Tag Archives: sex offenders

Florida housing sex offenders under a bridge

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It has happened. I have joked on many-a-occasion that with residency restriction laws the way they are, sex offenders will soon be living on the sides of highways and under bridges or in Montanta/Wyoming. I have never been sorrier to be correct. The blogosphere and mainstream media have picked up the latest news out of Florida that the state is “housing” sex offenders under a bridge:

The Florida Department of Corrections says there are fewer and fewer places in Miami-Dade County where sex offenders can live because the county has some of the strongest restrictions against this kind of criminal in the country.Florida’s solution: house the convicted felons under a bridge that forms one part of the causeway.

Five men — all registered sex offenders convicted of abusing children — live along the causeway because there is a housing shortage for Miami’s least welcome residents.

“I got nowhere I can go!” says sex offender Rene Matamoros, who lives with his dog on the shore where Biscayne Bay meets the causeway.

This is absolutely absurd and has got to stop. Enough is enough.

With nowhere to put these men, the Department of Corrections moved them under the Julia Tuttle Causeway. With the roar of cars passing overhead, convicted sex offender Kevin Morales sleeps in a chair to keep the rats off him.”The rodents come up next to you, you could be sleeping the whole night and they could be nibbling on you,” he said.

Morales has been homeless and living under the causeway for about three weeks. He works, has a car and had a rented apartment but was forced to move after the Department of Corrections said a swimming pool in his building put him too close to children.

The convicted felons may not be locked up anymore, but they say it’s not much of an improvement.

“Jail is anytime much better than this, than the life than I’m living here now,” Morales said. “[In jail] I can sleep better. I get fed three times a day. I can shower anytime that I want to.”

I think I will be sick.

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CT Risk Assessment Board given more time

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HB 7408 seeks to give the Risk Assessment Board (who knew we had one!) until October 1, 2007 to submit its report. This is great news. For one, I had no idea a Risk Assessment Board for sex offenders existed and secondly, the more time they have to soak in the national debate and make a recommendation, the better. The RAB has the following duties:

The board shall develop a risk assessment scale that assigns weights to various risk factors including, but not limited to, the seriousness of the offense, the offender’s prior offense history, the offender’s characteristics, the availability of community supports, whether the offender has indicated or credible evidence in the record indicates that the offender will reoffend if released into the community and whether the offender demonstrates a physical condition that minimizes the risk of reoffending, and specifies the risk level to which offenders with various risk assessment scores shall be assigned.

The board shall use the risk assessment scale to assess the risk of re-offending of each person subject to registration under this chapter, including incarcerated offenders who are within one year of their estimated release date, and assign each such person a risk level of high, medium or low.

The Board will have to report by October

  1. Whether information about sexual offenders assigned a risk level of high, medium or low should be made available to the public through the Internet;
  2. The types of information about sexual offenders that should be made available to the public through the Internet which may include, but not be limited to,
      (A) the name, residential address, physical description and photograph of the registrant,
      (B) the offense or offenses of which the registrant was convicted or found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect that required registration under this chapter,
      (C) a brief description of the facts and circumstances of such offense or offenses,
      (D) the criminal record of the registrant with respect to any prior convictions or findings of not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect for the commission of an offense requiring registration under this chapter, and
      (E) the name of the registrant’s supervising correctional, probation or parole officer, and contact information for such officer;
  3. Whether any of the persons assigned a high risk level by the board pursuant to subsection (c) of this section meets the criteria for civil commitment pursuant to section 17a-498;
  4. Whether additional restrictions should be placed on persons subject to registration under this chapter such as curfews and intensive monitoring on certain holidays; [and]
  5. Whether persons convicted of a sexual offense who pose a high risk of reoffending should be required to register under this chapter regardless of when they were convicted or released into the community; and
  6. Whether persons determined to be guilty with adjudication withheld in any other state or jurisdiction of any crime the essential elements of which are substantially the same as any of the crimes specified in subdivisions (2), (5) and (11) of section 54-250 should be required to register under this chapter.

Fantastic! I love this. A tiered system for sex offenders based on risk levels is optimal and I’m glad the state is taking a step in the right direction.

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CT jumps into residency restrictions ring

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The Judiciary Committee today considered HB 5503: An Act Concerning Residency Restrictions For Registered Sexual Offenders. I am saddened by this news. The requirement is 1000 feet from schools or day-care facilities. However, exceptions exist:

The provisions of subsection (a) of this section do not apply if (1) the person has established a residence within one thousand feet of such property prior to the effective date of this section, or (2) the school or facility is newly located on or after the effective date of this section within one thousand feet of such person’s residence.

In a  state this small, I wouldn’t be surprised if this effectively precluded offenders from living in any cities.

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Blawger opinions on sex offenders and residency restrictions

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Today saw two prominent sex offender issues blawgers voice their opinions on what sensible laws should be:

Steve Smith writes:

I think the chief evil of 90% of the current laws is the utter lack of effort to separate out true predators from one-time mistakes.

Most of his suggestions correctly center around differentiating between “high risk” and “low risk” sex offenders.

