Officials say Brunswick sex offender court, while controversial, works

12-16-15 North Carolina:

Allows better monitoring, treatment of offenders

BRUNSWICK COUNTY -- Southeastern North Carolina became the home of what officials there think is the first sex offender accountability and rehabilitation court program in the state after Ola Lewis noticed a trend in her Superior Court courtroom.

Lewis, the senior resident Superior Court judge for Brunswick County, considered starting the court after several sex offenders came into her courthouse for violating the terms of their probation -- namely not attending court-mandated treatment, which can cost about $40 a week.

"My answer to that concern," Lewis said, "was let's set it up on the drug court model and have the team of professionals, probation, treatment providers and a coordinator monitor their progress."

More than helping offenders return to society, Lewis said, the program is meant to help keep Brunswick County safe by guaranteeing that offenders receiving adequate treatment.

Misperceptions about the program can easily arise because of the nature of the offenders, said Carrie Menke, Brunswick County's mental health court coordinator, who also oversees the county's drug treatment and domestic violence treatment court.

"Do you want that person in your community getting more aware of their dysfunctional thinking patterns and how to change those thinking patterns and change those behaviors?" Menke said. "Or do you want them just not in treatment, leaving them wide open to re-offend?"

Eric Sipe, president of the N.C. chapter of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, questioned using grant funds to pay for offenders' treatment.

"When I was doing the treatment, attendance was always an issue, but it was always believed that that was part of the offenders' responsibility was to pay for their own treatment," said Sipe, who is now retired from practice in Catawba County, adding, "If it's working, that's great."

Offenders eligible for the program include only those whose penalties include probation, such as indecent liberties with a child or failure to register as a sex offender.

Participants in the program also receive other kinds of treatment, Menke said, often including therapy for trauma and substance abuse.

"There’s not necessarily a cure, but you have to learn what your triggers are, where to go, where not to go, change your people, places and things so that you don’t re-offend," Menke said.

Sipe, the Catawba County therapist, agreed there is no cure for sex offenders.

"They're always capable of re-offending," he said.

Since the Brunswick County program began meeting twice a month in September 2012, 17 sex offenders have participated. Of those, 11 have completed the program, while one other committed another sex offense.

When offenders participate in the court, they are privy to an advanced level of monitoring. Each court session brings together a mix of court officials, probation officers and treatment professionals.

"Any time we can get all those stakeholders together at one table it is beneficial to public safety and to what we do, which is trying to change behavior," said Mike Frazier, NC Department of Public Safety's manager for an area including Bladen, Brunswick and Columbus counties.

If a participant re-offends or no-shows a treatment session, for instance, officials are able to act quicker.

"We know immediately and we can deal with it at the next session of court," Lewis said. "They're not waiting six months to be seen by a judge." ..Source.. by Adam Wagner

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NY- Tompkins sex-offense court to open in 2009

12-15-2008 New York:

ITHACA — In early 2009, Tompkins County will become the seventh county in New York state with a sex-offense court, according to court officials.

While this is another in the array of specialty or problem-solving courts, like drug court and integrated domestic violence court, court officers and other advocates stress that sex-offense court is distinct.

“This is one of those courts. However, it's not a treatment court,” said Judy Kluger, deputy chief administrative judge for court operations and planning for New York state. “It's a way to address one of the more complicated issues that comes into our courts.”

While some sex-offenders go to jail or prison, a certain number end up back in the community and on probation, she explained. The court's goal will be to enhance monitoring of convicted sex-offenders in order to decrease incidents of re-offending, she added.

“It's a relatively new initiative for the state,” she said.

Kluger described sex-offense court as an “accountability court,” where sex-offenders are monitored by a judge and probation officers. The court will ensure faster follow-up on violations and provide a check on further criminal activity, she added.

The state began establishing sex-offense court in 2006, Kluger said. Tompkins County will join Kings, Oswego, Orange, Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk counties as sex-offense court hosts, she added.

