7-7-2009 Illinois:
The male resident who molested 10 female residents earlier this year at the La Salle County Nursing Home is no longer there, having been taken to an unidentified psychiatric facility.
However, according to records, a registered sex offender lives in the county home.
_____ is listed as living at 1380 N. 27th Road, Apt. 5A, the address for the nursing home. The 74-year-old ____ committed two sex acts in September 1996 against a 12-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty and arrived in prison Jan. 15, 1997, and paroled Oct. 5, 2000, completing parole Oct. 5, 2003. ____ was living in La Salle and working in Ottawa at the time of the offenses. He had no prior criminal record.
There has been no indication that ____ had anything to do with the series of incidents involving a resident molesting several female residents at the home. There are specific guidelines that must be followed, however, involving sex offenders.
Any nursing home in Illinois is required to tell the Illinois Department of Public Health about any resident whose background check shows them to be a sex offender. The state must then do a "risk analysis" of the offender, the results of which are given to the home to help determine whether staff are able to care for the offender and to prepare a care plan.
Sex offenders must also be placed in a private room and staff must meet with police to talk about the need for, and to develop if needed, policies to address the offender's presence in the home. Further, the home is required to tell residents and prospective residents and families they can ask whether an offender lives at the home and how to find information on the state sex offender Web site.
Nursing home administrator Adrienne Erickson is on medical leave and Assistant Administrator Cathy Harvey so far will not comment on the sex abuse incidents or if the sex offender procedures have been followed. ..Source.. by Dan Churney
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
IL- Can sex offenders live in county home? Yes
NV- Detective Shot Suspect in the Back
The original story is here, and the real witness' version:
7-7-2009 Nevada:
The Clark County Coroner's Office is correcting the cause of death in the shooting death of a suspected child molester.
Police say 32-year-old John Paul Hambleton ran and fought with 30-year-old Officer Jeremy Hendricks as Hendricks tried to arrest him. The detective shot Hambleton in the back, killing him. The coroner originally said he was shot in the chest.
A jury will decide if the officer's actions were justified on August 14, 2009 during his coroner's inquest. ..Source.. by 8CBS.com
Name of man killed by Las Vegas police released
7-6-2009 Nevada:
LAS VEGAS—The Clark County coroner's office has identified a man shot and killed by a Las Vegas police officer last week.
The coroner's office says 32-year-old John Paul Hambleton died Wednesday of a perforating gunshot wound to the chest, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported on its Web site Monday.
Police said Hambleton was suspected in a sexual assault case and detectives in plain clothes told him at his work that he was going to be arrested. Police say he fled and a detective fired a Taser at him, but that it didn't stop him.
Police said another detective pursued Hambleton and a scuffle between the two ensued. The officer shot Hambleton, who died at the scene. The detectives were not injured. ..Source.. by AP
KY- Prosecutors in Child Pornography Case to Seize Residence
7-7-2009 Kentucky:
Prosecutors in the Eastern District of Kentucky don't just want to put Joseph Robert Leitner in prison for years. The federal government wants his house.
Leitner, 62, pleaded guilty last week to charges that he possessed more than 30,000 images of child pornography, and he agreed to give up his home in the Chevy Chase subdivision of Lexington, court records show. A copy of the plea agreement is here.
Leitner, who was indicted last year, has been held in custody since October 2008. He pleaded guilty to one count of downloading child pornography in a case bolstered by images and computers taken from his home last year. Leitner faces between five and 20 years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for October. His lawyer, Jeffrey Darling, was not immediately reached for comment on Monday.
The property forfeiture marked the first time that prosecutors in the Eastern District of Kentucky have seized a home in a child pornography investigation. The forfeiture of houses more often occurs in drug prosecutions.
"He used his house as a protective shield to allow his criminal activity to go undetected," said Kyle Edelen, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office. Prosecutors, he said, based the forfeiture decision on the number of images and the frequency of the downloads.
U.S. District Judge Karl Forester signed a preliminary judgment (.pdf) of forfeiture June 30, ordering the government to provide notice and conduct ancillary proceedings to determine whether any third parties have rights to Leitner's property. "We're not going to just rip someone from their home or leave innocent people without homes," Edelen said.
In February 2008, a defendant in the Northern District of Texas forfeited his house in a child pornography case. "We're taking the war on child exploitation very seriously and we're making it very personal. None of your property is safe if you use it to exploit children -- you can even lose your home," then-U.S. Attorney Richard Roper said in a statement at the time the defendant was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
In an interview, Roper, who is now a partner at Thompson & Knight in Dallas, called forfeiture in child pornography cases "cutting-edge theory" and urged prosecutors to use discretion. Forfeiture, Roper said, should be based on a case-by-case basis. "Just because the statute gives you the authority to forfeit property doesn't mean you must do it." ..Source.. by Mike Scarcella
Should Minors Ever Face Life Without Parole?
7-7-2009 National:
Four years ago the high court decided no minor should face the death penalty. Now it's poised to determine if youths should face life without a chance of parole.
The Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons struck down the death penalty for juveniles, citing the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. But that left another possible Eighth Amendment issue on the table: whether sentences of life without parole for juveniles are constitutional.
That question is now being considered on both the judicial and legislative levels. In the term beginning this October, the Supremes will hear two cases — one involving a 13-year-old sex offender, the other a 17-year-old probation violator present when a felony murder occurred — both aiming to challenge life-without-parole sentences for juveniles (known by the unwieldy acronym JLWOP). Concurrently, the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security has been gathering testimony on a bill that would mandate parole hearings for JLWOP prisoners. The bill covers federal cases and gives states a financial incentive to comply with its terms.
"There is so much attention on this issue right now," says Baylor Law School professor Mark Osler, who has testified in favor of the proposed House bill, H.R. 2289. "I think in part it's because you have groups doing a good job advocating on it, and the idea is becoming more and more prevalent — that instead of wholesale change, we are smoothing off the rougher edges of the justice system, and that includes a focus on children."
Opponents to a change suggest that a focus on the prisoners as children, and not offenders, is wrong-headed and ahistorical. In its brief before the Supreme Court in the 13-year-old sex offender case, the State of Florida Attorney General's Office wrote, "Outside the context of the death penalty, this Court has always examined whether a sentence is grossly disproportionate under the Eighth Amendment by examining the sentence in relation to the offender's instant offense and prior offenses, not the individual characteristics of offender, such as age or mental capacity."
But the historical precedence is under assault.
"Juvenile crime has been going down, so people are starting to use that as political cover to raise the issue of why we have these overly punitive juvenile justice policies in place," said Ashley Nellis of the Sentencing Project. "And it's just a good time to be re-examining policies fiscally because incarceration is expensive, and life sentences are the most expensive."
The United States is one of the few countries that hand out JLWOP sentences. A 2005 Amnesty International study found that life without parole for juveniles is theoretically available in a dozen countries, but besides the U.S., only three others actually had teens serving such sentences — Israel with seven, South Africa with four and Tanzania with one.
In contrast, Sentencing Project Executive Director Mark Maurer noted in his testimony before the House subcommittee that 2,500 U.S. teenagers are incarcerated with no hope of release, most of them people of color. A majority of these — as many as 60 percent — are first-time offenders, and more than one quarter were convicted of felony murder, meaning they were participating in a crime when a murder occurred, but didn't do the actual killing.
"That's typical in a juvenile case where they are hanging out with older kids," Nellis says. "They don't realize they will do something bad, someone dies, and they wind up with life without parole."
An example of this is the case of Rebecca Falcon, a Florida 15-year-old who in 1997 hailed a cab with a gun-toting 18-year-old friend. The driver was shot in the head and died. Although it was never established in court who pulled the trigger — the teens accused each other — because Falcon was on the scene, she was sentenced to life without parole.
JLWOP sentences contravene several international treaties, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (which has been ratified by every country except the U.S. and Somalia), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which the U.S. has signed) and a 2007 U.N. General Assembly resolution calling on all nations to abolish the juvenile death penalty and JLWOP (the vote was 176-1, the U.S. dissenting).
Despite the international momentum, the U.S. is just beginning to discuss the issue. One reason, says Nellis, is the ongoing fear the public has about so-called "bad seed" children in their midst.
"There was this tough-on-crime perspective that dominated in the '90s," she says, "and you can see this in laws that moved juveniles into the adult system. There was also this public outcry promoted by politicians that there was this super predator, that laws needed to be toughened to deal with this kind of juvenile."
Professor Osler adds that because many of these JLWOP sentences are "concentrated in a few states — California, Pennsylvania, Michigan — and they're not the states you'd expect [meaning places like Texas, with its high adult execution rate] ... my suspicion is that there was a political moment where that seemed like the answer to a problem, whether it was youth violence or gangs."
The trouble here is that these sentences send a message that the juvenile, no matter how young, is irredeemable, and that, Osler says, "is the argument you hear over and over, that there's no hope for change based on what we saw them do."
Yet this kind of thinking is contradicted by research, which has found that adolescent brains are undeveloped in areas associated with impulse control, emotional response, risk assessment and moral reasoning. Which means, says Bryan A. Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, who testified on hearings about H.R. 2289, that "young teens experience widely fluctuating emotions and vulnerability to stress and peer pressure without the adult ability to resist impulses and risk-taking behavior or the adult capacity to control their emotions."
In fact, some social scientists believe full emotional and moral maturity doesn't occur until people are in their 20s, which means an incarcerated teenager, given the proper counseling and rehabilitation (a big if), could conceivably mature into a responsible adult.
This is what H.R. 2289 is trying to take into account. The bill would mandate that every JLWOP prisoner "receives, not less than once during the first 15 years of incarceration, and not less than every three years thereafter, a meaningful opportunity for parole or other form of supervised release." States in noncompliance of this mandate would be penalized by a 10 percent cut in the anticrime funding they would normally receive under the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968.
While a number of high-profile organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and The Center for Law and Global Justice at the University of San Francisco School of Law have produced reports castigating the U.S. for its policies on JLWOP, and PBS's Frontline documentary series produced a 2007 piece, "When Kids Get Life," widely viewed as sympathetic to the cause, opponents of loosening sentences have stood their ground. Critics of the act, which include the National District Attorneys Association, claim it is yet another example of the federal government butting into state issues and lumps all JLWOP offenders into the same eligible-for-parole category no matter how heinous the offense.
"That [last argument] would make a lot more sense if you required a mandatory release date," Osler says. "This bill is just about parole, and a lot of people up for parole never get parole. If you have a kid in for 15 years, and he still has a lot of problems, that kid will not be released."
But as Santa Mateo County, Calif., District Attorney James P. Fox noted in his testimony, the mere fact that a juvenile was prosecuted as an adult suggests he or she already has a lot of problems.
"The unwritten but clear implication of this proposed legislation is that too many juvenile offenders are prosecuted and sentenced as adults in our country," he testified. "The reality is, in fact, quite the opposite. Very few juveniles are prosecuted and sentenced as adults in America, contrary to the unwritten implication of this proposed legislation and a public misperception driven in large part by sensationalistic media coverage of certain high-profile cases. Few jurisdictions in America prosecute more than 1 to 2 percent of juvenile criminal offenders as adults, and in some jurisdictions, this percentage is even lower. In those cases where adult-court prosecution does occur, the simple fact of the matter is that adult-court prosecution is clearly warranted in these instances."
No one knows if H.R. 2289 will become law (it has yet to be voted out of committee), but with the Democratic majority in Congress, it probably has a decent shot. In the meantime, the two cases coming before the Supreme Court will go a long way toward determining how this country deals with its juvenile criminals. Yet because of the significant differences between them, people like Nellis are predicting a split decision.
"My expectation is that they will answer two different questions," she says. "They may talk about juvenile life for very young ages in the Sullivan case [the 13-year-old sex offender], and they might deal with probation violations in the second case. We're hopeful that at the very least life without parole cannot be used in non-homicide cases." ..Source.. by Lewis Beale
MI- Release of Lansing sex sting police reports raises concerns about disclosure of HIV status
7-7-2009 Michigan:
Critics say details of arrested man's health should have been redacted; unauthorized release of such information may be unlawful
LANSING — Buried at the end of one of the arrest reports from a controversial May 22 sex-sting operation in the capital city’s Fenner Nature Center is information that one of the men arrested was HIV positive. That disclosure, experts say, may have violated the state’s confidentiality laws protecting the identity of those who are infected with the virus.
In an email to Michigan Messenger, Jay Kaplan, staff attorney for American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan’s LGBT project, wrote:
I can find nothing in MCL 333.5131 that would permit the Lansing Police Department to disclose through their incident report the HIV status of the individual arrested. Since this police report is a public record, the information regarding his HIV status should have been redacted and absent his express authorized permission to disclose, or a court order, this information should not have been included in the report you were given.
The report was released last week after a battle over a Freedom of Information Act request between city officials and a coalition of groups and media outlets, including Michigan Messenger, seeking details on the sex sting.
Contained in the report was a narrative of the incident which lead to the arrest, as well as an interview with the defendant.
For privacy concerns related to HIV status, Michigan Messenger is not disclosing his identity of the arrested man, who has pleaded guilty to one count of indecent exposure.
According the incident narrative, the arrested man allegedly exposed himself in a wooded area to the undercover officer and agreed to have a three-way sexual encounter with the officer and a fictitious friend named “Bill.” During the conversation about the proposed group sex, the accused allegedly asked whether the officer’s friend was “clean,” referring, according to the police officer, to whether the men were HIV negative.
The officer responded that both he and “Bill” were “clean” and asked the accused if he was as well. The accused, according to the arrest report, said: “Oh yeah.” After this, the officer had the accused follow him to an “apartment” on Kalamazoo Avenue. The accused man was then arrested. During a search of the man’s vehicle, police found “several containers of medication” and when they asked the accused, he informed them he was HIV-positive and had been for 18 years.
While it is a crime in Michigan to engage in sexual penetration, however slight, without first disclosing one’s HIV-positive status, the accused was not accused of violating that law, or any of the other criminal laws involving penetration or sex acts which require disclosure of HIV status in public records.
Under Michigan law, unauthorized disclosure of a person’s HIV status can be not only a civil issue, but could result in criminal action. Under the law, disclosure of an HIV positive status is acceptable only by public health officials, and under very specific conditions, including the treatment of the patient, partner notification and to protect the health of the individual.
Lansing City Attorney Brigham Smith authorized the release of the police reports and the man’s HIV status. Smith told the Lansing City Council’s Public Safety Committee last week that the disclosure was not illegal, because the federal Health Information and Portability Act (HIPA) did not apply to the city.
“That was illegal,” said Penny Gardner, president of the Lansing Association for Human Rights, when she addressed the Public Safety Committee hearing. LAHR is one of the groups that signed onto the original FOIA request for information into May’s sex sting.
Mark Peterson, a member of the Michigan Positive Action Coalition, and HIV advocacy group, issued the following statement about the situation to Michigan Messenger:
I think that this situation highlights the continued stigma that having HIV still has. This story is one of taking an action that may be considered as prurient and even making it more salacious by adding HIV to the mix. There is no reason whatsoever that I can think of that would warrant the police from asking about or including this man’s HIV status in any public record. I’m not a lawyer, but this looks to me like a violation.
Why is it somehow OK to release the individuals HIV status without written permission here? What would have happen if they searched his car and found medications for asthma and diabetes? Would they have then reported, “Mr. Doe, an asthmatic diabetic, was …
It’s NOT OK to violate our state laws regarding protection of HIV status disclosure. HIV is a virus not grounds for assuming criminal behavior. Those of us living with HIV deserve adequate health care, not to be criminalized because of a virus. What’s next, viral policing?
While Lansing City Council members would not discuss the particular case, all three who attended the Public Safety Committee meeting last week expressed concern about the broader implications of disclosure of HIV status in police records which might become public.
“I would like to see some policies and procedures put in place on how and what information is put into a police report,” said Eric Hewitt, who represents Lansing’s First Ward.
Carol Wood, who is an at-large member of City Council and mayoral candidate, said she did not feel she had enough information to comment.
Sandy Allen, who represents the city’s Second Ward which includes Fenner Nature Center, said she too would like to see some policies come out of the situation.
“I don’t know why [someone's HIV status] should be [in a police report],” Allen said. “Personally, I don’t think it should be.” ..Source.. by Todd A. Heywood
OK- Oklahoma Corrections Department lacks funding to help sex offenders
7-7-2009 Oklahoma:
Inmates being released before getting treated, state officials say
Sex offenders are likely being released from Oklahoma prisons without any treatment to curb their criminal behavior, a state Corrections Department official says.
Oklahoma only has space for 55 inmates in the treatment program for sex offenders, who number more than 3,000 in state prisons.
"I was not prepared to hear that,” Oklahoma City attorney Robert Sisson said. "It’s appalling.”
That figure came to light last week when Gilbert D. Smith, 20, unsuccessfully sought to have an Oklahoma County judge reduce his 15-year prison sentence for rape.
