11-30-2011 National:
As two scandals spotlight the spouses of alleged sex offenders, the wife of an abuser shares her story with Salon
When a detective showed Jasmine a video of her husband confessing to sexually abusing a 10-year-old girl, she says, “It was like a knife through my heart.” The 43-year-old creator of HealingWives.com, an online support group for women with similar experiences, explains, “I felt like a victim myself — I mean, in an instant, my world changed.”
The experiences of the wives of child abusers are rarely focused on, but the headline-driving allegations against former college coaches Jerry Sandusky and Bernie Fine are changing that. A recently released tape recording of a conversation between one of Fine’s alleged victims and the coach’s wife, Laurie Davis, appears to reveal that she knew about her husband’s inappropriate sexual behavior. (CNN reported that Davis will claim that the recording was doctored.) Plenty have questioned whether Sandusky’s wife, Dorothy, could have been entirely unaware of her husband’s alleged abuse of boys over a 15-year period. The truth is that, should their husbands be found guilty, these women, along with Jasmine, are members of a unique and pained group; after all, the typical sexual abuser is a married man. How wives respond to the revelation of abuse varies greatly — from reporting it immediately to convincing themselves, time after time, that it won’t happen again. In plenty of cases, they aren’t even aware that their husband was attracted to children in the first place, let alone that he would ever abuse a pre-pubescent child.
That was the case for Jasmine, a Florida resident who asked to go by a pseudonym. On the day of her discovery, she got a call at work — the local elementary school where she taught first grade — notifying her that her husband had been arrested. It wasn’t until she arrived at the local police department and was directed toward the special victims unit that she began to understand. After being arrested, and confronted with an incriminating taped conversation he had with the victim, Jasmine’s husband confessed to molesting a young girl who lived across the street — on one occasion, in his own home.
The revelation was harrowing for Jasmine — but before she left the station that night, when a detective asked her what she was going to do, her answer was immediate: “I’m going to stay.” That isn’t to say that she instantly forgave him. When she went to court the next day for his hearing, she says, “I felt like I was going to a funeral. I was grieving for the life that we had.” They were high school sweethearts and had been married for six years at that point. “The person who I thought I knew absolutely everything about had this hidden life,” she says, her voice still carrying an air of disbelief. He revealed to her that he had experienced attraction to pre-pubescent girls in the past – in addition to adult women — but had convinced himself that “he could control it.” She says she was angry at him — not for experiencing these attractions but for not telling her about it sooner, and for putting himself in the position to act on it. Approaching the situation with that mind-set that allowed her to continue in the relationship.
Her husband was jailed for 60 days, served two years of house arrest, completed 10 years probation and is a lifetime registered sex offender in Florida. She’s stood by him the whole time and supported him financially when he was on house arrest and unable to work. “I had to think about our marriage and that he had been a good person — this was really the first thing we had gone through,” she explains. “He went through years and years of sex-offender treatment and I could see his thinking change. There weren’t so many rationalizations and excuses.”
Jasmine’s husband now tells her that he no longer experiences attraction to pre-pubescent girls, although even experts who promote sex-offender treatment doubt such a complete change is possible. “There is no evidence that a man can change from pedophilic to non-pedophilic (or vice versa),” says clinical psychologist James Cantor, the editor in chief of “Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment,” in an email. “A person can be taught tools to help him deal with his sexual interests, and a person’s sex drive can sometimes be suppressed, such as with testosterone-blocking medications. The overall evidence, however, is that changing from pedophilic to non-pedophilic is as impossible as changing a gay man to a straight man.” He adds: “The kind and scale of differences that we see on MRIs of pedophilic men are not the kind or scale that are known to change with training, or psychotherapy or other kinds of intervention.”
Joan Tabachnick of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers tells me, “For some, it is a good decision [to stay] and helps to keep the community safer,” she says. That’s because it gives the offender “a reason to stay connected, to not reoffend.” However, she is careful to add, “For others, it may mean that they are not looking at the reality of what is around them.”
Jasmine has been with her husband for 17 years now – in the same house where the abuse took place — and they now have a 1-year-old and a 4-year-old boy. But she says she doesn’t worry about her husband abusing their children: “I do want to point out that I have boys,” she says, adding that her husband never experienced attraction to males of any age. At the same time, though, she acknowledges that “the experts say it doesn’t really matter if it’s a girl or boy. It’s the age range that an offender is particularly attracted to.” They had their first child during the 10-year probation period; a judge ruled that Jasmine’s husband could be allowed to spend time alone with the boy.
Cantor declined to comment on Jasmine’s specific situation, but notes that “a sizable proportion — sometimes a third — of sexual offenders against multiple children committed those offenses against children of both sexes.” In general, offenders target a single sex, but it’s also true that pedophiles “distinguish between boys and girls much less” than those who are primarily oriented toward adults.
Some wives convince themselves their husband will change even without a conviction, imprisonment or treatment. Christina Enevoldsen, co-founder of the online support group Overcoming Sexual Abuse, married and had a child with her high school boyfriend, who had admitted to molesting a female relative in the past but swore he would never do such a thing again. When she found blood in her 1-year-old daughter’s diaper, her husband “tearfully admitted that he had molested her but promised it would never happen again,” she writes in a blog post. “He seemed very remorseful and I thought that since I caught him, he wouldn’t feel safe repeating the abuse. He seemed afraid of losing his family, so I thought that fear would stop him.”
But he continued to abuse his daughter for most of her childhood. “Yes, I had been fooled by my husband, but I had also fooled myself,” she says. Enevoldsen blames it in part on the repeated sexual abuse she experienced as a child at the hands of male relatives. “Finding blood in her diaper was finding blood in my diaper. I was transported to my own abuse with the same feelings and response: I froze as though my only choice was to lie still and stay quiet.”
Denial among close family members who suspect sexual abuse is terribly common – it’s why Tabachnick wrote the guide “Engaging Bystanders in Sexual Violence Prevention.” Tabachnick attempted to explain what might have been going through the mind of Fine’s wife: “We would be asking Bernie’s wife to report her husband, bring shame onto her family and her child, lose their standing in the community and whatever love was left in that marriage,” she says. “In our society there is a very high cost for reporting — and the benefit of reporting is very small if you are truly not sure there would be a successful prosecution.” (You can find more here on the reasons why witnesses to child sexual abuse fail to call police.)
There can also be a great deal of guilt on the wife’s part about the abuse: Molesters who are discovered often place blame on their partner. “He tried to say, ‘Well, you didn’t give me a lot of attention and things weren’t so good in the bedroom,’” Jasmine says. “After years of therapy, I realized that any healthy adult male doesn’t do that with a child. It doesn’t matter how much attention your wife is giving you.”
Jasmine insists that things with her husband are good now, despite the fact that she will have to live with his sex-offender status. His registration publicly lists their home address alongside the details of his conviction for “lewd or lascivious molestation.” It isn’t what she pictured for her life, but it’s what she’s chosen, given the circumstances. “Before this happened, I was the person who picked up the paper and said, ‘Oh, what a monster!’ Until you’re in the situation, you don’t know how you’ll react.” ..Source.. by Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon.
