CT- State Commentary — Sex offender hysteria produces no protection for public

3-20-2008 Connecticut:

Connecticut's hysteria over sex offenders is becoming ridiculous.

Bristol has just adopted and Windsor Locks is drafting an ordinance similar to those already in force in Danbury and New Milford to forbid sex offenders from entering areas likely to be frequented by children, like parks and playgrounds. Meanwhile the General Assembly is considering legislation to forbid sex offenders from living within a thousand feet of schools -- which would exclude most sex offenders from any housing they could afford.

It is all so silly. For if the regular criminal law cannot deter people from kidnapping or raping people or seducing minors, how will a zoning ordinance do better? Are towns going to station police officers at park entrances to demand identification from everyone and delay everyone's admission until each identification has been checked against the state's sex-offender registry?

And how much will a law forbidding sex offenders from living within a thousand feet of a school discourage them from getting closer unless cars, buses, bicycles, and shoes are outlawed as well?

Bristol especially should know that these protections are imaginary, having seen last year the rape of a teen-ager in a park by a registered sex offender wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet.

State government also should know better. But then state government has not yet noticed that nearly every woman murdered by an estranged husband or crazed boyfriend dies clutching a Superior Court protective order.

State government also considers or enacts new restrictions on handguns almost every year, always without any impact on crime, since people who are prepared to use guns to murder and rob are not deterred by gun registration requirements or gun sale rules, any more than they would be deterred even by outlawing handguns.

If sex offenders really were considered still dangerous upon their release — and many of them are not psychotic predators but only boors who took advantage of an acquaintance — real protection would require imposing longer terms on them in the first place.

With abusive spouses and boyfriends, real protection would require expedited trials and more shelters and firearms training for abused women.

With gun crime, real protection would require reconsidering the drug problem, since most gun crime involves contraband drugs.

Connecticut is getting all these only imaginary protections because its government does not want to bear the expense of real protections or even to consider how much crime the state can afford, there being only as much crime as legislation establishes.

About three-quarters of imprisonments in the state and a similarly disproportionate share of the work of the police and courts involve contraband drugs. Thus, if only by default, Connecticut has decided that chasing dopeheads around to protect people against themselves is far more important than protecting people against others.

But Connecticut's inability to get serious about crime is most glaring in the opposition in the General Assembly to requiring life sentences for people convicted of three violent felonies, proposals prompted by the murder last year of three members of the Petit family in Cheshire. At a hearing of the General Assembly's Judiciary Committee the other day, a relative of the murder victims spoke in favor of a "three strikes" law.

Connecticut now refuses to impose a life sentence automatically on anyone for any number of violent felonies, as if the highest objective of justice is to preserve a judge's discretion. But if the two parolees charged with the Cheshire murders are guilty, judicial discretion will have been partly responsible for the crime, since the parolees already had more than 40 felony convictions between them. And even if Connecticut had a "three strikes" law, it would not have applied to them, since their previous felonies were not violent.

Surely Connecticut should be able to determine some number of convictions for violent felonies requiring termination of judicial discretion in favor of public safety. And surely Connecticut should be able to determine some number of convictions for any felonies that signifies the incorrigibility of a criminal and requires a life sentence.

Sex offenders get the most attention but they are not the big problem, for Connecticut is full of released incorrigibles. The other day in Manchester Superior Court the criminal record of one such incorrigible was displayed on a computer printout; it was 6 feet long and included many serious crimes. But only after the 25th conviction did he get a long sentence, 22 years. ..more.. by Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.