6-22-2011 Illinois:
I wish I could tell ___ not to worry, that common sense will surely prevail in the sad, scary story of his son.
But I would be lying. His son is a sex offender, and when it comes to sex offenders, hysteria and superstition trump common sense every time.
In December 2008, ___ (pictured), then 27, had sex with two 16-year-old girl in a Downers Grove motel room. The girls were willing participants, and ___, who suffers from Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, has the judgment and social skills of a 10-year-old.
But the girls were legally underage, and authorities contended ___ knew right from wrong when he had sex with them. So he ended up pleading guilty but mentally ill to aggravated criminal sexual abuse and received a five-year prison sentence.
Flash ahead to today: ___ is scheduled to be paroled from Taylorville Correctional Center on July 23. His parents, Walt, 60, and Kathy, 58, want him to move back into their Elmhurst home where they can supervise his transition to freedom.
Unfortunately, there is a part-time preschool program operating in a church around the corner from the ___ residence. It's roughly 400 feet from lot line to lot line, and the rigid, one-size-fits-all legal restrictions in Illinois prohibit sex offenders from living within 500 feet of schools, parks, day-care centers and other places where children gather.
Nothing in the record suggests ___ is a pedophile with a deviant interest in the 2- to 5-year-old clientele of a preschool or that he has any predatory tendencies.
But even if he were a pedophile, the vast weight of research on residential restrictions — now in roughly 30 states and expanding, in places, to quarter-mile buffer zones — suggests this geographic limitation would do nothing to protect children.
"There was no significant relationship between reoffending and proximity to schools or day cares," concluded an academic study of such restrictions published last year in Criminal Justice and Behavior, the journal of The American Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology. "The belief that keeping sex offenders far from schools and other child-friendly locations will protect children from sexual abuse appears to be a well-intentioned but flawed premise."
That premise will keep ___ locked up past his parole date. The Illinois Department of Corrections refuses to allow sex offenders without legal places to live to enter supervised release (parole) programs, and a DOC spokeswoman said roughly 1,000 such inmates a year are "violated at the door," as the expression goes, and reincarcerated until their full sentences are up.
Some of you, I know, are saying, "So what? Sex offenders are the lowest of the low and the longer they're locked up, the better."
The flaw in this thinking is that it ultimately short-circuits the safeguards — such as mandatory therapy, electronic monitoring and tight supervision — that help offenders successfully re-enter society. When ___'s sentence is up in July 2012, for instance, he'll walk free even if he has nowhere to live.
"One of the unintended consequence of these draconian residency-restrictions is that they increase homelessness and transience among ex-offenders," said Lynn University psychology professor Jill S. Levenson, one of the authors of the article in Criminal Justice and Behavior. "And those," she said, "are known risk factors for the resumption of criminal behavior."
Last year, my colleagues Megan Twohey and Joe Mahr chronicled in this newspaper a series of horror stories of sex criminals who served their parole periods behind bars, then reoffended after vanishing unsupervised into the community. Nearly 1 in 3 was not up to date with the state's sex-offender registry.
Walt and Kathy ___ are unemployed and say they can't move or afford a separate dwelling for ___, their only child.
The compassionate and sensible solution would be for state officials to consider the circumstances here — including substantial expert opinion that it would be best for ___ and for society for him to live at home — and issue a waiver.
But there is no provision in the law for such consideration or the issuance of such a waiver, according to the Department of Corrections. And given the invertebrate skittishness with which our lawmakers approach the issue of sex crimes, there's little chance we'll ever add such a provision or relax the restrictions and introduce common sense when it comes to nonviolent offenders.
All I can tell Walt ___ is, if I were him, I'd worry, too. And good luck. ..Source.. by ERIC ZORN
June 22, 2011
Restrictions on sex offenders lack sense, common and otherwise
November 6, 2010
Alabama's sex offender notification law can't apply to homeless, state appeals court rules
11-6-2010 Alabama:
MONTGOMERY, Alabama -- A state appeals court ruled today that an Alabama law requiring sex offenders to give an address where they will be living before getting out of prison can't be applied to a homeless inmate with no money.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals ruled 4-0 that the arrest of Thornal Lee Adams for violating the law was unconstitutional because he was punished for being homeless.
"Adams continued to be incarcerated and ultimately charged for reasons that were beyond his control — his indigency and resulting homelessness," Judge Sam Welch wrote.
The appeals court said the law was intended to help law enforcement keep up with sex offenders following their release from prison and to notify residents in the neighborhoods where they will reside. But state law makes it "virtually nil" for indigent sex offenders to ever get out of jail even though they have finished their sentences for their sex crimes.
The court said its ruling applies only to the facts in Adams' case and the law could be applied constitutionally in other cases where an inmate has living options before his release.
Adams' attorney, David Schoen, called the decision "stunning in its recognition of the unique hardships that poverty places on members of our society, and it speaks in the strongest terms possible against penalizing that status through the criminal law."
Suzanne Webb, spokeswoman for Attorney General Troy King, said he would appeal the decision to the Alabama Supreme Court.
Alabama's Community Notification Act requires sex offenders to give an address where they will be living before they finish their sentences and get out of prison. Not giving an address is a felony that results in them being rearrested when they start to leave prison and carries a sentence of one to 10 years in prison.
Adams, who was convicted of rape and sodomy, said he couldn't give an address before his release in 2008 because he had no family to take him in, he had no money for an apartment, and he couldn't find space in a halfway house. He was arrested upon his release and placed in the Montgomery County jail for violating the law.
Circuit Judge Truman Hobbs Jr. tossed out the charge, and the appeals court agreed with him.
The attorney general's staff argued that the law is constitutional because an inmate only has to give a location, such as "a park bench, a bridge, or some other geographical space" where he could be found by law enforcement. The appeals court said the attorney general was ignoring the plain language of the law which requires an address where mail can be received.
In the 70-page ruling, the court said Alabama's law amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, but the Legislature can develop constitutional ways to track homeless indigent sex offenders. The court even outlined what other states have done.
At the time of Adams' case in 2008, the law required a sex offender to give an address 45 days before his release. In 2009, the Legislature toughened the law to require 180 days. ..Source.. by Phillip Rawls
August 13, 2010
Federal appeals court reverses ruling on sex offenders' lawsuit
8-13-2010 Alabama:
A federal appeals court has reversed a U.S. District Court judge's decision to throw out a lawsuit filed by four sex offenders who say Jefferson County's sheriff should not be allowed to hold them after serving their sentences just because they are poor and don't have a place to call home.
Share Alabama's Community Notification Act requires that before convicted sex offenders can be freed at the end of their sentences, they must provide an address where they will live after their release. The residence must meet certain requirements, including not being within a certain distance of a school.
If an inmate completes a sentence but can not provide an approved address, he or she can be held by the local sheriff in jail indefinitely, according to the state law.
district court failed to appreciate that this claim, if successful, would not affect the validity of their conviction nor the resulting sentence imposed, and would not necessarily result in immediate release," according to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling.
One of the three judges had agreed that the judge had made the right decision in dismissing the case.
The lawsuit now goes back to Coogler, unless Hale or the State of Alabama seeks a rehearing before the appeals court.
"All this does really is let us proceed with this case," said Kira Fonteneau, attorney representing the sex offenders. "It's a great first step ... It (the appeals ruling) doesn't determine anything as to what is going to happen with the case."
Sheriff's officials said they will not appeal the ruling and will continue to fight the case in the lower court.
They feel strongly about it, Sheriff Mike Hale said, because victims of sexual assault and sexual abuse have a very difficult time putting their lives back together, if ever, especially victims who are children.
"The argument that these offenders have paid their debt carries little weight with us," Hale said. "The laws involving sex offenders were created with one thing in mind and that is to protect others from becoming victims."
"We strongly believe they are trying to create a loophole in that law by claiming to be indigent so they may go about in society unmonitored," Hale said. "We will fight that vigorously and look forward to the case being considered by the lower courts."
Closing a loophole
The sheriff said he will ask the state legislators to strengthen the law closing any such loophole possibility.
"We agree with the state of Alabama that they must provide a legitimate address before being released back into our society," he said.
Chief Deputy Randy Christian said investigators would have little success doing that if a sex offender was released without authorities having the ability to warn the public about who they are, what they look like and where they intend to live.
"Our job is to be advocates for crime victims and protect potential victims. Not only is that the right thing to do, but Sheriff Hale demands it," Christian said.
The four men -- Sidney Gipson, William McGuirk, Timothy Guthery and James Sasser -- had sued in 2008. Their lawsuit asks that a procedure be put in place to determine if they are indigent. If they are deemed indigent, provisions would be made for them to comply with the law without being indefinitely held in jail.
Lack of a process
If the state is going to require people to get housing then there ought to be some process for people who can't afford to get housing, Fonteneau said. "The law does not provide a process for law enforcement or the individual to deal with it ... There's just nothing there," she said.
Gipson and McGuirk remain in the Jefferson County Jail, while Guthery and Sasser have been released.
Fonteneau said she doesn't know exactly how many inmates in the Jefferson County jail are in the same position as the four men who filed the lawsuit.
Christian said Wednesday there were six inmates in the county jail who have provided addresses, but they aren't compliant with the law, so they haven't been released. Either the addresses don't exist or they fail to meet with guidelines, for example, being too close to a school, he said. One inmate continues to be held because he hasn't provided any address at all, he said. ..Source.. by Kent Faulk -- The Birmingham News
August 12, 2010
Ala. sex offenders' lawsuit reinstated
8-12-2010 Alabama:
A federal appeals court has reversed a U.S. District Court judge's decision and reinstated a lawsuit filed by four sex offenders.
The sex offenders say Jefferson County's sheriff should not be allowed to keep them in jail after they finish their sentences just because they don't have a place to call home. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to a lowe court for reconsideration.
Alabama's Community Notification Act requires that before convicted sex offenders can be freed, they must provide an address where they will live after their release.
If an inmate completes a sentence but can not provide an approved address, he or she can be kept in jail.
The lawsuit now goes back to U.S. District Court Judge Scott Coogler. ..Source.. by The Gadsden Times via ReFORM Alabama