ZMan! opines:

If we must keep the online registry, then only those who are deemed high-risk should be on the registry, all others should be removed from the online portion of the registry. I’d rather see the registry be removed off line completely, but I know that will not occur.

Instead of making buffer zones, designate places sex offenders cannot go to. This way, at least they can walk or drive without violating some law.

Therapy should be mandatory in prison and jail for ALL criminals deemed to need it. If they do not get the treatment, then they will remain in prison or jail.

I do not agree with his last point that therapy should be mandated or offenders remain incarcerated. Civil commitment comes with its own issues and the ability of the state to effectively incarcerate someone beyond the term of their sentence at the excuse of “therapy” is something I cannot sign on to.

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Sex offenders and MySpace: Free speech and due process violations?

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The Duke Law & Tech Review iBlawg has two very interesting posts on whether MySpace’s decision to block convicted sex offenders from using their services violates either the right to free speech or to due process. As to free speech, the author writes:

The basis for asking if the proposed legislation and MySpace’s actions are a violation of the First Amendment stems from the Supreme Court case John Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition. 535 U.S. 234 (2002).In light of Free Speech Coalition, it appears that Congress would have to make a solid argument that all written works from a former sex offender to a teenager are patently offensive in light of community standards and is therefore unprotected speech. The difficulty with this argument is that it depends on what the sexual offender is writing on the social networking website, whether he or she is trying to arrange a meeting with the teenager, and whether the former sex offender is still a danger to the community.

Moreover, the speech that is in question is not harmful in itself; it is the later potentially unlawful actions that are potentially dangerous, indicating the legislation may be overly broad. The only way such speech can be differentiated from the speech in Free Speech Coalition is if a distinction is made between speech produced by non-former sex offenders and speech produced by sex offenders. If made, this distinction raises the question of whether this different treatment violates a sex offender’s right to due process.

On Due Process, she writes:

The Supreme Court has only ruled on two cases regarding sex offender registries and only one of those cases specifically discussed due process.1 In Conn. Dep’t of Pub. Safety v. Doe, 538 U.S. 1 (2003), a Connecticut statute provided for public disclosure of the state’s sex offender registry.Even in the wake of Doe, there are two arguable reasons for why sex offenders are being denied due process rights when banned from social online communities without any determination of their current dangerousness. First, the scope of Doe is very narrow. The Court ruled that Plaintiff already had a hearing when it was determined that he was a sex offender and that the Connecticut statute required the registration of all convicted sex offenders.

Second, in Doe, the online registry was solely for the purpose of public awareness.15 Here, third parties are using the registry to block certain individuals from Internet sites, and such a distinction may change the analysis.

There is more in-depth analysis in the full posts, so I encourage you to read them. I’ve long maintained that Doe ruled on nothing more than procedural due process and the substantive issue was not touched. SCOTUS has yet to consider whether any of these “requirements” or “restrictions” geared toward sex offenders violate substantive due process.

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Legislative updates

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Perusing the legislature’s list of bills for the past few days, I’ve stumbled upon quite a few legislative proposals dealing with sex offenders and criminal justice. I’ll update this post with links to each subsequent post. There are a few bills I want to address on their own.

As you can see in the footer, I’ve created a new category “proposed legislation”. I will be posting all future updates on proposed legislation to that category, so that’s an easy reference for those of you interested.

push against residency restrictions finally paying off

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Out of Maryland comes the news that legislators are considering shifting their focus away from residency restrictions. I cannot tell you how much this gladdens me. Finally the push against residency restrictions is beginning to pay off and hopefully more states will follow suit and try to cultivate legislation that will actually accomplish the goals they seek.

Sen. Norman Stone and Del. John Olszewski Jr. now say the focus of their bills is likely to move away from residential restrictions toward other legal remedies.

The possible changes come after studies conducted in states where similar laws have been passed or considered conclude that such restrictions have little effect.

In their current form, these bills would be standard fare – restricting how close sex offenders can live to “areas populated by children”.

Both Stone and Olszewski, however, say their bills may be altered to reflect the growing body of opinion in legislative and law-enforcement circles nationwide that residential restrictions are ineffective and, in some cases, counterproductive.

A report presented to the Florida legislature in 2005 was among the first to call residential restrictions into question, saying that statistics showed no decrease in the likelihood that convicted child sex offenders would commit new offenses, despite the presence of restrictions.

The Florida report went on to say that “such policies may ultimately be counterproductive,” noting that residential restrictions tended to cause many offenders to move into small-town and rural areas where they were poorly supervised by law enforcement authorities and had little or no access to psychiatric treatment, or drove them underground, where they were not monitored or treated at all.

Absolutely on point. The article also does a good job of highlighting other states where these laws are being questioned.

This analysis has been echoed in states like Texas, Colorado, Kansas and Minnesota, where legislatures have rejected residential restriction bills, as have cities including Topeka, Kan., Maplewood, Minn., and Covington, Ky. Legislatures in other states, including Georgia and Oklahoma, are revisiting their residential restriction statutes.

However, it seems that Iowa is now being looked at as the vanguard of this movement. Lots more after the jump, so click on the link to read the full post.

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