Editorial: Reform state's sex offender registry to better fit the crimes

A wolf in sheep's clothing; the Adam Walsh Act. How quickly the public falls for the carrot and misses the immense harm of the act; an act to raise welfare recipients and Lord knows what else will rear its ugly head. A generation of harm will come from this law.

3-17-2011 Michigan:

Politics remains the art of the possible. So sometimes, a small step forward beats standing in place, especially with an issue as onerous as the online Michigan Sex Offender Registry.

Bills sponsored by state Sen. Rick Jones, R-Grand Ledge, would at least undo one of the most egregious elements of the registry: the so-called Romeo and Juliet cases involving consenting teens. Legislators should approve them.

The bills, approved by the state Senate last week, would enable teens convicted of having sexual contact with an underage partner to avoid the virtually lifelong housing and employment restrictions and public humiliation associated with being registered as a sex offender. Nothing in the legislation would make such liaisons legal; the age of consent would remain at 16.

The bills create a three-tiered list of offenses and would put state law in compliance with the federal Adam Walsh Act. Teenagers committing more serious sex crimes would remain on the registry, but those on the registry could also petition a judge to have their names removed.

"It's not perfect, but it's moving in a positive direction," said Sen. Steve Bieda, D-Warren, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The Legislature should not stop here. The debate on these bills is an opportunity to create a legislative committee that would examine the entire registry and its costs to law enforcement agencies, and then recommend further reforms. Such changes should include giving judges more discretion over who goes on the registry, classifying convicts by their risk of reoffending instead of simply by their offenses, and placing more offenders on a private law enforcement registry instead of the public one.

Maintaining the accuracy of the burgeoning list has been a problem for the Michigan State Police. In some cases, names have remained on the list long after their convictions for misdemeanor sexual offenses have been expunged by the courts. Offenders are typically required to register for 25 years or life under Michigan law.

Child predators, the registry's original target, account for only a small slice of registrants. Michigan's sweeping 15-year-old registry, containing roughly 40,000 names, is one of the nation's largest. It's far too broad and includes people who pose little risk of reoffending. Pennsylvania, with a population 25% larger than Michigan's, lists only 10,000 people on its Internet registry for sex offenders.

"We end up putting so many people on this registry who are not going to get jobs or find places to live," said Shelli Weisberg of the ACLU of Michigan. "It spirals them back into the criminal justice system."

Getting rid of Romeo and Juliet cases should jump-start a broader debate on how to refine and improve an overreaching requirement that no longer serves its intended purpose. ..Source.. by Detroit Free Press

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Some teens may have to register online as sex offenders

1-15-2011 Wyoming:

CHEYENNE -- A House committee heard public testimony Thursday on a bill that would require certain teens to register as sex offenders.

Lawmakers have been reluctant to update the state's online registry with information on juvenile offenders. Federal requirements include offenders as young as 14, but Wyoming's proposal would only register the most serious teen offenders.

It's a compromise that gives law enforcement options when dealing with juveniles, even if it doesn't bring Wyoming into full compliance with federal guidelines, Natrona County District Attorney Mike Blonigen said to members of the House Judiciary Committee.

"I know at some point we might be the big green space on (the television show for FOX News commentator) Bill O'Reilly," he said. "At some point we might lose federal money."

But if a juvenile sexual offense is significant enough to join the registry, then it's important enough to release to the public, he said.

There are approximately 1,200 offenders in Wyoming's registry, and 60 percent of these individuals don't have any ties to the state, said Byron Oedekoven with the Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police.

He added that it raises questions about why a registered sex offender would want to move to Wyoming in the first place. And he supports the bill's stricter reporting requirements, which include workplace addresses, e--mail addresses and any screen names used online.

The purpose of the federal Adam Walsh Act is public safety, said Jennifer Horvath, an attorney with the Wyoming chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. She added that juvenile offenders are less likely than adults to become repeat offenders. Meanwhile, a majority of juvenile cases go through the adult court system in Wyoming.

The bill's juvenile exception won't do much to keep teens off the registry. The reporting requirements of youthful offenses also could follow juvenile offenders for as long as 26 years, she said.

Horvath added that teens who do commit another sexual crime likely would join the registry as adult offenders. ..Source.. by Michelle Dynes

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Kari Norman turned in her husband for child porn

If anyone believes that the Adam Walsh Act is not more harmful than helpful, you folks are closing your eyes to the collateral damages caused by this law. Congress and State lawmakers, ignored in enacting AWA, and continue to ignore the disastrous collateral consequences of AWA, to those affected by the law. This is but one of thousands of stories showing the blind eye of lawmakers and it will continue into the next generation, and beyond!