Sisson, a father of two, said the Corrections Department needs to ensure those offenders aren’t released without receiving treatment to control their sexual urges.
Corrections spokesman Jerry Massie said resources such as bed space and manpower limit the size of the sex offender treatment program. It is not likely to expand.
Inmates who are closest to completing their prison terms are given priority when slots open, Massie said, citing research indicating such programs are more effective at that time.
"You’ve just got to maximize the resources that you have,” he said.
If it is true that public safety is trumped by lack of money, then why is the nation spending billions on the Adam Walsh Act while people are losing their homes in the worst financial crisis this nation has seen in many years?
‘Waste of resources’
Oklahoma City attorney Jack Dempsey Pointer said he plans to ask an Oklahoma County judge to release one of his clients from prison so he can continue sex offender treatment at his own expense. The man — whom Pointer declined to name because nothing has been filed in the case — is not getting treatment in prison.
"This is a tremendous waste of resources,” Pointer said. "Plus my guy’s not getting any help.”
Pointer unsuccessfully lobbied the judge last year to sentence his client to probation, citing his progress in sessions with Dr. Richard Kishur.
Kishur, who created the Corrections Department’s sex offender treatment program, offers similar treatment in his private practice.
Pointer said releasing his client from prison would relieve the burden on the prison system, while allowing him to get the treatment he needs.
He said sex offenders who are amenable to treatment should be allowed to get it, even if that means not putting them behind bars.
Cheaper alternative
Randy Lopp, chairman of the Oklahoma Coalition for Sex Offender Management, said community-based treatment is a cheaper alternative than prison.
"Punishment and treatment are two different things,” he said.
Lopp said recidivism rates are low for sex offenders, which makes them good candidates for treatment instead of incarceration.
Studies show 13 percent to 15 percent of sex offenders are re-arrested, Lopp said.
Oklahoma County prosecutor Suzanne Lister favors treating sex offenders while they’re in prison.
"They’re a captive audience,” she said. "They need to be getting some kind of treatment.”
The state Corrections Department does not provide treatment for sex offenders in the community.
Agency spokesman Massie said it likely would be required for anyone who is being supervised by a probation officer. ..Source.. by JAY F. MARKS
NY- Sex offender fights police visits
This man is absolutely correct, there is nothing in state or federal law that permits home visits, the law requires the registrant to verify at predetermined intervals.
7-7-2009 New York:
In a case that could affect how closely sex offenders are monitored, a Town of Poughkeepsie man who allegedly paid a mother so he could have sex with her underage daughters in Manhattan may file a $100 million federal suit against the town and Dutchess County.
The potential suit from registered sex offender and disbarred attorney James Colliton would challenge whether authorities can monitor sex offenders through a county program in which police visit offenders in their homes.
Town and county officials said that policy is sound - and Colliton's legal arguments off-base.
Colliton, a father of five from Spackenkill and a former Manhattan tax lawyer, was convicted in 2007 of statutory rape and patronizing a prostitute in a case that made tabloid headlines.
Free after being sentenced to time served, Colliton claims he has been harassed by town police officers who regularly visit his physical residence, which Colliton listed as a Route 9 motel. The visits are part of a sex offender monitoring program initiated several years ago by county District Attorney William Grady.
Colliton claims the program violates state law and deprives him of his constitutional right to privacy and his Fourth Amendment right against unlawful searches.
Describing police visits as the "intentional infliction of emotional distress," Colliton recently served town and county officials with a notice of claim - often a precursor to filing suit.
In his eight-page claim filed last month, Colliton indicates he intends to seek $3 million in compensatory damages and $97 million in punitive damages in federal court.
Colliton could not be reached Monday.
"I have suffered liberty and property deprivations," Colliton wrote in his notice, which he apparently authored. He said police "visits came and keep coming even though no court has adjudged they are lawful."
Key to Colliton's potential suit is his assertion the state's Sex Offender Registration Act, or SORA, "sets forth the exclusive method" of verifying offenders' addresses - trumping any local monitoring policy.
According to Colliton, state law "does not authorize or permit the local police department to visit an offender," as long as the offender is complying with address verification rules.
Grady called Colliton's interpretation of the law "mistaken," and said the act "simply sets minimal standards of compliance" for registered offenders.
Grady said the county program, in which all registered sex offenders are visited by authorities, will continue.
"It ensures sex offenders are appropriately monitored and does not violate any state or federal prohibitions," Grady said. "Unless there is effective monitoring, there is a substantial likelihood that many will reoffend. ... We will continue to be proactive to ensure this does not happen."
Colliton notes the law requires certain offenders to verify their addresses every 90 days with the local law enforcement agency where they reside. He also points to the state Division of Criminal Justice Services Web site, which outlines reporting regulations for sex offenders.
Colliton notes those regulations require offenders to return an address verification form each year to the division, within 10 days after the offender receives it.
Level 3 offenders, those considered most likely to reoffend, must go to their local police department every 90 days to personally report their addresses.
Colliton is a Level 3 offender.
According to Colliton, the state Division of Criminal Justice Services "does not state that the local police department is authorized or permitted to visit an offender who is complying" with the law.
Division spokeswoman Janine Kava said officials there were unaware of any challenges to monitoring that are similar to Colliton's.
She also said there is nothing in the law giving the division authority to oversee local law enforcement.
Precedents cited
In his notice, Colliton cites two recent legal decisions, one in Albany city court and another in Supreme Court in Rockland County, that he claims indicate state law preempts local laws and policies regarding the monitoring of sex offenders.
Colliton argues Grady's policy of allowing police to visit offenders in their homes "is preempted" by state law and "is otherwise constitutionally violative."
Town Supervisor Patricia Myers said she does not believe Poughkeepsie police officers are doing anything wrong by checking in on registered sex offenders.
"I believe the town is totally within its rights," Myers said. "We are not doing anything illegal in any way."
Colliton's New York City case made headlines several years ago.
The now 45-year-old attorney fled in February 2006 after learning police wanted to speak with him about his involvement with underage girls. At the time, Colliton worked for the Manhattan law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and kept an apartment in the city.
He was eventually arrested in March 2006 at a Manhattan hotel. In 2007, Colliton pleaded guilty to statutory rape and patronizing a prostitute. He admitted having sex with a girl younger than 15 and another younger than 17 at various times between 2000 and 2005.
In 2006, the mother of the two sisters in the case pleaded guilty to endangering the welfare of a child - admitting she allowed her daughters to have sex with Colliton. The mother admitted she knew Colliton was giving the girls money and gifts. The woman said she also asked Colliton for money.
Colliton was sentenced to the 19 months he had already spent in jail awaiting trial and was released in 2007. He was declared a Level 3 sex offender and returned to Poughkeepsie.
Colliton is no stranger to lawsuits.
He sued his former law firm, claiming he was owed nearly $1.5 million in annual bonuses, salary and vacation pay.
A federal judge dismissed that case last year - noting Colliton had filed at least five suits against various defendants and writing his "litigation tactics border on extortion and should not be condoned."
Colliton also filed a series of lawsuits against Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and two of his assistants. Colliton claimed he was coerced into pleading guilty.
In addition, Colliton sued American Express Co. for giving police credit card information he says resulted in his 2006 capture near Toronto.
Colliton was taken into custody at Niagara Falls by U.S. immigration authorities, who mistakenly released him because of an apparent communications breakdown. Colliton was arrested a week later in a Manhattan hotel, where he was registered under an alias.
The status of Colliton's lawsuits was not immediately clear Monday. ..Source.. by Michael Valkys • Poughkeepsie Journal
OH- Update on law sought
7-7-2009 Ohio:
Sex offenders subject of Senate debate
WARREN - Residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities could get official word if a sex offender moves into the home under new legislation introduced this month by State Sen. Capri Cafaro, D-Hubbard.
Under current law, only nearby property owners - not necessarily residents of the same facility - are notified when a sex offender moves into the area. The law classifies the long-term care centers as one residence and only the manager or administrator is notified.
Operators of the facilities rarely pass on official notices to residents and their families, fearing the loss of residents and income, Cafaro said. In some cases, employees at the facilities are told of the criminal backgrounds as a precaution.
Trumbull County Probate Judge Thomas A. Swift, who gave input in the bill's design, is hyping the legislation as a more aggressive proposal for holding long-term care facilities accountable for notifying residents and their guardians of a potential threat.
House Bill 130, introduced by Cafaro into the Senate, would require nursing homes and similar facilities to inform residents and their ''sponsors'' when a sex offender or a person imprisoned on a felony in another state is admitted to the facility.