November 30, 2011
Married to a pedophile
July 14, 2011
The Accidental Sex Offender
7-14-2011 National:
It was a classic teenage love story. He was a football star, and she was a cheerleader. They met, they fell in love, they started having sex. And then the cops got involved. Fifteen years later, they're still paying the price.
Frank Rodriguez cannot coach his children's soccer teams. He can't get a job at a major corporation. He can't leave the state without registering with local law enforcement. A married father of four girls, he is a convicted sex offender. Neighbors can find his name and address on a public registry online.
His crime? Sleeping with his high school sweetheart 15 years ago. At the time, Frank was 19 years old, a recent high school graduate in the town of Caldwell, Texas. That's when he first had sex with Nikki Prescott, his future wife. The two had been dating for nearly a year; the sex was consensual. However, the legal age of consent in Texas is 17, and Nikki was just shy of 16. Nikki's mother, worried that her daughter's relationship with Frank was getting too serious, reported Frank to the police. She expected the cops to issue a warning, but instead she set in motion a legal nightmare from which Frank would never recover. He became a registered sex offender — for life.
Today, Nikki, 30, and Frank, 34, both say they unequivocally support laws that put sexual predators behind bars and protect children from attacks. "The registry isn't a bad thing," says Nikki. "It's a good thing. It's just that Frank shouldn't be on it."
Nikki and Frank's predicament is not an isolated incident. Across the country, young lovers are increasingly finding themselves caught in the nation's complicated web of sex-offender laws. Teenagers wind up on the public sex-offender registry, alongside violent predators, pedophiles, and child pornographers, for having consensual sex with an underage partner (or, sometimes, for streaking or sexting — sending racy self-portraits, which can be considered child pornography). The stigma of the sex-offender label is difficult to shed: "Once you're on the registry, good luck trying to explain it," says Sarah Tofte, who has studied sex-offender laws for the nonprofit group Human Rights Watch. "It's like you're in prison proclaiming your innocence. People think, Right, that's a likely story. Especially potential employers."
There are now more than 650,000 registered sex offenders nationwide. There are no reliable statistics on the number of juveniles — but the problem is clearly on the rise. Each of the 50 states now has at least one grassroots group dedicated to getting young people — many high school age, but some under the age of 10 — off the registry. The effort includes judges and other legal experts who say they have seen the problem often enough to persuade them that the system needs adjustment.
Still, the problem is poorly understood. Partly out of embarrassment, some parents don't want to talk about this issue — even as they work to try to remove their own children from the registry. To get some answers as to the extent of the problem, we conducted our own survey, state by state. What we found: Not all states register juveniles, and of the 34 that do, only 23 keep track of the number of juveniles on the registry. In those 23 states, there are nearly 23,000 registered juveniles. No states monitor whether the number of juveniles is on the rise or not, but one state, Oregon, provided an estimate, reporting a 70 percent jump in that state since 2005.
Undoubtedly, some of the juveniles on the list are guilty of violent sexual crimes. The grassroots movement is trying to help a different group of people: high school students who get labeled as sex offenders for teenage sexual behavior that can be technically criminal, but which, activists argue, should fall into a different category. Under the current system, kids' futures are being ruined, says William C. Buhl, a recently retired Michigan circuit judge who became an activist after overseeing 12 convictions of teenagers for consensual sex. Says Buhl, "What we have done, to young men, mostly, is destroy their lives, for somewhat common behavior."
Nikki Rodriguez remembers the night that sparked her embattled future — the night she first met Frank. At a mutual friend's house one evening on spring break, she and Frank began chatting, and quickly clicked. She was a 15-year-old freshman in high school, a self-described "clumsy" cheerleader. He was an 18-year-old football star, a confident, outgoing high school senior. They soon began calling each other every day. At the time, Nikki lived with her mother, stepfather, and four siblings on the grounds of a church camp that the family ran in Caldwell, a town of around 3,500 people.
"Frank was different," Nikki says. "He would pick flowers for me at the bus stop and bring them to school. At lunch, he came and sat with my friends and me, not with the guys." After nearly a year together, she and Frank had sex. They had no idea about crime or the consequences. "We were just madly in love," says Nikki, while standing on the sidelines of a soccer game in Caldwell on a windy Saturday morning. Watching her 11-year-old daughter, Analissa, bounce around the field, she adds, "Everyone was doing it."
When Nikki admitted to her mother, Melissa Ostman, that she was sleeping with Frank, tension flared. Ostman didn't think her daughter was ready for a sexual relationship, and the two began arguing frequently. "It's just that Nikki was so young," Ostman says. "I liked Frank from day one, but I wanted them to cool off."
One night, after Nikki and her mother had yet another argument, Ostman snapped. "Nikki and Frank were supposed to bring her sister home from the fair, but they left her there and went off together," she says. "I said, 'That's it.' I was getting so mad." Fed up after months of feuding, she says, she drove her daughter to the police station that night and reported Frank for having sex with a minor. "It was the only thing I could think of to get Nikki to listen to me," she says. "I wanted her to know I was serious." She thought the police would simply scare Frank, giving him a stern warning. "If I had known the implications," she says, "I wouldn't have done it."
Nikki remembers the police interrogation. "The sheriff said I had to give a statement," she says. "I refused." The officer told Nikki she could be arrested, she says, so she replied: "Arrest me." Then, thinking it would help Frank, she told the cops the sex was consensual. After that, she was driven to the hospital to be tested for rape.
The next day, Nikki's mother calmed down. She went back to the police station to rescind her complaint. It was too late. "The police said the state would be taking it from here," she says. "Looking back on it, I just feel horrible. I don't know what the answer is when your kid is 15 or 16 and wants to date. But the answer is not to label the guy a sex offender."
America's sex-offender laws have a noble goal: to protect children from predators. A handful of states have had sex-offender registries since the 1940s, but most states began creating them in the 1990s, after an 11-year-old boy named Jacob Wetterling disappeared while riding his bike in Minnesota. In 1994, Congress created the Jacob Wetterling Act, requiring states to establish registries listing convicted sex offenders. That same year, 7-year-old Megan Kanka was raped and killed by a predator who lured her into his New Jersey home. Two years later, Congress passed Megan's Law, making the registries available to the public.
Other federal acts have followed. The federal rules are broadly defined, and state laws vary widely. In 2006, new federal legislation tried to bring some uniformity to the tangle of state laws. The Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, also known as the Adam Walsh Act (named for a 6-year-old Florida boy who was murdered in 1981), created minimum standards across the states. However, only seven states have implemented the act to date. A main reason cited is cost: Many states, already struggling to maintain expanding registries, say they can't afford any added administrative costs. The government has said that states that aren't compliant with the act will lose a chunk of federal funding, effective as of July this year.