12-22-2009 Michigan:

She paid the price for doing right

Detroit --Kari Norman believes she did the right thing when she called Romulus Police to tell them she found child pornography on her husband's computer.

But she wouldn't do it again.

"I made that call on March 19. That's the day my life fell apart," said Norman, 40, who claims she lost her home and her financial security and attempted suicide before testifying against her husband last month in Wayne County Circuit Court.

Christopher Scott Norman, 42, was sentenced Dec. 10 by Judge James Callahan to serve three to five years for his conviction on 12 counts of child sexually abusive activity and using computers to obtain child pornography.

Law in Michigan bars spouses from being called to testify against each other -- except in cases involving domestic abuse and child pornography. Experts say more women are making the gut-wrenching choice between living with a difficult or even dangerous partner and living without support.

"He's in jail. He has food and a place to sleep. My son and I have nothing," said the Missouri native who landed in homeless shelters after her airline employee husband of just three months was jailed.

"I called the police and asked whether it was illegal to have what I found on the computer. They told me they'd have to look and before I knew it, I had six police officers standing over my shoulder looking at the computer telling me they needed to arrest my husband," she said. "I did everything they asked of me. I drove to the airport to pick him up like normal and brought him home to a dozen waiting police cars. I helped them destroy my life."

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who has complained that she has little money to spend on much needed witness protection, said she can do nothing to help Norman.

"This illustrates that unlike television, a case is never over. There should be aftercare services for victims and some witnesses," Worthy said. "While this doesn't fit squarely into traditional witness protection, it shows the growing need for assistance after a trial is over in certain cases."

Beth Morrison is chief executive officer of HAVEN, a nonprofit organization in Oakland County that runs a shelter and offers care and counseling for victims of domestic assault. She said, "A lot of women make that tough choice. And for many, they eventually are very glad they did."

Morrison compared Norman's plight with the many women paralyzed by the choice of sacrificing their financial security and self-esteem to reveal a spouse's criminal incest.

"When a woman without a substantial support structure calls the police, her life can be completely disrupted. In that situation, you could lose your financial support, your home, your social status, your friends, your job," Morrison said. "I've heard a lot of women say the decision to take action like this was the most difficult and hardest thing they did in their lives, but it saved them their children."

Treated as hostile witness
Shortly before her husband was sentenced, Kari Norman and 12-year-old son Sam boarded a train for Kansas City. Her goal was to straighten out custody issues over Sam with his father, her previous husband in her hometown.

Then, Norman said, she wants to "disappear somewhere into America."

Kari Norman was treated as a hostile witness during the trial by both the prosecutor and her husband's defense lawyer.

The defense theory had been that she set him up, although her MySpace.com page still contains statements of dedication for her husband.

And despite the fact she is the one who alerted police, the prosecution accused her of trying to hide evidence, including marijuana she told police she found in the apartment and then hid from her husband.

"She got the squeeze from both sides," said Richard Krisciunas, the University of Detroit Mercy law professor and retired Wayne County assistant prosecutor appointed by the court to briefly represent Kari Norman.

"Statements she made to Romulus Police got taken out of context, but then she testified at the prelim that she loved him, and I think she said the same thing at the trial," Krisciunas said. "There was a lot going on here that was unusual, but in other ways common. I'm always amazed that witnesses like this come forward at all."

'I should have gotten away'
Norman is luckier than many because she has a mobile and marketable profession as a registered nurse, licensed to work in Michigan and Missouri. But she's frustrated.

"I'm tired of being the good wife. I should have ignored what I found and divorced him first. I should have gotten away from here and then turned him in later. I just didn't realize doing the right thing was going to be so wrong for me," she said.

Debbie McPeek, director of programs at Turning Point, the Macomb County shelter where Norman said she lived from Nov. 20 to Dec. 1, said, "There's always a price to be paid for speaking up and doing the right thing. Domestic violence survivors often pay that price."

McPeek said she has no personal knowledge of Norman's case and insisted every woman who comes to the shelter has a unique story.

"Some women don't act. Some are going to do what they need to do to survive one minute to the next," she said. "If they have social support, a buck available here and there to get out of town, parents or relatives to support them, they are more likely to report wrongdoing."

Turning Point serves about 500 people a year, half of them children with their mothers.

"People may not understand the decision process because these are not choices like deciding if I'm going to have a burger or salad for lunch," McPeek said. "It is very common to see these survivors who are isolated."