The bill also gives immunity to whistle-blowing employees of the facilities who report failure to comply with the law. The proposal also calls for a fine of $100 a day for each day any offender goes unreported.
''For me it's pretty straight forward. The same consideration should be given to residents and their sponsors that the law now provides to surrounding homeowners. It's just common sense,'' Cafaro said. ''They have seven days to comply with the notification, and any fine money is channeled to a fund for Adult Protective Services.''
Cafaro said the provision calling for the reporting of out-of-state felons helps prevent what's known as ''dumping,'' or when a care facility recruits residents from elsewhere to fill bed space to take full advantage of Medicaid subsidies.
Both Cafaro and Swift say they anticipate opposition to the legislation from powerful long-term health care lobbyists.
A spokesman from the Ohio Health Care Association, which represents nursing homes, already reportedly questioned what a nursing home administrator is supposed to do to carry out full notification. Nursing home representatives point out that legally, they cannot turn away potential residents if they are in need and if they are able to provide payment.
Cafaro's bill, now in the Senate Judiciary and Criminal Justice Committee, includes a requirement that all nursing homes keep a log that would include identifying sex offenders. The log is available on request for any potential resident or guardian of a potential resident.
''This legislation really doesn't pose any problem to a reputable nursing home. Responsible nursing homes can ensure residents of proper notification,'' said Swift, who earlier this year called attention to a Warren nursing home that was housing more than a dozen of his wards of the court along with two sex offenders.
The judge contacted that nursing home and eventually all nursing homes in the county, asking them to notify his court of any sex offenders who were living as residents.
Both sex offenders living in the local nursing home since moved out. One of them, considered a Tier III predator, finished rehabilitation and moved to a Warren apartment complex. The second offender, with a Tier II classification, which requires no notification, since has moved to another nursing home in Orwell.
Swift also is tracking House Bill 98, which was introduced earlier by Ohio Rep. Courtney Combs, R-Hamilton, and referred to the Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee in April. It also calls for notification to residents and their sponsors.
Combs' original bill was written after an 18-year-old mentally retarded daughter of a constituent was raped in a long-term care facility in Cincinnati without ever being told the ex-convict lived in the same building. ..Source.. by CHRISTOPHER BOBBY Tribune Chronicle
States struggle to comply with sex offender database
Hopefully states struggle real hard because this law was written as though there never were any state laws or state constitutions to worry about. Effectively the Adam Walsh Act (written by a select few in Congress and a Secret Service Agent, passed under suspension of the rules with 20 or so present) tells states to ignore all state law and constitution except the fact that certain people were convicted of a sex offense, register them. This is a real test of the 10th Amendment.
7-7-2009 National:
Congress found it easy enough to pass guidelines for a national Internet database of sex offenders. Individual states are finding it far more difficult to comply with those guidelines.
Not a single state was ready to meet a deadline set for this month, prompting Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to grant an extension. With a year's reprieve, states are now wrestling with what they can and will do to satisfy the guidelines when they take effect in July 2010.
States that fail to comply will lose a portion of their annual federal justice grant, but California and Vermont are considering whether that would cost them less than implementing the program.
Maryland and other states will have to enact new laws, but some legislators oppose aspects of the federal guidelines involving the registration of juveniles and unlimited retroactivity. Virginia has legislation pending that would make it impossible to comply. D.C. officials say they are close to compliance but are awaiting further adjustments by Congress.
Under the guidelines created by the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, states and other jurisdictions must feed a national Internet database with information about where the nation's estimated 674,000 registered sex offenders live and work. A jurisdiction that fails to do so faces the mandatory 10 percent of its Byrne Justice Assistance Grant, which supports crime control and prevention and funds victim programs as well as public defenders.
All juvenile offenders, whether they were tried in adult or juvenile court, will have to be registered under the law. The U.S. attorney general will have the authority to apply the law retroactively, meaning it may be applied to those who have served their time.
Offenders would be classified in three tiers. Tier 3 offenders would be required to update their whereabouts every three months with lifetime registration requirements; tier 2 would update every six months with 25 years of registration; and tier 1 offenders would update every year for 15 years.
While some states are having problems with individual issues involving the new guidelines, others see an overall picture of dollars and cents. These states may ignore the guidelines entirely because implementation is too costly.
The California Sex Offender Management Board is urging the state not to comply with the act, which will involve "substantial and unreimbursed costs." To offset the $2.1 million that would be lost in federal funding, the agency suggests using other resources to ensure local law enforcement and other programs are not affected. The board says the state's current registry is sufficient.
Vermont has only one person updating its registry. Officials estimate the costs to implement the law would run into millions of dollars for new technology and staffing.
"It would require a lot more money than we would actually be losing," said Sheri Englert, the state's sex offender registry coordinator.
Vermont would lose about $500,000 for failing to comply.
With a little more than 2,400 registered sex offenders in Vermont, and about 400 of those online, it can get overwhelming for jurisdictions to keep track of offenders and for offenders to understand the law, Ms. Englert added.
"Most of the time, it's a generalization, they're going to fail from the onset," she said. "Rather than throw laws at them that are going to further frustrate them, forcing them to go under the radar, we need consistency across the board for every state. That's where most issues come up, [offenders who move] don't understand rules from the state they've just left."
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, about 674,000 people are registered as sex offenders in the U.S. But these numbers are constantly fluctuating as offenders move to new locations, die or are taken off the registry because their terms expire.
There are about 6,000 registered sex offenders in Maryland, which officials said was not ready for the deadline.
Maryland stands to lose about $1.9 million in Byrne funding in fiscal 2011 if found in noncompliance. The state requires only those juveniles convicted as adults to register. Those tried in the juvenile court system would have to be added. Maryland has been unable to pass compliance legislation regarding juvenile registration and retroactivity issues.
"It's not as easy as, 'We'd like to do this, and we're going to do it,' " said Dave Wolinski, of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. "We've got people on both sides of the fence saying they have different feelings about juvenile registration and registration terms."
Allison Turkel, policy adviser for the Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering and Tracking Office, which was created from the Walsh Act, said the law aims to classify offenders using a three-tiered system based on the severity of the offense for which they were convicted.
"[The law] sets a floor, not a ceiling, for registration," Ms. Turkel said.
The law also strengthens child pornography protections, requires violent sex offenders to register with local authorities and increases communication among states to know when an offender moves across state lines.
However, some critics have argued the law entraps homeless offenders, who are without a permanent residency. As long as offenders provide information about where they "habitually live," they are within the law.
As of May 29, the District had 869 registered offenders, but only 818 of those were listed online in June. The District breaks down offenders into three classes: A, B and C under the Sex Offender Registry Act of 1999, which authorizes the Metropolitan Police Department to release offender information to the public. The online list does not include class C offenders, which would change under the law.
However, Sgt. Robert Panizari, unit supervisor for the department's Sex Offender Registry Unit, said the city is close to meeting federal law but that could change as the law adapts.
"Congress is going to go back and look at [the act]," Mr. Panizari said. "We do have some more work to do, and now we have time on that."
Virginia had 15,893 registered sex offenders as of June 30. The state's crime commission is studying Byrne funding and compliance to the act because of budgetary issues and anticipating implementation costs. Virginia would lose an estimated $400,000 to $600,000 in funding if found in noncompliance, based on fiscal 2009 numbers. The state has pending legislation also regarding juvenile registration and retroactivity that would make it unable to comply with federal guidelines.
Although the state has not fully complied with the act, measures have been taken to require offenders to provide information about themselves online, with increased punishments for failing to register as a class 6 felony. Much of this legislation has failed to get the support needed to pass, while others float through legislative limbo.
Dave Spencer, who was released from prison in 2004 after serving 4 1/2 years for a third-degree sexual abuse conviction in Iowa, said the federal government needs to stay out of what should be a state's business in deciding its own sex offender laws. Under the act, Spencer is considered at least a tier 2 offender. The two-time offender could still be held accountable for his first conviction in the late 1980s because of unlimited retroactivity.
"[States] should not allow themselves to be federalized in a way that trashes the Constitution," Spencer said. "There has to be a more realistic and productive way to solve the sex abuse problem. ... The consequences for noncompliance don't make any real sense. The feds are saying, in effect, if you don't comply with this mandate, we are going to make it difficult, if not impossible, for you to fight crime in your state at all."
Steve Roddel of Family Watchdog LLC said the federal government needs to do more to protect communities from sex offenders.