In the meantime, the effectiveness of individual state registries has become subject to debate. Patty Wetterling, a child-safety advocate whose son Jacob sparked the Wetterling Act, now counts herself among those voicing concerns. The registries were designed to be "a very useful law-enforcement tool," she says, "but legislators wanting to appear tough on crime have hijacked that intent, have cast a very broad net, and are causing many people tremendous harm." Parents add that teenagers arrested for consensual sex are diluting the registries — making it hard to spot violent predators.
Frank Rodriguez was 19 years old in the fall of 1996 when the police rolled up to his home and arrested him. The eldest of three brothers and two sisters, Frank had grown up in Caldwell, where his parents worked for the city and the school system. Frank had spent his high school summers working on local ranches, and the physical labor served him well on the football field. Known around town as a star lineman and kicker, he was surprised when the police treated him as a criminal instead of a hero.
"The guys who cheered me on at games were treating me like dirt," says Frank, while sitting at a Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of town. It's a Sunday afternoon, and he has been working all weekend, doing carpentry work as a freelance contractor.
After spending the night in jail as a teen, Frank met with his court-appointed attorney, Mary Hennessy. Says Frank, "She told me: You could do two to 20 years if you go to trial. I was like, 'What?'" The attorney advised Frank to plead guilty, meaning he would get seven years' probation. He followed her advice.
Hennessy explains today that while she doesn't think it's fair to label Frank as a sex offender, the state has an obligation to protect children. Local authorities could not ignore the complaint against Frank, she says, even if Nikki's mother tried to take it back.
Once he was labeled a sex offender, Frank faced a slew of restrictions. "I couldn't talk to Nikki. I couldn't go to restaurants, public swimming pools, football games — any places where there might be kids," he says. "I couldn't vote. I couldn't leave the county without permission. My probation officer told me, 'If you even look at a woman the wrong way, you could go to prison.'"
Frank did not have to go to jail. Instead, he was required to perform 350 hours of community service — picking up trash, mowing lawns — and to attend weekly counseling courses with convicted sex offenders and pedophiles. He also had to move out of his family home, since a 12-year-old girl lived there: his own sister.
His father helped him rent a place, and Frank says he became depressed. A recent high school graduate, he had been planning to attend a nearby technical college. Instead, he says, "I just locked myself up in there — my life stopped." After a few months, he spoke secretly on the phone with Nikki, who said she would wait for him. "In my world, it meant everything," Frank says. He managed to get a job with the help of a friend whose father owned a construction company. He began fixing up a home his grandmother owned, then moved in. The day Nikki turned 17, she moved in, too. The reunion was an emotional one, as Nikki had endured a rough year herself: Her relationship with her mother had deteriorated dramatically.
Despite the unusual circumstances, Nikki and Frank's connection grew stronger. "We didn't have anything — but we didn't need anything," Frank says. "We were together." Nikki finished school, then got a job in the county courthouse, where she works today; she and Frank married two years later. The couple's first daughter was born about two years after that. Since Frank was still on probation, it was illegal for him to live in the same home as his baby girl. So he lived there against the law, becoming withdrawn and paranoid, constantly worrying about getting arrested. "My personality changed," he says. "I used to be the life of the party. Now I didn't want to leave the house." A second daughter arrived a year later.
In 2003, Frank's probation came to an end, and he could legally live with his daughters. Still, he needed to go to the police station every year on his birthday to register as a sex offender. Nikki lobbied officials in the courthouse — judges, district attorneys — to clear Frank's name, to no avail. Frank simply fell outside the parameters of Texas law, which stipulated that the accused had to be within three years of age of his underage sexual partner to avoid registration. Frank is three years and two months older than Nikki. A further element of the law said that the accused could avoid registration if he was under 19 years old and his partner was over 13 years old when they had sex. Nikki was 15. But Frank lost again: He was 19.
Nikki and Frank connected with activists, and traveled to the state capital to participate in a public hearing. Still, Frank remained on the Texas registry, his crime listed as "sexual assault of a child."
In recent years, at least 50 grassroots groups have been launched with the goal of changing sex-offender laws. Mothers, shocked to find their sons on the registry for high school sex, note that teens on the registry have trouble getting into college and finding jobs, and often face residency restrictions — such as a ban on living within 1,000 feet of a school. They are also frequent targets of harassment, or worse: A young man in Maine named William Elliott, on the registry for sleeping with his 15-year-old girlfriend when he was 19, was murdered in 2006 by a vigilante. The killer had found Elliott's name on the registry and decided to go hunting for sex offenders before turning the gun on himself.
Some grassroots groups are controversial, as they're lobbying to ease restrictions on all sex offenders, violent or not. But many groups are formed by mothers of high school lovers. Tonia Maloney, who runs Illinois Voices, says her group includes at least 75 mothers of sons on the registry for consensual teenage sex. Francie Baldino, who runs Michigan Citizens for Justice, says her group has around 30 mothers in the same situation. Both women became activists when their own teenage sons were arrested after having consensual sex.
Even kids under the age of 10 have been registered, says Cheryl Carpenter, a criminal-defense attorney in Michigan. She knows a 9-year-old boy who went on a private juvenile registry for playing doctor with a 6-year-old girl. The boy's name can now be removed from the registry, thanks to new state legislation spurred by activists. A similar case is currently unfolding in Wisconsin courts, where a 6-year-old boy is accused of sexually assaulting a 5-year-old girl; the children reportedly said they were playing doctor.
Carpenter, who has managed to free 11 teenagers (all convicted of sexual offenses involving minors) from the registry, now serves on a professional advisory board for the Coalition for a Useful Registry, a grassroots group launched by two Michigan mothers. She estimates that the group includes 150 mothers of sons on the registry for teenage sex. Some of the boys, she says, can now petition for removal from the registry under the state's new legislation.
Activists also note that the age of consent varies among states — ranging from age 16 to 18 — so sex can be a crime in one state and not in another. While the activists say they're not advocating teenage sex, the reality is that a significant percentage of teens are sexually active: A national study by the Centers for Disease Control shows that 28 percent of girls ages 15 to 17 have had sex.
In the past few years, the grassroots groups have managed to get many states to pass laws designed to help high school students. The so-called Romeo and Juliet laws aim to reduce or eliminate the penalties for consensual sex with a minor, provided the couple's age difference is minimal and other parameters are met. While the laws have helped in many cases, activists say, often young people find themselves just missing the parameters of the law in their state.
In Texas in 2009, activists succeeded in getting state lawmakers to pass a bill that tweaked the law — and could help Frank Rodriguez. But when the bill landed on Governor Rick Perry's desk, he vetoed it. This past spring, a revised version of the bill went back to the governor's desk. And this time, in late May, he signed it. The bill becomes law in September — and, for the first time, it gives Frank a chance to petition the court to remove his name from the registry.
Under the new bill, the accused can file a petition if he was within four years of age of his sexual partner and if the partner was at least 15. For Frank, this could be the end of a frustrating 15-year journey, one that has caused tensions on both sides of the family. As Nikki notes, "My relationship with my mom has never been the same."
Her mother agrees. "I walk around every day with this guilt. We don't know yet what kind of effect [Frank's registration] is going to have on the girls," she says, referring to her granddaughters. "Kids can be so mean."
