Should All Convicted Sex Offenders Be Required to Register?

12-27-2010 Washington:

BAINBRIDGE ISLAND — Ed Gonda and his family moved to Bainbridge Island upon hearing it was a pastoral “laid back, forgiving” kind of place.

After finding a rental, he and his wife enrolled their daughter in school. As Christians, they found a local church they liked. They made friends with neighbors and island residents.

But eventually, word got out.

Gonda had a criminal past. And not for burglary or drug possession, but for a sex offense.

The news traveled fast, and people who they thought they knew well acted swiftly. His daughter could no longer play with friends down the street, he said. The church pews around them were vacant on Sundays. They more or less stopped going out anywhere on the island.

“We’re treated like we’re diseased,” his wife said.

Having a daughter, Gonda can empathize with islanders. He would never want a pedophile around her, and he has family members who were the victims of sexual abuse.

Gonda didn’t go to prison for being a pedophile. In 1995, when he was in his early 30s, he had a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl he lived with at the time.

Gonda pleaded guilty to his charges and did about four years in state prison. He participated in and paid more than $10,000 for sex-offender treatment. He has committed no new crimes since he got out of prison about a decade ago, according to a check of his criminal history. As sex offenders go, he is considered a “Level 1” by law enforcement, the level least likely to re-offend. He said that just to be safe, he avoids places where teens close to his victim’s age congregate.

“I admit, I was wrong,” Gonda said. “But I’ve changed. Why are people still looking at me for something I did 15 years ago?”

Law enforcement makes a determination of how likely a sex offender is to re-offend and rates them on a scale of 1 to 3.

But the public often fails to see any nuance.

“People look at them in a bucket,” said Bainbridge Island Police Commander Sue Shultz. “They say ‘Any kind of sex offender is a sex offender, and always will be a sex offender.’”

The registration of sex offenders was one of three components of the Community Protection Act of 1990, passed in the wake of two tragic and brutal killings. It’s a popular measure with the public, and the Legislature has strengthened and spent more money on the laws surrounding sex offenses. Lawmakers have also bolstered penalties for failing to register as a sex offender.

The subject of debate is who is included in the registries, who is not and how often should they be checked on.

Shultz said that twice a year, Bainbridge officers “very discreetly” check on the island’s sex offenders to ensure they’re living at their registered address and that they haven’t made any significant changes in appearance that would necessitate a new photo being put on file. Level 3 sex offenders — though Bainbridge doesn’t currently have any — are checked on every three months.

Random attacks by sex offenders are rare. Shultz and other officials point out that more than 90 percent of sexual abuse cases occur between a victim and someone they thought they could trust.

Outside of two incidents of non-sexual criminal activity, none of the 11 Level 1 sex offenders on Bainbridge Island have been reported to police for even an allegation of sexual abuse, Shultz said. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, but she encourages residents to put it into perspective.

So far, the legislative decree for the registry has been to err on the side of caution. While extremely rare, recent horrifying crimes committed by sex offenders have galvanized lawmakers to act.

Kitsap County Prosecutor Russ Hauge uses the analogy of an airplane crash.

“It doesn’t happen very often,” he said. “But when it does, it’s a tragedy.”

Hauge chaired a task force convened by Gov. Chris Gregoire in the wake of the killing of Zina Linnik, a 12-year-old girl abducted and murdered by Terapon Adhahn, a Level 1 sex offender. A result of that task force was the creation of a sex-offender policy board that reports to the governor, and the creation of a pot of grant money awarded to local law enforcement to make face-to-face contact with every sex offender in the state.

“Nobody knows how much of a safety factor it adds,” Hauge said. “But a murder of a young girl damages the community in an incalculable way.”

Victim’s advocates, who see the impacts sex offenses have on victims, have a hard time finding any sympathy for the registrants, said Lucy Berliner, a longtime advocate and head of the Harborview Center for Sexual Assault and Traumatic Stress.

“The only consequence I can see of registration is the inconvenience for the sex offender,” she said.

Aside from law-enforcement monitoring costs, registration also creates an entirely new class of crime: failing to register. All sex offenders have 72 hours to register with their local sheriff’s office any time they move to a new permanent residence.

The crime carries a maximum of five years in prison, and if the offender’s failed to register twice before, up to 10 years in prison.

Not counting the state’s 37 county jails, there are more than 300 inmates serving time for failing to register in the state’s prison system, at a cost of more than $1 million a year.

The cases take up law enforcement’s time and resources. Trina Washburn, Kitsap County Detectives Support Specialist, has five file cabinets of active county sex-offender registration cases.

Registration, as one might imagine, isn’t popular with offenders. It’s often the worst part of a criminal sentence.