Mr. Roddel is president of the company, which is a free national Internet search for registered offenders that he created after the 2005 Jessica Lunsford case. The site averages 5 million visitors per month.
"It's politics. States believe they have the right to decide," Mr. Roddel said. "Now, they'll all tell you, 'We're working to do our best to balance privacy rights with the public safety requirements that we have.' ... People are not looking for strangers, they're looking for people they know. Having access to that information is literally lifesaving. ..Source.. by Kristi Jourdan THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Monday, July 6, 2009
FL- Broward's Solution To The Tuttle Causeway Condundrum
7-6-2009 Florida:
The task force assigned to sort through the difficulties associated with the myriad of sex offender residence restrictions and offer up recommendations for the Broward County Commission has released a draft of its findings. It's a thoughtful compilation that ought to resonate beyond Broward and into Miami-Dade County, where overreaching statutes have created the homeless mess under the Julie Tuttle Causeway.
The Recommendations:
Broward Sex Offender & Sexual Predator Residence
Task Force Report Page 26 July 2, 2009
RECOMMENDATIONS
Based on our review of the available evidence, we respectfully submit the following
recommendations for policy which reflects criminal justice research and "best practices."
While some of our recommendations were unanimously agreed upon, others were not.
Our recommendations reflect the consensus of the task force based on majority vote.
1. It is clear that bus stops diminish housing availability within buffer zones to a literal point of non-existence. We recommend that if a residential exclusion zone is passed, it should not include school bus stops as a prohibited venue.
2. Based on data provided by the county's Planning and Redevelopment Division (p.22), it is also exceedingly clear that a 2,500 foot zone as described in the existing ordinance will exclude sex offenders from residing in the unincorporated areas of the county. Because 24 municipalities have also passed 2,500 foot exclusion zones, few options exist for sex offender housing throughout the county. This raises concerns, not due to sympathy for sex offenders, but because research indicates that housing instability is a consistent and robust predictor of absconding, probation violation, and recidivism for criminal offenders in general and sex offenders specifically.
Reports from FDLE indicate a growing number of "sex offender transients" in Broward, and many more in Miami-Dade County where homelessness resulting from residential restrictions has caught national attention.
3. Residence restrictions regulate only where sex offenders sleep at night and do nothing to prevent pedophilic or predatory offenders from frequenting places during the day where they can cultivate relationships with children and access opportunities for sexual abuse. Therefore, we recommend that the commissioners consider enacting a child safety zone preventing sex offenders from loitering without a legitimate reason in areas where children are present.
4. We recommend that in any ordinance that is passed, an exception be made for offenders who established their residence prior to the passage of the ordinance (a "grandfather" clause). Such clauses are commonly found in other municipal ordinances. Because housing throughout the county is so limited, such a clause will reduce the probability of homelessness and transience for RSOs who are already living in unincorporated areas. The proposed end-of-lease grandfather clause simply delays housing instability rather than prevents it. Grandfathering homeowners but not lease holders represents differential treatment based on financial resources.
Since there is no reason to believe that current lease holders present a greater Broward Sex Offender & Sexual Predator Residence Task Force Report Page 27 July 2, 2009 threat to the safety of children than homeowners, this differential treatment seems not only unfair, but illogical.
5. We recommend that an exception be made (referred to as a Romeo & Juliet clause in Florida statutes) for young adults with a single victim and who, at the time of the offense, were under the age of 22 and committed a "statutory" offense with a teenage victim no more than 4 years younger than the offender. While we recognize that such behavior is unlawful, and that minors cannot legally consent to sexual activity with an adult, we also recognize that such offenders are not typically diagnosed as pedophiles and probably do not pose a significant danger to commit future sexually violent crimes.
6. We recommend that commissioners strongly urge our elected state senators and representatives to enact a statewide solution to sex offender management. The problem of clustering is a direct result of the multiplicity of ordinances throughout the state (at least156) which push offenders into areas with less restrictive buffer zones.
The best solution is for the Florida legislature to enact a uniform statewide residential policy for sex offenders. We recommend that the county commissioners adopt a resolution asking the legislature to create a statewide residence solution, which should include a Romeo & Juliet clause as well as a grandfather clause. The recommendation to the legislature should also urge the adoption of a uniform statewide child safety zone provision preventing RSOs from loitering within 300-500 feet of a school, park, daycare, designated school bus stop, or other place where children regularly congregate. We also recommend that the legislature review the crimes that require registration and that Florida create a more refined, risk-based classification and tier system of offenders that might, in some circumstances, lead to individuals eventually being deleted from the registry but only upon meeting criteria established by statute and requiring judicial review.
7. We recommend that commissioners strongly urge leaders from the League of Cities to endorse a uniform county-wide ordinance. The problem of clustering is a direct result of the multiplicity of differing ordinances throughout the county (24) which push offenders into areas with less restrictive buffer zones. In the absence of legislative reform, the best immediate solution is for city councils to agree to enforce uniform residential policies for sex offenders throughout this county.
8. We urge leaders from the League of Cities to undertake an analysis of potentially compliant housing in each municipality and amend ordinances to allow for reasonable housing availability to alleviate clustering. Information designating compliant residential locations should be provided to DOC probation, law Broward Sex Offender & Sexual Predator Residence Task Force Report Page 28 July 2, 2009 enforcement agencies, and other case managers to assist RSOs in securing housing.
9. We recommend that commissioners consider text amendments to land use plans to allow residential units in industrial areas as a permitted use. The feasibility of alternative housing options for sex offenders needs to be more fully investigated, as any alternative housing would be subject to zoning variances and practical considerations such as affordability and access to residential infrastructure (public transportation, shopping, services, etc.). Innovative housing options are recognized as a possible long-term solution requiring complex planning and development, and therefore should not be considered as a singular alternative to our other recommendations.
10. We support Mayor Ritter's letter to Governor Crist asking for leadership and assistance in addressing the matter and suggesting a statewide or regional task force to allow for uniformity of residence requirements.
11. Based upon concerns raised by the Broward Sheriff's Office and the State Attorney's Office, we recommend that commissioners and the county attorney review the language defining "temporary" and "permanent" residence in Ordinance 2009-22 as "a place. ..Source.. by Fred Grimm
CA- Murphy's Law: Bad legislation comes back to haunt author
7-6-2009 California:
Sometimes bad laws have a way of coming back to bite the people most responsible for enacting them. That's the case with state Sen. George Runner, the principal sponsor of Proposition 83, the 2006 initiative popularly known as Jessica's Law, which voters approved overwhelmingly.
Among other things, the law severely restricts where sexual offenders can live after being released from prison. Under its provisions, those convicted of rape or child molestation or even misdemeanor indecent exposure cannot live within 2,000 feet of a school or a park.
As critics of Proposition 83 pointed out, such tight restrictions have the unintended effect of forcing paroled sex offenders either into homelessness or into rural and suburban communities where law enforcement is thin and jobs and counseling services that many offenders need to remain crime-free are virtually nonexistent.
This was not mere conjecture. Law enforcement officials in other states that had enacted similar restrictions reported those results. Because of that, many states sought to repeal or modify their versions of Jessica's Law.
Runner was fully aware of these concerns. Nonetheless, the Republican from Lancaster continued to press the case for passage.
But even before voters approved Jessica's Law, The Sacramento Bee's Andy Furillo reports, Runner had taken exceptional care to see that as few parolees as possible, including ex-sex offenders, would be sent to his suburban Los Angeles district.
Because his district is home to a state prison and has a large supply of affordable housing, Runner says, a disproportionate number of released felons were being housed there.
So, he cut a deal with the Department of Corrections, 10 months before the ballot measure was voted on, to reduce the flow of parolees there.
Under what Runner called a "side agreement," the Department of Corrections pledged to assign only parolees with "historical ties" to his north Los Angeles County district.
But the deal turns out to have been illegal. State law requires that parolees be returned to their county of origin but does not allow the prison system to direct them to or away from specific communities.
Last year, the department suspended the agreement. So now, Runner's constituents are in position to experience the full brunt of Jessica's Law along with the rest of the state. Because the suburban district Runner represents is less populated, its parks and schools more spread out, it means that more sex offenders will likely wind up there.
A special board set up to monitor the effects of Jessica's Law thinks homelessness among parolees poses a significant public safety threat. Since Runner's initiative went into effect, the number of homeless sex offenders has jumped from 88 to 1,000.
The costly, dangerous mistake that is Jessica's Law hurts all of California. Now it will be felt in full force in Runner's home district -- as it should be. ..Opinion.. of The Modesto Bee
FL- Child porn's dirty secret: Dads often behind lens
7-6-2009 Florida:
TAMPA - He told his young daughter he was going to make her a model.
He shot pictures of her in skimpier and skimpier outfits.
And when she slept, the Tampa man photographed himself molesting her.
He created a Web site, charging strangers to view graphic photos of his daughter. Pedophiles could write in and say what they wanted to see her wearing.
The man was discovered when investigators searching his child-pornography collection noticed that sheets in some of the pictures matched the sheets on his bed.
They also saw explicit pictures of a young girl being molested. Investigators recognized her from family pictures.
The case was not unusual, authorities say.
That's because when children are victims of pornography, the photographers and abusers often are their fathers, stepfathers and grandfathers.
"Some of the darkest stuff you see is produced in people's basements," said Stacy Arruda, who supervises the Tampa FBI's computer crimes unit. "The most common that we see in this area ... is parents and stepparents abusing their own children."
Nearly twice as many children in a nationwide child-porn database were photographed by their parents as were victims of online enticement. The number victimized by parents was nearly seven times that of children exploited by strangers.
There was the case of a Tampa man traced by a Pennsylvania state trooper investigating child pornography on the Internet. When investigators searched his home, the man's 12-year-old daughter was there. Later, as agents reviewed pornographic images on the man's computer, there she was posed on a bed when she was 7.
'Our secret'
Several years ago, prosecutors say, the parents of a 14-year-old girl established a Web site with graphic photos of their daughter. The mother bought the girl provocative clothing; the father took the pictures and molested her. When investigators searched the Tampa-area home, the girl's closet was full of garter belts, stockings and platform shoes.
Then there was the man who took pornographic pictures of his 9-year-old great-granddaughter.
"Make a pretty face," he would tell her.
"Don't tell anybody," he would say afterward. "It will be our secret."
The Bradenton man was prosecuted after his great-granddaughter told her grandmother about the photo sessions. Investigators reviewing photographs discovered the man's 7-year-old great-grandson also was a victim.
When investigators asked the girl why she took off her clothes for her great-grandfather, she said it was because you're supposed to do what your grandparents tell you.
These cases are a dirty secret, and not only in families.
Media reports almost always leave out the relationship between perpetrator and victim in order to protect the child's identity. Most media organizations, including The Tampa Tribune, have policies that bar publishing the identities of sexual assault victims, especially children.
For that reason, the suspects' names also are being withheld in this story.
"Most people would not suspect that a girl's own father would do it," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Colleen Murphy-Davis, who prosecutes such cases.
"It's really shocking," said another Tampa federal prosecutor, Amanda Kaiser. "When you first start, you think, 'How could parents do that? How could they sell their children?' ... It's just sickening."
Some fathers are seeking financial gain, Kaiser said. Others want sexual gratification.
"I think they're sociopaths," she said. "I don't think they have any conscience. I think they lack empathy, and to them, children are just a commodity to be used."
Since Arruda began her job 31/2 years ago, she estimates the office has investigated about 100 such cases. Technology costs are falling, making exploitation easier.
"Anybody with a digital camera can take pictures of whatever they want," she said.
Sometimes male relatives trade photographs with other pedophiles online, Arruda said.
Fathers can get away with being abusers because they can exploit the bond of trust, authorities say. They groom their children to accept what is happening and have the leverage to keep them quiet.
Sometimes, the mothers know.
"You've got one of two situations," Murphy-Davis said. "The mother knows about it, so they figure it's fruitless to tell mom, or they've told her in the past and she's like, 'You're lying.' Or there's just too much shame with going to the mother and saying, 'This is what the man you love is doing to me.'"
Sometimes, the mother supports the abusing father at the expense of the child. One Tampa mother wanted to kick her teenage daughter out of the house and make her live with her grandmother so the father could remain there while his case was pending. The judge was so disgusted he ordered the father jailed. The mother's letter in her husband's defense angered the sentencing judge.
Prison sentences
The charge of producing child pornography carries a prison sentence of up to 30 years; possessing child porn carries up to 10 years; and transporting or shipping child porn brings a minimum mandatory sentence of five years and as long as 20 years.
The Tampa man who created a Web site with graphic photos of his daughter pleaded guilty to all three of those charges and was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison.
"What law enforcement tends to be seeing is that the children who are being used to produce these images are kids being abused in bedrooms and basements and living rooms across the United States and elsewhere," said Michelle Collins, executive director of the Exploited Child Division of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The division is a clearinghouse for law enforcement to share information when children depicted in pornography are identified. Collins said this helps prevent defendants from arguing that the children in their pornography collections aren't real.
Since the program started in 2003, more than 2,300 children have been identified in pornographic pictures and videos, Collins said.
Of those, 27 percent were photographed by parents or stepparents; 24 percent by neighbors or close family friends; and 10 percent by other relatives.
Just 4 percent were photographed by strangers. The rest were photographed by coaches, babysitters, their parents' boyfriends and girlfriends, or by themselves, often after being enticed by someone they met online.
"The individuals who sexually molest are most likely to molest children who they're a trusted adult toward," Collins said. "That's why there is such a low disclosure rate of children who are abused." ..Source.. by
NJ- Acquitted in court, Edison man faces new challenges as he rebuilds his life
7-6-2009 New Jersey:
Bruce Nealous knew he wasn't guilty.
His wife, children and friends believed he wasn't guilty.
Perhaps most importantly, a jury believed it, too.
But nearly a month after Nealous walked free from a Middlesex County courtroom -- vindicated in theory -- the 48-year-old Edison man is finding it difficult to repair a life that's come undone and a reputation in tatters.
Two years ago, Nealous was accused of one of the most stigmatized crimes in any society: the molestation of a child.
He spent a week behind bars before making bail. He lost his job as a chef at a school cafeteria and his position as a volunteer basketball coach. In one of the more difficult blows, child welfare officials temporarily ordered him to stay away from his own kids lest he pose a danger to them.
The experience, he said, made him feel "violated."
"It bothers me that my name is associated with this," said Nealous, a former Marine. "This attacks everything I hold near and dear. I want my name cleared."
No one keeps reliable statistics on how many people are acquitted at trial of sexually abusing children, but those who are cleared often share a common experience, said Kim Hart, executive director of the National Child Abuse Defense and Resource Center, an Ohio group that provided assistance to Nealous' lawyer during the trial.
In most cases, Hart said, the lives of the accused are irrevocably altered, marked by a lingering stain.
"The acquittal gives some of it back, but it's very seldom that they regain their reputation," Hart said. "In our society, we have no legal mechanism to get back what was lost."
For two decades, Nealous had been an executive chef for a company that provides food services to high schools and colleges. He held a second job as an adjunct professor at Hudson County Community College, teaching culinary arts. In his free time, he volunteered as a basketball coach at St. Peter the Apostle Elementary School in New Brunswick.
That all came crashing down on July 30, 2007, when he was charged with aggravated sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a child. A teenage boy -- one of Nealous' former players -- told his grandmother the coach had abused him repeatedly over a two-year period beginning in 2000, when the boy was 9. The grandmother went to police.
Steven Altman, Nealous' lawyer, said the teen made the accusation after seeing his former coach at South Brunswick High School, where the youth was a student. At the time, Nealous was the chef in the school's cafeteria.
Nealous said the allegation blind sided him.
"Till this day I'm still trying to figure out why this kid singled me out, why this happened to me," he said.
Over three hours of questioning by investigators from the Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office, Nealous maintained his innocence.
"I said, 'You've got the wrong person,'" he said.
He was charged anyway, spending a week in the county jail before a friend arrived with bail money. When he emerged, he said, he felt numb, not quite able to wrap his mind around what had happened.
The state Division of Youth and Family Services, following protocol in cases of alleged abuse, insisted he stay away from his two children -- an order essentially barring him from his home -- until he underwent a psychological evaluation. Once he did, he was cleared to return.
Nealous also found he no longer had a job; his company suspended him pending the case's outcome.
The trial, in Superior Court in New Brunswick, lasted six weeks. On June 9, the jury took just 40 minutes to find him not guilty.
Altman, Nealous' lawyer, said the teen's allegations simply didn't stand up to scrutiny.
"We had people come in and pick apart his story," Altman said. "I don't know why the boy lied, but we had many of his former team members come in and testify for Bruce. I couldn't believe the outpouring of respect and love the St. Peter's community had for this man who was accused of sexually assaulting a young boy."
Sheree Pitchford, the Middlesex County assistant prosecutor who handled Nealous' case, said that in general, a jury's decision to acquit does not definitively prove a defendant's innocence, showing only that the state did not prove its case.
Sexual abuse charges, she added, are especially difficult to prosecute because they often pit the word of the accuser against the word of the defendant.
"It gets down to credibility," Pitchford said. "It just boils down to a he-said, she-said type of case. " We do an investigation. We prosecute based on the information we have. Juries want more than the victim's testimony in most of these cases. We prepare victims from the very beginning based on the limited proofs we have to realize there could be an acquittal."
Today, Nealous is trying to resume as normal a life as possible, but his future looks far different than it once did. Despite his acquittal, he said he was informed by his employer that he no longer has a job. He's now working as an apprentice painter to support his family.
"I was going to go to school and become an art teacher," Nealous said. "But I'm not. I don't trust kids."
He said it was the support of his wife, children and friends that got him through the last two years. He continues to rely on them now.
"I just want my name cleared," Nealous said. "I was accused of something I didn't do. I want people to know I'm innocent." ..Source.. by Sue Epstein/The Star-Ledger
Why a Bill of Rights?
There is nothing wrong with the constitution as conceived, the Bill of Rights being part of it, the problem today is, those who read it with in ways that pervert it. The sad thing is, we all elected them...
7-6-2009 National:
Why did the founders of our nation give us the Bill of Rights? The answer is easy. They knew Congress could not be trusted with our God-given rights. Think about it. Why in the world would they have written the First Amendment prohibiting Congress from enacting any law that abridges freedom of speech and the press?
The answer is that in the absence of such a limitation Congress would abridge free speech and free press. That same distrust of Congress explains the other amendments found in our Bill of Rights protecting rights such as our rights to property, fair trial and to bear arms.
The Bill of Rights should serve as a constant reminder of the deep distrust that our founders had of government. They knew that some government was necessary but they rightfully saw government as the enemy of the people and they sought to limit government and provide us with protections.
After the 1787 Constitutional Convention, there were intense ratification debates about the proposed Constitution. Both James Madison and Alexander Hamilton expressed grave reservations about Thomas Jefferson’s, George Mason’s and others’ insistence that the Constitution be amended by the Bill of Rights.
Those reservations weren’t the result of a lack of concern for liberty. To the contrary, they were concerned about the loss of liberties.
Alexander Hamilton expressed his reservation in Federalist Paper No. 84, “(B)ills of rights … are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous.” Hamilton asks, “For why declare that things shall not be done (by Congress) which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given (to Congress) by which restrictions may be imposed?”
Hamilton’s argument was that Congress can only do what the Constitution specifically gave it authority to do. Powers not granted belong to the people and the states.
Another way of examining Hamilton’s concern: Why have an amendment prohibiting Congress from infringing on our right to picnic on our back porch when the Constitution gives Congress no authority to infringe upon that right in the first place?
Alexander Hamilton added that a Bill of Rights would “contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more (powers) than were granted. … (it) would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power.”
Going back to our picnic example, those who would usurp our God-given liberties might enact a law banning our right to have a picnic. They’d justify their actions by claiming that nowhere in the Constitution is there a guaranteed right to have a picnic.
To mollify Alexander Hamilton’s and James Madison’s fears about how a Bill of Rights might be used as a pretext to infringe on human rights, the Ninth Amendment was added that reads: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” In essence, the Ninth Amendment says it’s impossible to list all of our God-given or natural rights. Just because a right is not listed doesn’t mean it can be infringed upon or disparaged by the U.S. Congress.
The Tenth Amendment is a reinforcement of the Ninth saying, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” That means if a power is not delegated to Congress, it belongs to the states of the people.
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments mean absolutely nothing today as Americans have developed a level of naive trust for Congress, the White House and the U.S. Supreme Court that would have astonished the founders, a trust that will lead to our undoing as a great nation. ..Source.. by Walter E. Williams
Pornography outlawed in Ukraine, unless it's “medicinal”
7-6-2009 Ukraine:
Possession of pornography is now a criminal offense in Ukraine, Lenta.ru reports, after Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko signed a law to that effect today. Human rights activists and members of the Ukrainian artistic community had asked the president to veto the law.
The draft of the law was prepared by the Ukrainian government. It was passed by the Ukrainian parliament, the Supreme Rada, on June 11.
Now pornography can be kept only “for medical purposes,” according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice. The ministry also warns that possession of a large number of identical images will be considered evidence of trading in pornography, which is also criminalized.
Punishment for possession of pornography will include fines and imprisonment for up to three years. ..Source.. by MOS News.com
Sunday, July 5, 2009
In Prisoners’ Wake, a Tide of Troubled Kids
7-6-2009 National:
WASHINGTON — Herbert Rashad Scott, whose parents were in and out of prison throughout his childhood, vowed to break his family’s cycle of self-destruction.
The circumstances were not promising. Mr. Scott, 20, was awaiting sentencing for drug possession and robbery, but he was allowed supervised release from jail in May to attend a job preparation class — a chance to turn his life around. As he spoke, he wriggled his neck, trying to get used to the necktie required, and he tried to ignore the tracking device on his ankle.
“I had low self-esteem and depression,” Mr. Scott said of his teenage years. Now, his ex-girlfriend was pregnant, and he pondered his child’s prospects.
“I want to be there for this child, and I want the child to know that jail ain’t no place to be,” he said.
The chances of seeing a parent go to prison have never been greater, especially for poor black Americans, and new research is documenting the long-term harm to the children they leave behind. Recent studies indicate that having an incarcerated parent doubles the chance that a child will be at least temporarily homeless and measurably increases the likelihood of physically aggressive behavior, social isolation, depression and problems in school — all portending dimmer prospects in adulthood.
“Parental imprisonment has emerged as a novel, and distinctly American, childhood risk that is concentrated among black children and children of low-education parents,” said Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who is studying what some now call the “incarceration generation.”
Incarceration rates in the United States have multiplied over the last three decades, in part because of stiffer sentencing rules. At any given moment, more than 1.5 million children have a parent, usually their father, in prison, according to federal data. But many more are affected over the course of childhood, especially if they are black, new studies show.
Among those born in 1990, one in four black children, compared with one in 25 white children, had a father in prison by age 14. Risk is concentrated among black children whose parents are high-school dropouts; half of those children had a father in prison, compared with one in 14 white children with dropout parents, according to a report by Dr. Wildeman recently published in the journal Demography.
For both blacks and whites, the chances of parental incarceration were far higher than they were for children born just 12 years earlier, in 1978.
Scholars agree that in some cases children may benefit from a parent’s forced removal, especially when a father is a sexual predator or violent at home. But more often, the harm outweighs any benefits, studies have found.
If a parent’s imprisonment deprives a struggling family of earnings or child support, the practical consequences can be fairly clear-cut. While poor urban children had a 3 percent chance of experiencing a period of homelessness over the previous year, those with an incarcerated parent had a 6 percent chance, one study found.
Quantifying other effects of parental incarceration, like aggressive behavior and depression, is more complex because many children of prisoners are already living in deprived and turbulent environments. But researchers using newly available surveys that follow families over time are starting to home in on the impact.
Among 5-year-old urban boys, 49 percent of those who had a father incarcerated within the previous 30 months exhibited physically aggressive behaviors like hitting others or destroying objects, compared with 38 percent of those in otherwise similar circumstances who did not have a father imprisoned, Dr. Wildeman found.
While most attention has been placed on physical aggression, a study by Sara Wakefield, a sociologist following children in Chicago, found that having a parent imprisoned was a mental-health tipping point for some. Thus, while 28 percent of the children in her study over all experienced feelings of social isolation, depression or anxiety at levels that would warrant clinical evaluation or treatment, about 35 percent of those who had an incarcerated parent did.
Such hidden issues can have lifelong consequences.
Terrisa Bryant, 20, who was in the same jobs class as Mr. Scott, with a group called Strive, said she grew up resenting her father’s absences, including his time spent in prison. With her mother working day and night to put food on the table, Ms. Bryant was the baby sitter for her younger siblings.
“I couldn’t go out,” Ms. Bryant said. “I felt isolated.”
Ms. Bryant said she thought her anger and isolation helped explain why she got pregnant at 14 and had to drop out of school to raise her child. Now, she hopes to get certified for a career in child care.
With financial woes now forcing many states to rethink the relentless expansion of prisons, “this intergenerational transfer of problems should be included as an additional cost of incarceration to society,” said Sarah S. McLanahan, a sociologist at Princeton University and director of a national survey of families that is providing data for many of the new studies.