The girls don't yet know their parents' history, although they have hints of it. "They hear us talking," Nikki says, as her daughters bound around the living room on a Saturday evening in Caldwell. "They know something is up. One day my mom came over, and Layla, my 7-year-old, asked her, 'Why did you send my dad to jail?'
"It's been really hard on Frank," Nikki adds, describing how she and Frank have had to explain their situation time and again throughout the years — to teachers, to employers, to parents of their daughters' friends. "He's always wondering what people are thinking." Recently, the family moved to a new home across town, and the neighborhood kids came over every day, until they abruptly stopped. "We wondered, Did their parents see the registry?" Nikki says. "You never know for sure."
When Nikki and Frank learned that the governor of Texas had signed the new bill, they couldn't quite believe it. Now in the process of hiring a lawyer to petition the court, they are reluctant to celebrate their freedom just yet. Says Frank, "I'll believe it when I see it." ..Source.. by Abigail Pesta
June 3, 2011
Jaycee Dugard speaks out as her tormentor sentenced to 431 years
6-3-2011 California:
Jaycee Dugard said the serial sex offender who kidnapped and held her captive for 18 years had "stolen her life" on Thursday as he was sentenced to more than 400 years behind bars.
Phillip Garrido and his wife Nancy abducted Jaycee, then aged 11, as her stepfather watched her walk to a school bus in South Lake Tahoe, California, on June 10 1991.
She was driven 168 miles to the Garridos' home in Antioch where she was held in a secret backyard compound. She was repeatedly raped by Garrido and gave birth to two daughters he fathered, now aged 13 and 16.
In a statement read out in court by her mother, Terry Probyn, Miss Dugard told Phillip Garrido: "I chose not to be here today because I refuse to waste another second of my life in your presence. Everything you ever did to me was wrong and I hope one day you will see that.
"I hated every second of every day for 18 years. You stole my life and that of my family."
Miss Dugard, now 31, also said she was doing well now and told Phillip Garrido "you do not matter anymore". ..Source.. by Robin Yapp
May 18, 2011
Advocates push back against New Mexico’s sex-crime laws
5-18-2011 New Mexico:
To the casual observer, Lloyd Swartz looks like every other middle-aged guy hosting a yard sale on a Saturday afternoon in May. From the driveway of his modest adobe house, Swartz and his wife preside over a jumble of construction equipment, furniture, clothing and knickknacks. He greets potential customers with a broad smile, a strong handshake and a booming laugh. But Swartz is also the president of an organization called Reform Sex Offender Laws in New Mexico.
“I’m a registered sex offender,” Swartz says bluntly. “I got in trouble when I was 17 years old, in Texas.”
Swartz, who was convicted of sexual assault in 1987, spent 10 years on probation.
“I did something stupid when I was a kid,” Swartz says. But after serving his sentence, he says, “I’d moved on with my life; I’m not even thinking about it.”
But in 2000, New Mexico amended its sex offender laws to require all convicted sex offenders—even those who, like Swartz, were convicted and sentenced long before the registry was created—to register with the New Mexico Department of Public Safety.
“They come knocking on my door [saying], ‘You have to register,’” Swartz recalls. “I said, ‘What do you mean? How can that be constitutional?’” For Swartz, that moment was a catalyst: He realized that even sex offenders didn’t deserve to be judged forever, and he wanted to fight for that realization.
“The story of my life is not what I did when I was 17 years old,” Swartz explains. “What have I done since then? I’ve made scientific discoveries; I’ve built businesses; I’ve raised a family. These are the things that make me who I am.”
So Swartz founded RSOLNM, began attending conferences and ultimately started talking to state legislators about what he considers a major crisis in the state’s criminal justice system.
“I learned it was bigger than me, bigger than my family and my problem,” Swartz says. “This crisis is destroying our country. It is affecting every man, woman and child, whether they know it or not, in a myriad of ways.”
He’s not the only one who thinks so.
Santa Fe lawyer Jason Flores-Williams uses the phrase “abjectly unconstitutional” to describe Swartz’ experience of being added onto the sex-offender registry even after he had completed his sentence.
“It would be like you get a speeding ticket going 27 miles per hour in a 25 [mile-perhour zone],” Flores-Williams explains. “You get an $80 ticket; you say ‘OK, fine, sucks for me’—but then, four years later, they come back and say, ‘Anybody who did that four years ago now has to do these three things and pay a $300 ticket.’ It’s unconstitutional.”
Flores-Williams is currently defending two clients with similar issues. Taken to an extreme, he says, strict residency requirements and public sex-offender registries can limit convicted sex offenders’ options to the point that they’re no longer able to contribute to society.
Flores-Williams cites the case of Charles Mader, an Albuquerque sex offender jailed this month for violating residency requirements when he failed to report that he had moved from a dumpster to a homeless shelter, as a perfect example.
“If a person is living without therapy, proper medication [or] treatment—and they’re living in a dumpster or a homeless shelter—then they’re just going to get worse,” Flores-Williams says. “This person is not going to become better and have a chance at reintegrating himself into society. It’s going to exacerbate the problem.”
Swartz is inclined to agree. “We can’t oppress millions of people, give them no hope at all and think everything’s going to be hunky-dory [and that] these people are not going to be pushed into committing other crimes,” Swartz says. “Not only is the system not working, but it’s actually endangering us by pushing people to the fringe.”
New Mexico’s online database lists 78 convicted sex offenders (77 of them men) living in the city of Santa Fe and 2,458 statewide—but DPS Law Enforcement Records Assistant Bureau Chief Regina Chacón tells SFR that, because certain nonviolent crimes are not listed online, the state’s actual total for convicted sex offenders is 2,776.
“The people on the website are [convicts of] violent crimes against children and adults,” Chacón explains. Most sex crimes, from rape to child pornography, are considered violent crimes; two exceptions, Chacón says, are incest and statutory rape.
But just because a sex offender is listed online—or convicted at all—doesn’t necessarily lead to recidivism.
A 2003 US Department of Justice study encompassing more than 9,600 male sex offenders released from prison in 1994 found that only 5.3 percent were rearrested for sex crimes. Among all convicted criminals released that year, by comparison, a whopping 67.5 percent were rearrested, and 46.9 percent were reconvicted.
But Swartz sees that as another reason the registry doesn’t work.
“Why are we registering people [as sex offenders] for 25 years to life?” Swartz wonders. “It makes absolutely no sense.”
Flores-Williams also says the broadbrush approach New Mexico takes to registering sex offenders is unfair.
“There’s a really wide range here,” Flores- Williams says. “There’s the violent sexual predator; that’s a person who needs to be addressed in very specific ways. But what about the 20-year-old who dates a 16-yearold?” he wonders. “It’s not the best thing, but it sure as hell is very, very different from a guy who rapes and kills a 4-year-old.”
During the 2011 legislative session, Rep.
Moe Maestas, D-Bernalillo, introduced a bill to reduce the amount of time a person convicted of fourth-degree criminal sexual contact with an adult would be assigned to the registry, from life to 10 years—but based on that change, Gov. Susana Martinez vetoed the bill. Chacón says DPS supports the veto.