A whirlwind courtship
Kari and Christopher Norman married in January in Toledo, just two weeks after he discovered his middle school sweetheart on MySpace. She had recently divorced back home in a Kansas City suburb.

The Normans had been married for only three months when she said she discovered electronic folders on the household computer containing photographs from adult sex parties she said her husband and others organized through Craigslist at Metro Airport area motels.

Other files contained photos of children, toddlers to teens, nude and engaged in sexual activity -- material that Christopher Norman, a Southwest Airlines cargo operations worker, apparently downloaded from the Internet.

"I have nobody in Michigan, but I really don't have any family back in Missouri, either," Norman said. "In the movies, there are witness protection programs, but I guess that doesn't exist in real life. I know I have to find a way to make it on my own. It scares me." ..Source.. Doug Guthrie / The Detroit News

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PA- National sex-offender law stalls

9-27-2009 Pennsylvania:

Allegheny lawmaker's 2007 bill to get Pennsylvania on board still languishes.

Twenty-five years after his 6-year-old son Adam was abducted from a Florida shopping mall and later found murdered, John Walsh watched the fruits of his lobbying turn into law.

Joined by other parents across the country who experienced the same anguish, the host of TV's ''America's Most Wanted'' had aggressively campaigned for federal standards that all states could adopt, paving the way for a national registry that could track sex offenders across state lines and for sentencing mandates that would result in stiffer penalties across the board.

But three years after the 2006 law was signed amid great fanfare, it remains ineffective. Only one state, Ohio, has complied with the law.

The other 49 states have been given an extension until July 2010 to adopt the legislation or lose 10 percent of the federal Justice Assistance Grant funding targeted for fighting crime. For Pennsylvania, the loss would amount to about $1.7 million.

State Sen. Jane Orie, R-Allegheny, introduced a bill in 2007 that would require Pennsylvania to implement the law.

''I am grateful that the commonwealth is now working swiftly to [be] one of the first states to step forward and enact the Adam Walsh Child Protection Act,'' Orie said in a news release in November 2007.

There has been little movement on the bill since. It landed last February in the Senate Judiciary Committee, where it has languished.

The law, officially known as the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, creates a national database that will allow law enforcement to track sex offenders when they cross state lines.

It also creates a new three-tiered classification system in which the most heinous offenders -- those who kidnap or sexually molest children -- are required to register for life under Megan's Law and placed in a national sex offender registry. The law requires state, local and federal law enforcement agencies to share information and make details about the worst offenders available on the Internet. Each state also must also be linked to the National Sex Offender Public Registry.

But most of the states, which initially were ordered to adopt the law by July 2009, have to yet to move on it.

California lawmakers have said no to the law, even in the wake of shocking headlines surrounding the case of Phillip Garrido, a sex offender who kidnapped 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Duggard in 1991 and held her captive in his Antioch, Calif., home for 18 years.

Critics in California and Pennsylvania say the law takes away local options, particularly for rehabilitation, and may be too harsh for minors as young as 14 who would be registered for life as a sex offender if convicted of serious sex crimes.

States also are concerned about the cost of implementing the law and its emphasis on punitive penalties.

''There are some controversial parts of it,'' said Rep. Katie True, R-Lancaster, who has served on the House Children and Youth Committee. ''But we need in Pennsylvania to begin having a dialogue about it. It's a priority.''

She said one sticking point is in the treatment of juveniles convicted of sex offenses.

Nationwide there are roughly 647,000 people listed on state sex offender registries, but permanently listing children as young as 14 under the Adam Walsh Act has unnerved many.

Beth Swift, the chief juvenile probation officer for Lehigh County, said one of the concerns about the law is that it doesn't allow for the rehabilitation children.

''Certainly the [law] is debatable,'' said Swift. ''We do an excellent job of containment of sex offenders and believe in keeping them in placement as long as needed and having strong after-care placement.''

Swift said there are about 20 juvenile sex offenders in Lehigh County, of which only a handful would meet the most serious ''Tier 3'' designation.

''Tier 1'' and ''Tier 2'' are for lesser sex crimes.

Robert J. Stanzione, Bucks County's chief of juvenile probation, was part of a county group that reviewed the legislation for potential consequences, particularly where they applied to juveniles.

Under the law, Stanzione said more than 100 of the roughly 140 juvenile sex offenders in Bucks County would be prosecuted as Tier 3 violators and, if convicted, would be registered for life as sex offenders. The majority of the acts committed by juveniles there, said Stanzione, involved sex with another minor at least four years younger, which is a Tier 3 offense under the law.