Heather Mac Donald, a legal expert at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, agreed that everything possible should be done to help the children of people who were incarcerated. But Ms. Mac Donald said that it was hard to distinguish the effects of having a parent in prison from those of having a parent who is a criminal, and that any evaluation of tough sentencing policies, which she supports, had to weigh the benefits for the larger community. “A large portion of fathers were imprisoned on violence or drug-trafficking charges,” she said. “What would be the effects on other children in the neighborhood if those men are out there?”
Adam Gaines, 40, of Owings Mills, Md., has firsthand experience of watching his children flounder. He was freed last year after 13 and a half years in prison for robbery. Now, he is trying to be the father he never was to a son who dropped out of school in the 10th grade, another son who is just starting high school and a teenage daughter who had a baby and dropped out of school.
Mr. Gaines shook his heroin addiction after years in prison, has moved back in with his wife, Tasuha, and is studying to be a fitness teacher.
When his father was behind bars, said Mr. Gaines’s oldest child, Adam Jr., 19, “I didn’t have a role model, and I had to learn on the streets how to carry myself, what it meant to be a man.”
Mr. Scott, too, may not be around for his child. Despite his vow to break the cycle of failure and his job preparation class, he disappeared shortly after talking to a reporter in May, apparently to avoid a mandatory drug test, and did not report to his probation officer.
Mr. Scott was arrested on charges of absconding in the last week of May and is now in a Washington jail awaiting a sentence that could be three years or more — and making it more likely that his child, too, will join the incarceration generation. ..Source.. by ERIK ECKHOLM
PA- Court suggests lawmakers address Megan's Law loophole for homeless
The journalist claims, in two cases of homeless offenders where neither while homeless committed any offense whatsoever, were charged with failure to register and the courts holding that, due to the wording of the law they did not have to register. It seems to be that the legislature's silence screams that there is no public safety issue under these circumstances and therefore no change is warranted. That apparently goes against the grain of judges and this journalist, so why do something for the sake of doing something that is not needed? Too many people are stuck in the "I need to control" mode which is apparent here!
7-5-2009 Pennsylvania:
Six years ago, a panel of Pennsylvania Superior Court justices ruling on a York County case cautioned the state legislature of an apparent hole in Megan's Law -- a hole allowing homeless defendants to wander away from the requirement to register where they were living.
Last month, a different three-justice panel from the same court, ruling on a different case and reaching a different conclusion, suggested the legislature address the same shortcoming.
Both cases involved men convicted of sex crimes who had been released from prison and were each unable to find a residence.
In York County, Michael Lee Rozankowski was tried in 2002 for failing to register his residence with state police. He was convicted in a bench trial and sentenced to one to two years in prison.
He appealed with the argument that at the time of his arrest, he had no residence to register with the police. The Superior Court affirmed the verdict, stating Rozankowski's argument "rings hollow."
"We do not decide whether the Pennsylvania registration statute provides an adequate means for homeless individuals to register their whereabouts, because we do not reach that issue in this case," the court said in Rozankowski's appeal.
In Dauphin County, William H. Wilgus was tried in 2008 for failing to register his residence with state police.
He was convicted in a bench trial. But before sentencing, the trial judge granted a defense motion, set aside the verdict and dismissed the charges.
Wilgus's post-trial argument, which resulted in the arrest of judgment, was that he had no "residence" to register with the police.
The commonwealth appealed, and the Superior Court affirmed the arrest of judgment last month.
"Because Wilgus's homeless existence precluded the possibility of a residence . . . we're constrained to hold Wilgus was without a 'residence' to register, change or verify within the meaning of Pennsylvania's Megan's Law," the court said in the Wilgus case.
"The legislature may well consider amending the statute to address the status of homeless offenders within the registration requirements of Megan's Law."
The Dauphin County District Attorney's Office intends to appeal that ruling to the state Supreme Court, Chief Deputy Prosecutor Sean McCormick said.
The difference in the two cases are:
--- York County Judge Michael J. Brillhart convicted Rozankowski of not notifying state police that he left his last "residence" regardless that he had no new definite residence to register.
--- Dauphin County Judge Scott A. Evans found that Wilgus did not have a "residence" to register and therefore did not violate Megan's Law.
Nils Frederiksen, spokesman for Attorney General Tom Corbett, said the Attorney General's Office is "closely watching" the Wilgus case but at this point has no standing in it.
State Rep. Stan Saylor, R-Windsor Township, said the case exposed an issue that needs to be addressed if Megan's Law is to continue and be effective.
He isn't sure of the solution, but said he will ask the state's legal experts to examine what can be done within the constitution. Once the state budget is passed, he said, fixing the law should become a priority.
"There needs to be some corrective legislation to monitor those who are homeless," Saylor said.
Former state Rep. Bev Mackereth, R-Spring Grove, now executive director of York County human services, was active in the legislation of Pennsylvania's Megan's Law. She said legislators discussed whether more sex offenders would become homeless because of the limitations of where they can reside and the ready availability of information about where they do reside.
"Really, nobody wants them living in their neighborhoods," Mackereth said.
She explained the lawmakers determined public safety was more important than the "interest of the individual" offender. That is, although a Megan's Law registrant may be harassed out of a neighborhood, the legislature felt overall the public should have knowledge of where sex offenders live.
"We may have created this ourselves," Mackereth said. "We discussed whether there would be more homeless offenders. We never considered the problem of registering an address. I don't remember that coming up." ..Source.. by RICK LEE, Daily Record/Sunday News
OR- Center angers 4-H Club parents
Absolute proof that the public is not capable of making decisions that is best for all concerned. The public is too biased and full of irrational prejudices.
7-5-2009 Oregon:
A treatment program for sex offenders has been next to the local youth office for 15 years
The Lane County sex offender treatment center has been located on West 13th Avenue for 15 years.
But that isn’t stopping residents from getting fired up over the center’s close proximity to the local 4-H office at the Oregon State University/Lane County Extension Service building where their children congregate.
It isn’t just in the same neighborhood.
It’s next door.
“As a parent, I can’t believe this has been under our nose this whole time,” said 4-H parent Bill Linn, whose 9-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son raise beef cattle in 4H. “I have a big problem with the county’s placement of this building. You should not put a bunch of sex offenders in a place where people congregate with children.”
The treatment program tends to select the highest-risk offenders, said Lane County Behavioral Health Services Manager Al Levine, who oversees the treatment facility.
When asked if predatory offenders — those who have a tendency to victimize or injure others and who have been convicted of certain sex crimes such as rape, sodomy and sexual abuse — were treated in the facility, Levine said: “Probably,” adding that “these are the ones we most want to treat.”
In the 15 years the program has been located in the building, there has never been a problem, Levine said.
“We make a point of not scheduling visits during times when there are events or during the fair,” he said. “There is a very high level of vigilance and diligence in that office.”
And it’s not likely the program — which treats between 30 and 40 offenders and is staffed by two parole officers — will be there for very much longer.
It is scheduled to move to another building on West Seventh Avenue and Charnelton Street in February.
But Linn and other parents want the program to move now.
“I plan to lobby the county to accelerate the moving of the facility,” Linn said Thursday. “It’s not safe.”
Parents became aware of the problem Monday, when a child ran by the doors of the office and a probation officer stepped outside to tell his mother that children shouldn’t be playing in the area.
Levine said 4-H staff have known about the county’s treatment facility for years.
Steve Dodrill, staff chairman with the OSU Extension Service, which offers the 4-H program, did not return a message left Thursday.
However, longtime 4-H leader Doris Hoitt said she and other leaders had no idea the sex offender treatment facility was next door.
“I am concerned about exposure to predators,” she said. “Exposure to people who may not have the best intentions.”
Upset about perceived potential dangers, Linn is launching a campaign that he says will start today when he greets parents arriving to pick up their children from 4-H camp with handouts and a video camera.
He’s also moving his charge online to Facebook and Twitter and said he may purchase mobile billboards to alert people to the problem.
Offenders in the sex offender treatment program have a near-zero recidivism rate, Levine said.
“These are the subset of clients who have been directed to and agreed to pursue treatment for their difficulties,” he said. “These are not the sex offenders to be worried about.”
Levine said he hopes the program won’t have to move twice before February.
“It really isn’t a problem that needs to be fixed,” he said. “But it is going to become political — commissioners are going to get involved and they will make a decision.”
With 4-H kids coming back from camp today, Linn and other parents say they are worried about their children’s safety.
“There are plenty of places to put this type of agency,” Hoitt said.
“It needs to be stopped now and moved tomorrow.” ..Source.. by Whitney Malkin, The Register-Guard