Diana McWilliams, the executive director of Santa Fe’s Solace Crisis Treatment Center, acknowledges that the current system is flawed.
“It is almost like a no-win situation, because either you’re tromping on someone’s civil rights because you’re trying to make a law that applies to everyone, or you’re leaving big gaps or loopholes,” McWilliams says. But in spite of the current system’s imperfections, she says, the registry is a valuable tool.
“We’re just glad that there are some tools for victims to keep track of their offender,” McWilliams says. Still, she adds, “It is unfortunate that we have to have a black-and-white law when there’s a lot of gray in dealing with human behavior.”
But to Dan Smith, a convicted sex offender who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he fears being ostracized, ‘unfortunate’ is a gross understatement.
“Society has an impression that these kinds of crimes are so horrible that the people who commit them are beyond redemption,” Smith tells SFR. “No politician, no lawmaker would ever champion the cause to revisit the harshness of these laws, because they know they’d never get elected to office again.”
As a result, Smith says, many sex offenders—regardless of the nature of their crime—are placed on the state’s registry, where everyone from prospective employers to acquaintances can see what they’ve done.
“It’s like losing pieces of my life,” Smith says. “Even if I’m a bad person, I think I have the same right of any other alleged criminal to have a chance to get those pieces of my life back if, after the alleged crime, I’m not a threat to society.”
Smith offers an analogy in the penalties for murder.
“If you take a person’s life,” Smith says, “the laws, the sentencing and the possibility of getting out of prison if convicted are wide and varied—but murderers have the opportunity to pay their debt to society and come away free.”
But as a sex offender, he says, “You can never be free.” ..Source.. by ALEXA SCHIRTZINGER
April 13, 2011
Life on the List
4-13-2011 National:
Does publicly posting names of convicted sex offenders actually reduce the number of sexual offenses?
You could say it started with three small-town Minnesota boys riding their bikes to a convenience store on an October night in 1989. As they were returning home on a dark stretch of road, a man stepped out of the darkness holding a gun. He told them to lie face down on the ground and then directed two of them -- Trevor Wetterling, age 10, and Aaron Larson, 11, to run into the woods and not look back or he'd shoot them. That was the last that they, or anyone, would see of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling.
The subsequent fruitless search led President Bill Clinton to sign a law in September 1994 designed to help police quickly locate potential perpetrators of sex offenses. The Jacob Wetterling Act required states to create sex-offender registries accessible to police, though not to the public. But that same year, 7-year-old Megan Kanka of Hamilton Township, New Jersey, was lured across the street, then raped and murdered by a neighbor who -- unbeknownst to her parents -- had served six years in prison for aggravated assault and attempted sexual assault on another child. The Kankas maintained that, had they known a convicted sex offender lived nearby, they could have protected their daughter. So in 1996, Clinton signed Megan's Law, which required states to open up their sex-offender registries to the public.
Megan's Law launched America's practice of notifying neighborhoods of where sex offenders live. Though the law is well intentioned, it's not clear whether it has reduced the number of sex offenses; rather, public notification appears to destabilize offenders' lives, increasing the risk they'll commit another crime. There is also ample evidence that since the law passed, vigilantes have used sex-offender registries to threaten, harass, and inflict violence on hundreds of offenders and their families.
In the decade and a half since Megan's Law was passed, public-policy researchers, corrections officials, and treatment professionals have begun to recognize the faulty premises and poor outcomes the law has created. A few states, recognizing the problems with public registries, have tried to develop legal solutions that both protect offenders from abuse and reduce sexual violence. But a new federal law -- the Adam Walsh Act, signed by President George W. Bush in 2006 and set to take effect this summer -- threatens to shut down those innovations; states not found in compliance by July 26 will lose critical federal crime-fighting funds. At a time when criminal-justice policies are increasingly adopting a "smart on crime" approach grounded in research on what works, the legal treatment of sexual offenders is moving in the opposite direction.
"Jeff" isn't his real name. When he talks about the June day in 2005 that the beer bottle shattered his front window, his voice quavers. "I'm sorry -- all of this just makes me so angry," he says. He was convicted in 1995, as a 23-year-old, for having what he says was consensual sex with a 15-year-old girl he met in a bar. That onetime liaison came to light, Jeff says, when the girl became pregnant (he says DNA later showed he wasn't the father) and her parents reported the episode to the police, with the girl as a cooperating witness. He spent five years in prison, but even after his 2000 release, state law required that he be placed -- for life -- on the state registry, which shows his photo, address, and the details of his conviction.
Jeff says the bottle thrower on that June day was a neighbor -- someone with whom he'd been friendly -- who had found Jeff on the registry and appeared on his lawn with two biker buddies, shouting threats. When Jeff went out to talk to the group, the men formed a semicircle, pushing and spitting on him. He retaliated with punches, and the resulting fight ended with both sides bloodied and a hole in a wall when they pursued him as he retreated into the house.
A month later, Jeff recalls, his tool shed was broken into and the equipment for his logging business stolen. Not long after, a second neighbor plugged a culvert they shared so that Jeff's basement flooded in the next storm; Jeff says the man told him he'd done it "to get the sex offender out of my neighborhood." Jeff has changed his phone number a dozen times after repeated threatening calls.
In 2003, Jeff married a lifelong acquaintance who knew his history. She worked as a nurse at a hospital, and shortly after their marriage, a manager told her that she had to choose between her job and her husband. Jeff attributes their 2005 divorce to his status on the sex-offender registry: "We were looking at each other, and it was like, 'I'm destroying your life.'" Even the two girls he parents, ages 13 and 14 (one from a previous partner and the other for whom he serves as guardian), started being teased in school and were excluded from social, school, and church events. "What have my kids ever done to anybody?" Jeff says. "In reality, sometimes I wonder if maybe killing myself may not be the best thing I can do for them."
About 700,000 sex offenders appear on registries in the 50 states and other U.S. jurisdictions. But their crimes vary widely, from chronic violent sexual predation down to voyeurism and even public urination. Researchers estimate that the vast majority of these offenders are at low-risk for repeating their crimes. Nonetheless, the public is overwhelmingly concerned: In a 2005 Gallup poll, 66 percent of respondents said they were "very concerned" about sex offenders, while 36 percent said the same about terrorism.
Giving a nervous public instant access to the addresses and photos of sex offenders produces none-too-surprising results. Though no reliable national statistics exist on vigilante violence against sex offenders, a few studies indicate widespread abuses. In a 2005 study by University of Louisville criminologist Richard Tewksbury in the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 47 percent of 121 sex offenders reported they'd been harassed as a result of being on a state registry, and 16 percent said that they'd been assaulted; among nearly 600 immediate family members of offenders that Tewksbury and Lynn University researcher Jill Levenson surveyed, 44 percent said they'd been threatened or harassed by neighbors as a result of their relative's sex-offender status, 27 percent that their property had been damaged, and 7 percent that they'd been physically assaulted or injured. A 2005 study in the same journal by Levenson and Leo Cotter, who directs a Florida sex-offender outpatient program, reported that 21 percent of 183 offenders had their property damaged by a person who found out about their status.
