Sex-offender alerts not mandatory

3-18-2010 Ohio:

Ohio justices rule that judges get to decide when felon’s neighbors need to be warned

Neighbors of some of the most serious sex offenders in Ohio need not be warned of their presence, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled yesterday.

The court said lawmakers, in passing a tough law on sex offenders in 2007, never intended for authorities to automatically notify people living within 1,000 feet of any person convicted of a serious sex offense such as rape, sexual battery and kidnapping of minors.

Instead, judges will have the discretion to decide whether people convicted of such offenses after the law took effect in 2008 should be subject to the community-notification requirement.

The Supreme Court ruling was unanimous.

Justice Robert R. Cupp, who wrote the decision, noted that lawmakers had intended to give judges flexibility to determine which sex offenders posed a serious danger to the community and which did not.

"By so doing, the legislature expressed its will to continue the policy of providing discretion to the sentencing judge in these circumstances, albeit with additional guidance in the form of the factors now contained (in a new provision of the law)," Cupp wrote.

The most serious sex offenders still will need to register with authorities every 90 days for life. The ruling deals only with the community-notification provision.

The case involved a Lorain County man, Stephen J. McConville, who pleaded guilty to rape and gross sexual imposition in July 2008. Although McConville was classified as the most serious type of sex offender in the state's three-tier system, a trial judge concluded that he was unlikely to reoffend. Therefore, the judge said, there was no need to notify neighbors of McConville's whereabouts.

Prosecutors in Lorain County said the state's sex-offender law, the Adam Walsh Act, was crafted to inform the public of dangerous sex offenders. In court briefs, Lorain County Prosecutor Dennis P. Will said abandoning the notification requirement would leave people vulnerable.

"To permit this would be to completely defeat one of the main purposes of the (Adam Walsh Act), which is to warn the community about sexual offenders in their midst," Will wrote.

Will could not be reached yesterday to react to the ruling.

McConville's attorney, John M. Prusak, said the decision could open the door to new sentencing hearings for some sex offenders.

Ken Spiert, chief counsel in the Office of the Ohio Public Defender, said the decision affirms language in the Adam Walsh Act that preserves discretion for trial judges.

"This decision recognizes that, just as they have in the past, local judges have the responsibility to ensure that the community is notified of only truly dangerous sex offenders," he said.

Yesterday's court ruling is likely to have "very limited impact," said Margie Slagle, attorney for the Ohio Justice and Policy Center in Cincinnati. She said many courts, including those in Hamilton County, already were letting judges decide community-notification requirements.

The act was named for Adam Walsh, a boy who was abducted from a Florida shopping center and murdered. He was the son of John Walsh, co-founder of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and host of the television show America's Most Wanted: America Fights Back. ..Source.. James Nash, THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH