliminarily raised genuine and material issues about the actual utility of polygraphs (for lifetime parolees) particularly in light of the long-standing case law underscoring the unreliable and controversial nature of this testing device

“For these many reasons, an evidentiary hearing is vital to explore the existence and strength of what the State asserts are the therapeutic, rehabilitative, and risk management benefits of polygraph examinations as administered to released sex offenders.

“Such a hearing ideally should encompass expert testimony, cross-examination, and neutral judicial inquiry. Appropriate findings of fact (and, on the points where the experts may disagree, findings of credibility) must also be generated. That amplified record, along with detailed factual findings, will enable this reviewing court’s more informed ultimate resolution of the competing constitutional interests at stake.’’

The job of doing all that fell to Mercer Assignment Judge Mary Jacobson, who held a hearing on the issue Monday, and is expected to hear more legal arguments before making a call.

In the appeals ruling handed down a year ago, Mercer’s go-to judge was told to have her review of the issue completed by April 30.

But that was before Jacobson also ended up refereeing the complex Bridgegate case involving Gov. Chris Christie, as well as the fiasco of succession that following the conviction of ex-mayor Tony Mack on federal corruption charges. ..Source.. by Paul Mickle

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Glitch in widely used polygraph can skew results

Give the wide use of polys for folks on parole or probation, how many have been incorrectly sent to prison?

5-20-2013 National:

WASHINGTON -- Police departments and federal agencies across the country are using a type of polygraph despite evidence of a technical problem that could label truthful people as liars or the guilty as innocent, McClatchy has found.

As a result, innocent people might have been labeled criminal suspects, faced greater scrutiny while on probation or lost out on jobs. Or, just as alarming, spies and criminals may have escaped detection.

The technical glitch produced errors in the computerized measurements of sweat in one of the most popular polygraphs, the LX4000. Although polygraphers first noticed the problem a decade ago, many government agencies hadn’t known about the risk of inaccurate measurements until McClatchy recently raised questions about it.

The manufacturer, Lafayette Instrument Co. Inc., described the phenomenon as “occasional” and “minor,” but it couldn’t say exactly how often it occurs. Even after one federal agency became concerned and stopped using the measurement and a veteran polygrapher at another witnessed it repeatedly change test results, the extent and the source of the problem weren’t independently studied nor openly debated. In the meantime, tens of thousands of Americans were polygraphed on the LX4000.

The controversy casts new doubt on the reliability and usefulness of polygraphs, which are popularly known as lie detectors and whose tests are banned for use as evidence by most U.S. courts. Scientists have long questioned whether polygraphers can accurately identify liars by interpreting measurements of blood pressure, sweat activity and respiration. But polygraphers themselves say they rely on the measurements to be accurate for their daily, high-stakes decisions about people’s lives.

“We’re talking about using a procedure that has a very weak scientific foundation and making it worse,” said William Iacono, a University of Minnesota psychology professor who’s researched polygraph testing. “I already don’t have very much confidence in how government agencies conduct these tests. Now, they might as well be flipping a coin.” ...continued... by Marisa Taylor, McClatchy Washington Bureau

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Groundbreaking research: One out of every 10 rape convictions wrong?

7-6-2012 National:

As a young man, Michael Jones pleaded guilty to back-to-back attempted molestations of two girl strangers. However, he adamantly maintained his innocence while in prison and on parole. He said his lawyer had coerced him into pleading guilty by threatening him with life in prison if he went to trial. Michael was one of a handful of Black people in a rural white community; both of the little girls were white. He was identified when police brought him to the station and showed him to the girls. There was no lineup procedure with foils; he was the only choice the girls were given. On the basis of his two convictions, government evaluators diagnosed Michael with pedophilia and recommended civil commitment.

As a teenager, Paul Smith tried to molest a younger boy. He was arrested at the scene and confessed. He disputed only one point in the victim’s statement: that he had threatened the younger boy with a gun. Police searched his home and found no gun. Pre-conviction polygraph testing indicated he was being truthful when he denied having a gun. Over the ensuing years, however, clinicians in sex offender treatment programs hammered at him to admit that he had used a gun. Government evaluators said Paul’s “denial” and “minimization” of his gun use influenced their recommendation for civil commitment.

In cases such as these, I am consistently struck by the naïveté of clinicians and forensic evaluators alike, who accept police reports and especially victim accounts as the gospel truth. From my former career as a criminal investigator, I can attest to the fact that even impartial observers with no conscious motivation to distort are never 100 percent accurate in describing events they have witnessed. As Daniel Schachter so clearly articulates in Seven Sins of Memory, distortion is the nature of the human animal. It is even more likely to occur in situations involving high levels of stress, fear and emotionality.

So I was happy to see that the issue of false convictions for sex offenses is getting some much-needed and long-overdue attention. Or, let me qualify that: Happy about the empirical research, but less than thrilled with a theoretical article on the psychological dynamics underlying false accusations. Let me take those up one at a time. ..For the rest of this article: by Karen Franklin of In the News

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