Recent incidents illustrate those findings. In April 2010, a man used a printout from California's sex-offender registry to try to rob the homes of two registered sex offenders in Grover Beach. In November, a registered sex offender from Orlando was assaulted in front of his home by three teens who told him they knew he was a sex offender; they punched and kicked him repeatedly and stomped his dog to death before running off. That same month in the Virginia town of Hopewell, police charged 19-year-old Daniel Narron with attempted murder for using his SUV to try to run down 52-year-old Rudolph Ellis, who is on Virginia's sex-offender list. Since 2005, at least six sex offenders nationwide have been murdered by people who used a state registry to track their victims.
The problems with the sex-registry laws are myriad, starting from their very premises. One of the basic assumptions behind Megan's Law is that parents who know that a sex offender lives nearby will take precautions; after a decade and a half, however, there's little research to show that's happened. A second premise is that sex offenders are somehow different from other criminals and can't change, but a 2003 study found that sex offenders had a three-year recidivism rate of 5 percent for another sex crime; that compares with a 47 percent rate for other criminals committing another crime. Finally, the law assumes sex offenders will be less likely to commit another crime if they know they're being watched. Again, the research is weak: In 2009, analysts at the Washington State Institute for Public Policy looked at seven studies on recidivism by registered sex offenders that had been conducted since the first registry law was passed. Two showed that being on a registry decreased recidivism, one showed an increase, three indicated no effect, and one didn't measure the effect. "Though the research differs somewhat from state to state and study to study, overall it does not appear that registries have resulted in a significant decline in sex crimes in general or in recidivistic sex crimes more specifically," says Levenson, perhaps the leading researcher on the effects of sex-offender registries.
Still, probably the biggest issue with registries is who gets on them and what happens to those who do. As originally conceived in the Wetterling Act, registries were to be accessible only to law enforcement. It was raw public pressure, rather than criminological research results, that turned those lists over to the public. And, like many policies driven by public furor, the enabling laws overreached. Today, most registries include offenders busted for a range of acts, from offensive or vulgar behavior to heinous crimes. A 2007 Human Rights Watch study reported that at least five states required those convicted of offenses related to adult prostitution to be registered, 11 states did the same for those guilty of public urination, and 25 did so for public exhibitionism. "Most people assume that a registered sex offender is someone who has sexually abused a child or engaged in a violent sexual assault of an adult," noted the study's authors. Registries, that is, create the impression that neighborhoods are thick with recidivist sexual predators, making it impossible for parents to discern who actually is dangerous.
Sex-offender registries also now include people who have committed no sexual crime: Forty-one states put those convicted of falsely imprisoning or kidnapping a minor on their sex-offender registries -- whether or not the crime was related to sex. Last March, for example, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld a ruling that a 17-year-old boy who forced another 17-year-old to go with him to collect a drug debt could be made to register as a sex offender, though the crime involved nothing sexual. The court majority argued for the wider net because "Wisconsin's sex offender registration statute 'reflect[s] an intent to protect the public and assist law enforcement.'" As the dissenting justices noted, under that reasoning, convictions for violating most provisions of Wisconsin law could trigger mandatory sex-offender registration.
Sweeping everyone onto a single list produces some absurd outcomes. Fred Berlin, who founded the Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital, worked with a patient in his 80s who had Alzheimer's and was living in a nursing home. The man also was on the sex-offender registry for fondling a child in his family. Berlin says the man's offense probably was related to the onset of his dementia. But that didn't stop the nursing home's neighbors, who found his name on the registry, from successfully demanding he be moved to another facility.
A raft of research shows that such disruptions increase offenders' risk of committing another sexual crime. For example, three studies conducted between 2000 and 2007 indicate that being listed on a sex-offender registry leads to a loss of positive community supports and to barriers in getting housing and employment, both problems linked to increased recidivism. Betsy Mata and her husband Jose know that well. They're co-pastors at Holy Ground Christian Fellowship in Anaheim, California, where they run a 12-step residential treatment program for sex offenders under a contract with the state parole agency. After a registered sex offender was convicted of murdering two teens 90 miles south of their facility, someone looked on the state registry and found out that the program was housing 11 sex offenders in two rented houses. Two hundred fired-up citizens attended a community meeting. Betsy Mata started getting threatening calls -- one caller said he'd castrate the men. When the story broke in The Orange County Register, one of the landlords canceled the program's lease, and the parole agency stepped in to shut down the second house to avoid the publicity. As a result, eight of the 11 men ended up on the street.
That outcome isn't surprising: A state task force report issued last November documented a 750 percent increase in California's population of homeless sex offenders since a restriction on offenders living within 2,000 feet of schools or parks went into effect four years ago. Last November, the Oklahoma town of Sand Springs took advantage of that state's 2,000-foot law by announcing plans to build a new town park close to a trailer park where 23 sex offenders live, which will force the offenders to move. Nationally, a 2008 U.S. Department of Justice report concluded that cases of offenders being forced into homelessness have been "widely reported."
Sex-offender policies, meanwhile, are growing ever more punitive, including tightened residency restrictions, lifetime placement on sex-offender registries for even minor offenses, and even the expanded use of the death penalty for certain non-homicide sex offenses. Treatment professionals say no other group of ex-convicts who have done their time are the target of such systematic vitriol. "Drunk drivers can be dangerous -- they get in cars and kill innocent people, but we still see them as human beings deserving of help," Berlin says.
***
In recent years, however, a few states have taken the lead in using their registries more judiciously in response to research showing the link between public notification and vigilantism and discrimination against offenders, including those who are lower-risk. One state leading that effort is Washington, which created the country's first public sex-offender registry, in 1990, after three highly publicized murders, two involving children. Washington has invested heavily since then in evaluating and improving its practices. Before an offender is released from jail, a multidisciplinary committee uses an actuarial risk-assessment tool to determine his likelihood of committing another crime, looking at factors like whether the offender has a history of sex offenses or has completed a treatment program. On that basis, offenders are placed into one of three tiers. Those in tier 1 -- judged the least likely to re-offend -- are listed on a registry accessible to law-enforcement eyes only. Those in tiers 2 and 3 must submit to the state's public registry, and police must distribute notification flyers in the offenders' neighborhoods before their release.
The police, though, do more than notify. Given resources by the state's association of sheriffs and police chiefs, local cops also educate. Before a tier-2 or -3 offender moves into a neighborhood, police hold a public meeting. A parole officer and a sex-offender treatment provider talk about the characteristics of the offender, how the neighborhood can stay vigilant, and how the parole officer monitors offenders. An advocate for sexual-assault victims offers context, including that most assaults are committed by people whom victims know, and discusses strategies parents can use to communicate with kids about what to watch out for. Police also make clear that harassing sex offenders often puts them more at risk of committing another crime. "We will not accept any vigilantism any more than we would accept a sex offender re-offending," a Seattle police detective said at one meeting. Having a team of presenters "allows the community to see that many players are part of sex-offender management," says Lindsay Palmer of the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center.