“I’ve had attorneys tell me, ‘My guy will do twice the amount of time in custody — as long as they don’t have to register,’” said Kevin Hull, Kitsap County deputy prosecutor and head of the office’s special assault unit. “That tells me that there is some value to it.”

Registration, however, is not negotiable, Hull said.

“If we can prove a sex crime, then we’re going to prove a sex crime,” he said.

There are more than 20,000 registered sex offenders in the state, with almost 800 in Kitsap. Of those, there are 44 Level 3 offenders, 148 Level 2s and almost 600 Level 1 sex offenders.

The registration period — 10 years for lesser sex crimes, 15 years for midrange sex offenses and life for the most serious — also starts over anytime the offender commits a new crime.

Registration’s effect can be two-fold: law enforcement keeps an eye on an offender for many years after a conviction, and for some cases, a lifetime. Conversely, it also has a deterrent effect on an offender, because, as David Boerner, a longtime Seattle University law professor and one of the architects of the act that created registration, points out, “’They know who I am and where I am.’”

‘A WHOLE NEW WORLD OF JUVENILE SEX OFFENDERS’

Thomas Weaver, a Bremerton defense attorney who handles sex cases, questions the indiscriminate nature of a sex offender registry. While lower-level sex offenders might not have their pictures in the paper like Level 3 offenders do, they’re still on the list, he said.

Currently, Weaver has a case in which the 19-year-old defendant is charged with having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl. The defendant is permitted to have sex with a teen if he’s no more than 48 months older than the teen — but in this case, he’s 54 months older.

A conviction would require the defendant to register for a decade.

“(The need for registration), I think, is to provide notification to the community of a potential danger,” he said. “I don’t see how, in the case of a 19-year-old having sex with a 15-year-old girl, the community needs to be notified every time he moves.”

“Sexting,” where teens send lewd photos to each other over mobile phones, may seem to some just an immature teenage mistake. Under the law, however, it can be considered “Dealing in depictions of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct” — a class B felony requiring 15 years of sex offender registration for those convicted of it.

Weaver said he also regularly gets what he calls “playing doctor” cases that involve siblings. Typically, an older brother, at least three years older than his sister, has touched her private parts. Such a conviction, if the girl is under 12, is a class A felony — which, barring an appeal from the defendant, means a lifetime of sex offender registration.

“They’re still coming to understand sexuality,” Weaver said. “What we’re saying as a society is you’re supposed to have the sexual maturity of an adult when you’re pubescent or even prepubescent.”

Those convictions are adding up.

“We’re creating a whole world of juvenile sex offenders,” Weaver said.

State Rep. Jan Angel, R-Port Orchard, is for harsh sentences for sex crimes and for monitoring of offenders, such as GPS anklets. But she said she’s heard from constituents that in some cases involving young adults, the rigidity of the law can interfere with an offender’s ability to move on in life.

“Things happen, they’re young,” she said. “Should they be tied with this for the rest of their lives when they become upstanding adults?”

State Rep. Sherry Appleton, D-Poulsbo, a member of the House’s public safety and emergency preparedness committee, is crafting legislation that would help certain juveniles who are not predatory offenders opt out of registration.

“A lot of these kids get into trouble and now they’re labeled as sex offenders for life,” she said. “Then they have no life, they can’t get into the military, they can’t get a job, can’t get an apartment. We have to have a way to get them off these registries.”

Sex offenders can petition the courts to end their requirement. They’re eligible after at least 10 years of registering — two years in juvenile cases. But even if they’ve completed sex offender treatment and kept their nose clean since they were released from incarceration, the time and money to go through the process may still end with a judge hesitant to grant the request, Weaver said.

THE REGISTRY’S LIMITS

Weaver does wonder about a slippery slope in registration. For example, why not enact a burglary offender registration to notify the public when such convicts are released, he wonders.

A kidnapping registry was created in the wake of Washington’s sex offender registry, he said. Nevada has a registry for convicts of many different crimes. And there have also been calls in some states for a registry of arson offenders, a crime that also often involves an underlying psychological component.

Where to draw the line?

As a sex offender, Ed Gonda can understand why people would be afraid of Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders. His family’s few options of places to live are apartments and houses that accommodate sex offenders. But he doesn’t want to go to those places out of fear for his wife and daughter. Other landlords, however, won’t rent to him because of his status.

“So where can we live?” he wonders.

While in prison, he changed his name. He still feels blessed to have found a family and for the neighbors on Bainbridge Island that do accept him.

“God gave me a family, a wife and a new start,” he said. “I just wish someone would give us a chance.” ..Source.. Kitsap Sun