“It's about public safety and protecting the community,” she said. “The hope is that this will prevent sexual offenders from re-offending.” Kluger added that since the court will be using existing resources, there should be no appreciable extra cost.

Tompkins County Judge John Rowley called it a “community safety program” that can coordinate agencies, professionals and services in ways probation can't do by itself. These groups include sex-offense experts from the mental health clinic, law-enforcement officers, the district attorney's office, the victim's advocacy center, defense attorneys, court personnel and substance-abuse counselors.

“There are a significant number of sexual offenders on community supervision,” Rowley said. “I felt that the court had an obligation to ensure the supervision was effective as possible,” The court will ensure good planning and good communication, and break down the walls that separate agencies, he said.

Offenders will have to appear in the court twice a month, and the court will be able to enforce their travel restrictions and computer activities with GPS tracking gear and Internet monitoring software, he said. Since sex-offense court will be coordinating the agencies' efforts, offenders who violate their probation conditions can be incarcerated immediately, he said.

“We're not trying to change the person,” Rowley said. “We're trying to ensure community safety. If a person has raised their risk in some way, they're not going to be in the community.”

While committing a sexual-offense is not addictive behavior, it's talked about in the same way, Rowley said. Sex-offenders and therapists will be responsible for identifying behavior triggers and forming a relapse prevention plan to avoid those triggers, he added.

“Sex-offenders have their own list of things that trigger their behavior,” he said. “At a minimum, we know the risk of sex-offenders re-offending exists for the rest of their lives, according to the research.”

“This is not an alternative to incarceration,” emphasized Tompkins County District Attorney Gwen Wilkinson. Sex-offense court is part of a sex-offender's sentence, and “not a cakewalk” for them.

“The more monitoring you have of sex-offenders, the better,” she said. “Sex-offenders can be on probation for a long time. We have to maximize our ability to monitor them.”

Both Rowley and Wilkinson said that sex-offense cases are hard to prosecute. Besides the lack of physical and corroborating evidence, it's emotionally difficult for juvenile victims to testify at trials, Wilkinson said.

“Trials are extremely traumatic for child victims,” she said. In cases involving child victims, plea bargaining is preferred.

“Those sex-offenders I can put in prison, I will put in prison, she said.

While planning for the court continues, court personnel recently attended training for it in Oswego, and he is holding a continuing legal education program for county bar association members on Friday, Rowley said. ..News Source.. by Raymond Drumsta • Gannett News Service

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NY- In Courtroom 102, Focus Is on Sex Offenses

5-19-2008 New York:

THE sex cases that are heard in Judge Jeffrey A. Cohen’s courtroom are sad, disturbing stories of people accused of crimes like sexual abuse of children, rape or spreading child pornography. Courts throughout the land see such cases, but what makes Courtroom 102 in the Westchester County Courthouse here distinctive is that it handles almost nothing else.

In 2006, the state’s chief judge, Judith S. Kaye, created three pilot courts — in Nassau and Oswego Counties as well as Westchester — to handle felony-level sex offenses. The idea was that such courts might cultivate expertise among judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers who would become knowledgeable about the complexities involved — the likelihood of a suspect’s repeating a crime or the restrictions needed to prevent an offender from striking again.

Given that few issues raise more fears among Americans than the possibility of a predatory sex offender moving next door, the rationale for such a court seemed persuasive to many. The experiment has quickly been expanded to Suffolk, Brooklyn, Erie and Orange Counties.

On a recent morning, a 30-ish woman, Nilda Pagan, walked into Courtroom 102 with a quandary. She had been convicted of having sex five years ago with a 14-year-old boy and has been on probation since then on terms that require her to stay away from children under 18, except her own three. Now her 15-year-old daughter was about to give birth, and the county’s Probation Department denied Ms. Pagan the right to have this new grandchild live with her. Did that make sense? her lawyer asked.

Judge Cohen, a 59-year-old whose broad white mustache and dark hair graying at the temples make him look stately in his black judicial robes, found that restriction excessive and allowed the grandchild to live in Ms. Pagan’s home.

“I don’t see where breaking up a family serves any useful purpose whatsoever, not for the baby, not for the child and not for the defendant,” the judge ruled.

Then a teenager in low-slung pants was brought in for sentencing. His victim, a jeans-clad, ponytailed woman, stood at the next bench, and a prosecutor read a letter the woman had written describing how last year, while she was sleeping, the defendant, then 16, had broken into her apartment in Yonkers through an open window. She said he rolled over her while she was in bed, dragged her into the living room, then opened the door for two of his friends so the three could ransack the place.

The woman said in the letter that she had been raped, but none of the three men were charged with rape; the charges against them involved lesser sexual assaults. The woman told of having recurring nightmares and being afraid to sleep without a light.

“I have to live with this the rest of my life,” she wrote.

The defendant had already pleaded guilty to attempted burglary and misdemeanor sexual abuse, and Judge Cohen sentenced him to three years in state prison.

“You committed a big, bad crime — you entered someone’s house without permission,” the judge declared.

And so it went in sex offenders court on a day devoted largely to motions, sentencing and hearings. Keith Gaiser, a goateed man who had served time for rape, was sentenced to one year in jail for failing to register with the police as a sex offender when he moved to a new neighborhood. Shawn Rutledge, 37, was sentenced to six months in jail and five years on probation after pleading guilty to second-degree burglary for sneaking into a group home for mentally retarded adults in Lewisboro and having a sexual encounter with a 39-year-old resident. He was severely reprimanded by Judge Cohen for minimizing his involvement and blaming the victim.

“It was a violation of law and basically a violation of all we deem holy — taking advantage of a person in that condition,” the judge said.

Judge Cohen has been running the court since mid-January and already finds that hearing, say, five or six child abuse cases in an afternoon can be draining.

“If you let a guy out and he re-offends, there is a measure of personal responsibility, which every judge has in every case, but with sex offenses, the circumstances are very emotional,” he said. “I’m hoping that the justice that results from this type of specialized court is appropriate.”

There are some defense attorneys who question whether defendants are being treated fairly in these special courts. Diane Webster, a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society of Westchester County, whose job it is to defend indigent suspects brought into Mr. Cohen’s court, complained that the state had not provided money for independent psychiatrists to evaluate offenders. Instead, she said, offenders are evaluated mostly by probation officers, who, Ms. Webster said, are not sufficiently trained in psychological issues and are part of law enforcement to boot.

Because sex offenders are lumped together in a single court, she said, distinctions are not always made between, say, a stranger who rapes someone and a 19-year-old charged with statutory rape for having consensual sex with an under-age teenager. The judicial machinery, she said, compels each offender to undergo probation with electronic ankle monitors, polygraph tests and limits on movement near parks and other places where children gather.

Ms. Webster said Judge Cohen had made strides to treat each case individually, but too often, she said, the Probation Department treats them all the same.

“It’s very rigid, which is the opposite of what a specialized court should be,” she said

Judge Cohen said the court does not dispense “cookie cutter justice” and noted that professionals received specialized training in understanding various kinds of offenders.

Rocco A. Pozzi, the county’s commissioner of probation and correction, oversees an agency that has 190 sex-offender cases under supervision. He said his department has been so accurate in deciding how extensively to monitor offenders that in the past three years only one offender has been rearrested for sex crimes.

One of Ms. Webster’s clients that day was Timothy Moore, 21, who had pleaded guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl when he was 19 and was sentenced to 10 years on probation. Ms. Webster argued that the terms were unnecessarily harsh because the sex had been consensual.

She also said that Mr. Moore was looking for work, but that when prospective employers learned about his monitoring bracelet they would refuse to hire him. Probation officials asked that he wear it for another six months. Judge Cohen split the difference at 90 days and said he would re-evaluate his order then.

Another case was disposed of — for now. ..more.. by JOSEPH BERGER

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