There are still problems -- tiering and community notification practices can differ from county to county -- but overall the state's results have been positive. After a 1997 state law mandated the current protocol for community meetings, the five-year recidivism rate for released felony sex offenders dropped by half (though researchers note that state and national crime rates generally fell during that period). A 2006 Washington State Institute for Public Policy study of recidivism among Washington's convicted sex offenders showed a re-offense rate of less than 3 percent, compared with the national rate of 5.3 percent reported in a 2003 U.S. Department of Justice study.
Other states that are instituting reforms also have shown promising results. Like Washington, since 1997 Minnesota has held community education meetings and included only higher-risk offenders on its state registry. A 2008 study of those practices showed lower recidivism rates for sex offenders subject to them than for matched comparison groups of sex offenders. In Vermont, the Department of Corrections launched a "circles of support" initiative in 2005 that links ex-offenders with trained community volunteers. Though the state hasn't yet formally evaluated the project's impact, the department's David Peebles says that offenders who participate have so far shown more success than others in reintegrating and avoiding new crimes. In Colorado, the head of the state sex-offender management board says the state's community-education efforts have helped reduce re-offense rates while avoiding vigilantism: A 2008 evaluation of 101 high-risk paroled offenders there showed a recidivism rate of less than 1 percent.
But innovative approaches like those could be undermined by the Adam Walsh Act. After passage of Megan's Law, missing-children's advocates became concerned about offenders using differences in state registries to slip across state lines to jurisdictions with looser requirements. They lobbied for a uniform national registry, and in 2006, President Bush signed the act, named for a 6-year-old boy kidnapped and murdered in 1981 by a serial killer. The law mandates a uniform structure for state registries and links them to create a single national registry. It also requires that states adopt identical risk-assessment systems that automatically classify offenders based on their crime of conviction.
The implications of that apparently technical change are enormous. According to an internal memo of Washington state's Sex Offender Policy Board (SOPB), which develops guidelines for state practice, about 70 percent of the state's sex offenders are now classified as lower-risk, in tier 1, while the other 30 percent are grouped into the higher-risk tiers 2 and 3. The new law would roughly invert those statistics. Worse, the law would prohibit the state's practice of not making public the names and addresses of tier-1 offenders. According to SOPB member Brad Meryhew, within two months of implementing the law, neighborhoods would be flooded with notification flyers about high-risk sex offenders living in their neighborhoods -- offenders who previously were classified as low-risk under Washington's system. "The hysteria and the impact on people's lives would be astounding," Meryhew says.
That's a concern for one key advocate for missing children -- Patty Wetterling, Jacob Wetterling's mother. In 1990, she started the Jacob Wetterling Foundation to help communities protect children and teens. Wetterling believes the highest-risk offenders should never be released. But for others convicted of sexual crimes, she opposes get-tough laws like restricting where they can live. "We need to keep in mind the goal -- to have no more victims," she says. "If you go down that path, then you have to find the things that every human being needs in life. You need housing. You need a job. You need family support, community support. ... Everyone on the registry is somebody's brother, somebody's son, somebody's father." ..Source.. by Steve Yoder
November 28, 2010
In just a few clicks of child porn, several lives are ruined
11-28-2010 Texas:
TYLER – Slump-shouldered in an orange jumpsuit, Randy Paroline apologized to his wife and to three rows of relatives and friends in a federal courtroom. He said he'd put porn behind him. He told the judge about to send him to prison that he wanted to help others avoid his mistakes.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Baldwin glowered. He told a federal judge that Paroline's viewing of Internet child pornography – images of children being raped and forced into sexual poses with adults and animals – hurt innocents as surely as if Paroline had abused them himself.
Baldwin read a victim's account of what it felt like to be molested and then stared at by strangers like Paroline. Now 20, the woman still feared being recognized from those awful photos. It went beyond unending shame; she also felt guilty that pictures of her abuse at 8 and 9 could be used to lure other kids into sexual torture.
In the last decade, such courtroom scenes have grown common across Texas and the U.S. Seemingly normal people are drawn into secret obsessions with Internet child porn. It's increasingly easy to find online. For many, the toxic mix of guilt, shame and attraction becomes an irresistible magnet.
People like Paroline are stunned to end up in courtrooms and prisons – and labeled as beyond redemption.
Until FBI agents came to his Athens air-conditioning company in July 2008, Paroline said in federal court, he didn't know that he could face prison and lifetime registration as a sex offender for opening free images on the Internet. "I never intended to hurt anyone," Paroline said, staring down at jail-issue plastic sandals. "I had no idea I would end up here."
Child porn possession has been a federal crime since 1990. In the last decade, federal prosecutions more than doubled in Texas and nationwide. In Texas, the cases have grown faster than nearly any category of federal offense, according to Syracuse University's TRAC database. Since October 2007, more child porn cases have been filed in Texas than old-school federal prosecutions for bank robbery or bank fraud, mail fraud or wire fraud.
The cases often involve seemingly ordinary people with stable jobs and families. The nearly 1,000 Texans prosecuted since 2000 include band instructors and businessmen, physicians and pastors and prison guards, restaurant managers and retirees.
Most defendants, like Paroline, quickly plead guilty. The cases are so repellent that cops and prosecutors get uneasy when asked why offenders do what they do.
"We have never really been able to figure that out," said Ed Jones, a Longview police detective who examined Paroline's computer for the FBI. "A lot of times, even they couldn't tell you. They were bored. They came across it. They got curious and kept looking. Some of them have a serious predilection for children."
He has little interest in talking to his targets – "perverts" who get pleasure from "looking at children being victimized," he says. "If you get to the point where you're beginning to understand their thinking, you're getting too close to their mentality."
Researchers say understanding of offenders is in its infancy. There's little data to differentiate passive voyeurs from active predators, and no definitive way to assess future risks for offenders like Paroline.
"Some people who don't necessarily want to get involved with kids do get hooked," said psychiatrist Fred Berlin, founder of Johns Hopkins University's sexual disorders clinic.
He and other experts say many offenders don't know how to stop. And the public remains largely unaware that, typically, people who view child porn get more prison time than people who sexually abuse children.
In the last decade, according to a federal public defender's 2009 analysis, the mean federal child porn sentence increased by nearly six years in the decade ending in 2007 to more than 7 ½ years in prison.
Some experts note that those increases came without any scientific data or rationale. Most offenders, like Paroline, have no prior records – let alone sex offenses.
"People who look at child porn need to be arrested and need to have consequences. I think the consequences should be equitable," said psychologist David Delmonico, director of Duquesne University's online behavior research and education center in Pittsburgh. "I think we're on a modern-day witch hunt for child-porn offenders."
Shame and guilt
Paroline agreed to a series of interviews with The Dallas Morning News beginning last summer. The 45-year-old gave access to investigation records, as well as psychological and polygraph exams supporting his contention that he's never touched a child. His wife answered questions just before he completed a two-year prison sentence in October.
"If this helps one person stay away from this stuff, it's worth it," he says. "It's something that's so hard to talk about. There's so much shame and guilt."
He sees himself as an average guy. He looks it, with a middle-aged paunch, a graying goatee and receding buzz haircut. His East Texas twang flows in church rhythms. His worst outburst is "goodness gracious." He drives a pickup, favors cowboy hats and dotes on his sickly wife, who is disabled with lupus.
Paroline sounds earnest, even as he squirms around questions. He says viewing child porn was never about sex, much less an attraction to kids. He falls silent when asked about two toddlers he and his wife were trying to adopt when he got caught.
He says he never made any connection with the two "little angels" in his home and horrific images he sought online – little girls choking and gagging, little girls with fathers and sons, a kindergartener with a horse.
His computer hard drive indicated that his Internet forays were brief. After indulging a few minutes, he'd stop for months. Then he'd take another coffee break with his laptop. He'd stay in his office for lunch. He'd find time alone before church. He says it was his escape.
"I'm still trying to understand all of this myself," he says.
Paroline says his porn habit began with peeks at a hated stepfather's Hustler magazines as a miserable teen. After marrying at 19, Paroline says, he bought porn and dabbled in adult swinger sex. When his marriage ended, he took daily refuge in porn.
Then he met Rena'te, a divorced phone company sales rep. The petite brunette, five years younger, made an ultimatum after finding a Hustler in his home. Paroline promised to give up porn before they married in 1998.
She thought he kept his word. When Paroline withdrew, she blamed job stress. She recalls suggesting prayer and devotionals and church. He says he couldn't explain that he had turned to online porn.
He says he began exploring Internet porn when she traveled and he felt lonesome. With a click, he could see anything. Another click made everything disappear.
By fall 2007, he says, Internet child porn eased stress from his new business, building portable air conditioners. By spring, his secret trolling intensified as the couple took in the two toddler sisters and began adoption proceedings.
The oldest girl was a sexual abuse victim. Rena'te recalls her husband's visceral reaction when their Corsicana adoption agency showed a video about child abuse. Reading the girls' histories, she says, "broke Randy's heart."
Paroline says he tried to put limits on his secret habit. He never bought, shared or saved images. He didn't know his computer recorded every online click.
Police found that he accessed 280 child-porn images over 15 days between September 2007 and July 2008. In that period, he entered more than 1,000 search terms for hard-core child porn. Most of his search terms are unprintable.
What he wanted was easy to find. Just one of his Google searches got 1.6 million results. Another got 1.17 million.
Paroline admits to being aroused and sometimes masturbating. He insists his attraction wasn't pleasure but revulsion. "You feel better about yourself," he says, "because you've seen some horrible thing. That probably sounds pretty bad."
By midsummer in 2008, Paroline was online more and more. He says he wept. He prayed. He believes that God sent the virus he downloaded on his last search. The way he sees it, he turned himself in.
Paroline called a computer technician to fix his laptop. After an initial look, the tech suggested trashing it. Instead, Paroline carried it to the tech's car, explaining that it held "a lot of my problems."
In his account to the FBI, the tech recalled Paroline offering more of an excuse than a confession: "You're probably going to see what I'm into, but I'm getting better with it."
Once back at his shop, the tech found horrific images in the laptop's history files and called the FBI. Hours later, agents were in Paroline's office.
Paroline admitted everything. Then the agents told his wife. She recalls a blur of tears and disbelief. What did they mean by child porn? What might happen to their little girls? Their adoptions were almost final.
A hundred friends and relatives were coming to a "welcome home" adoption party the next day. The Parolines had a hall rented near their ranch and catered food. They'd sent invitations with a family portrait. While waiting for the FBI to talk to her husband, Rena'te fielded phone calls from her sister about pretty tablecloths for the party.
The FBI agents told the Parolines to inform their adoption agency that Randy faced charges. Rena'te recalls slapping herself and screaming, "Not my girls!"
Paroline called the agency when they got home. Texas Child Protective Services ordered the agency to take the two sisters. The Parolines drove to Corsicana to surrender them near midnight.
The couple kept driving, ending up in Texarkana. Her sister and his sister taped a note on the party hall door, saying that the family celebration was canceled.
'Coming clean'
A forensic psychologist hired by a defense lawyer, F.R. "Buck" Files of Tyler, diagnosed Paroline as a pedophile who posed a low risk of hands-on offenses. Paroline saw a therapist. He wrote an essay that he was "coming clean" at the price of his good name, his freedom, his chance at fatherhood. Nowhere in the 25-page essay did he mention child porn.
His wife read her husband's essay reluctantly. She says she doesn't want to know more. "I don't want to look at Randy with those eyes."
Some relatives urged divorce before Paroline pleaded guilty. "No, this is my husband," she recalls saying.
"I wanted to help him get through this," she says.
At Paroline's sentencing in June 2009, U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis said Paroline's remorse seemed heartfelt. He imposed a two-year prison sentence, one of the area's lowest in recent years for child porn.
Prosecutors asked the judge to make Paroline pay $3.4 million in restitution to a Pennsylvania woman identified as one of 23 children in Paroline's laptop images.
In a victim's impact statement read in court, the woman wrote that she couldn't hold a job and had post-traumatic stress disorder. "How can I get over this," she wrote, "when the shameful abuse I suffered is out there forever?"
By mid-2009, prosecutors noted, 62 original photos of that woman's abuse had metastasized online. More than 8,800 versions had surfaced in criminal investigations. The woman's lawyer, James Marsh of New York City, calls those numbers low; versions have recently been tracked to 40,000 Internet addresses involved in peer-to-peer file-sharing.
Davis rejected the restitution request, finding no direct link between Paroline's actions and the woman's injuries. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals heard an appeal this month. Experts predict that the case could go before the U.S. Supreme Court.
During his months in prison, Paroline's wife moved their camping trailer to Houston and commuted there to see him each weekend. She says that was easier than waiting alone in their ranch house, staring at their empty children's room.
The little girls who were nearly theirs have been adopted by another family.
In July, Paroline moved to a Tyler halfway house. He began working at his mother's gravel company. He called his therapist to resume counseling. In prison, he got none. He says that was a tradeoff. Fellow inmates never figured out what he was in for, so he never got attacked or labeled a "cho-mo," or child molester, like other child-porn prisoners.
In October, Paroline went home on supervised release. He says he'd like to speak to church groups to offer a cautionary tale. Since word of his case spread, his wife says, at least 20 acquaintances have approached her or her mother-in-law about struggles with pornography.
But Paroline stops cold when asked whether he'll call himself a child-porn offender. He says he prefers not looking back at what he says amounts to 15 bad days – the days that authorities found he'd looked at child porn. He recoils when asked if he thinks about the kids in the images, or what he'd tell them.
"I don't remember what I looked at, and I don't want to," he says. "What do you say to a 6-year-old, other than, 'I'm sorry I looked at that; it wasn't about you.' ?" ..Source.. by LEE HANCOCK / The Dallas Morning News