''Because of that gap, it ends up being a potential lifetime registration as a sex offender, and that's a scary thing,'' said Stanzione. ''Most research shows most of these kids, at least 80 percent, don't commit the same crime again. That's not the case when you're an adult offender, but there's potential to turn around an adolescent.''

Stanzione said there's plenty of support among juvenile professionals, including the state juvenile court judges, to lobby against passage of the law in Pennsylvania unless changes are made.

''The other side of the coin is we have an obligation to protect the community,'' said Stanzione. ''But I won't support [the law] until the lifetime registration for juveniles is re-evaluated.''

Juveniles aside, other law enforcement officials say they would support the law.

Lehigh County District Attorney Jim Martin said he supports the idea of a national sex offender registry.

''We have a very mobile society these days and sex offenders move from place to place and it would be useful for law enforcement to track them easily through a registry,'' he said.

The state District Attorneys Association voted earlier this year to support the law, he said. ..Source.. by Matt Birkbeck OF THE MORNING CALL

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AZ- Arizona's Bungled Budget May Help Sex Offenders Slip Under the Radar

9-3-2009 Arizona:

The state budget battle is preventing Arizona's compliance with a federal mandate requiring states to enter information about sex offenders into a national database.

The Adam Walsh Act of 2006 requires states to submit information about their most prolific perverts by July of this year, and Arizona has failed to do so because our leaders our still engaged in a two-month-old pissing match over a 1-cent sales tax increase that has yielded little results.

"Arizona, right now, has a real challenge financially to be able to buy the type of hardware and software that would be needed to do it," Sgt. Harold Sanders of the Arizona Department of Public Safety tells 92.3 KTAR.

Right now, there are roughly 14,000 convicted sex offenders gracing our streets, however, we only keep track of the ones a judge has deemed "most likely to re-offend."

Well, if the public accepted the judge saying "Your Guilty" why will the public not agree with the judge saying "He's not likely to re-offend."????? Judges decisions are only good, if they go your way????

Trying to keep track of so many miscreants is as about as plausible as Arizona seeing a budget today, and the Adam Walsh Act is designed to keep track of all sex offenders, making the most vicious re-register every three months so law enforcement can keep better track of them.

Maybe next year we can create a wayward legislator registry to keep track of all our elected officials who feel that since being in the state legislature is a part-time job, they can just skip town and go on vacation whenever things get sticky down at the capitol (as always, Senators Gray, and Gorman, we are looking in your direction). ..Source.. by James King in Budget Blunders

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Minor Sex Offenders

12-24-2007 Montana

HELENA - Recent changes to state laws dealing with juvenile sex offenders are creating debate. According to the Departments of Corrections and Justice. The Montana Sex Offender Registry currently includes 12 juveniles under the age of 19. Six of them are still on parole or probation.

In Montana's Pine Hills Youth Correctional facility 21 of the 80-to-85 juvenile males are in the residential sex offender program, an 18- month treatment program.

Bob Anez, Mt. Dept. of Corrections says, "I think there's a recognition in the program that these are kids. These are individuals that haven't developed as far as adults have in terms of their thought process."

The treatment program focuses on cognitive thinking and the process that leads to the offensive behavior.

"To link up their thought processes with their actions. Thoughts lead to feelings, feelings lead to actions. So they understand what's happening inside their heads and how to deal with that, it's one thing to get them to understand what caused them to act the way they did in the past. But there's an effort to get them to a point where they don't fall into that trap again."

Since May of this year, juvenile sex offenders have been required to register with the state's online sex offender system, outing many of them to neighbors and classmates. The change is, in part, due to laws like the recent Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act and the 1996 Megan's law. Ali Bovingdon, Asst. Attorney General of Mt. said, "They basically direct the state as to what a state needs to do for its registry laws to be in compliance with the federal laws."

eAdvocate Comment: However, the Adam Walsh Act (choose 'Text of Legislation' then '#5')does allow for excluding certain juveniles and minors (Sec 111(8) and 111(5(C)), but officals always fail to tell folks, or act on that.end.

Despite the age of the offender or the specifics of the crime officials say sex offender registries are not meant to consider the possible embarrassment of the perpetrator.

"It does talk about registration being in the interest of public safety and registration is generally not about rehabilitation of an offender, it's about notification to the community of sex offenders who are living in people's neighborhoods."

eAdvocate comment: Nowhere in the act do they provide a dime for treatment when it is known to reduce recidivism. Clearly PREVENTION of future offenses is not the goal of lawmakers!.end

Juvenile offenders can be taken off the sex offender registry if a judge finds that the youth has no prior sex offenses, registration is not needed to protect the public and that it's in the best interest of the public, not the offender.

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