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Was evidence kept from jury?
Victim of Sex Abuse facing the Death Penalty in PA (click to see video from CNN)
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Experts say killing alleged rapist still could be murder
8-5-2012 South Carolina:
The gut feeling for some – probably many – is that an alleged Chester County rapist got what was coming to him when somebody shot him in the head July 29.
Michael Jermaine Terry, 39, had been in and out of jail his whole adult life for drugs and guns and violence and stealing.
On the day he was killed, police say, he took a 16-year-old girl he knew into the woods and attacked her.
When police came to investigate, they found Terry dead in the road a half-mile from where the alleged rape occurred.
Some are cheering for whomever killed Terry.
But soon the person who killed him might be facing a charge as serious as murder, say legal experts – even if Terry did commit a heinous crime just minutes before he was shot in what looks like revenge. Emotion, the parent in anybody, is cheering for Charles Bronson as he sweeps up criminals with bullets in the old “Death Wish” movies that reach back to the 1970s.
Real life is that cops and prosecutors are required to investigate and solve killings – even if the person killed is the worst kind of offender.
Legal experts say the law is clear: “Taking the law into your own hands” is not legal.
Someone enraged by a previous crime cannot legally act with revenge violence, retribution violence or vigilante justice, said Miller Shealy, a professor at the Charleston School of Law and former prosecutor.
Law enforcement is required to investigate the death of even an alleged predator and if warranted, file charges up to murder, Shealy said.
“There is no room, under the law, for a revenge killing,” Shealy said. “There is no law that allows open season on anyone – even someone accused of a terrible crime.”
Police have not said who might be a suspect in Terry’s death or if anybody who knew the victim in the alleged rape is a suspect. Investigators are waiting for evidence to come back in both the assault and killing.
However, police and prosecutors and the courts must be able to work through criminal acts and accusations before a “rush to justice” by the public, a victim or a victim’s family, said Shealy and Debra Gammons, a former judge who also is a law professor at the Charleston school.
The law allows someone who walks in on a crime or sees a crime such as sexual assault to stop the attack, Gammons said, but does not allow retribution afterward.
“The law requires we let the justice system work,” she said. “Our society depends on letting the system run its course.”
Terry, accused of a terrible crime, was dead and could not be questioned by police about the allegations. He had no chance to defend himself, whether he was guilty of the alleged rape or not.
If someone is charged with murder in this case and a trial ensued, a jury could make a decision not to convict. It is possible that no way could 12 people on a jury who are parents, regular people, convict someone for killing a monster.
Jury nullification – the acquittal of someone even if the facts are against him, as in the movie “A Time to Kill” – can happen. It does happen. But it does not happen often.
And real life is not movies.
The person who killed Terry would be rolling the dice with his or her life by going to trial on murder or voluntary manslaughter – the so-called “heat of passion” killing, Shealy said, because prosecutors would argue that Terry was, in this killing case, a victim no matter how bad he was.
As understandable to regular people – to a jury even – as the idea that “somebody got what they deserved,” that is not the law, said state Rep. Tommy Pope, R-York, the former prosecutor for York County. Police investigate crimes and prosecutors convict criminals.
“You just can’t have people gunning other people down,” Pope said.
The law requires that even a person with an awful past gets a chance to defend himself in a courtroom, the legal experts say.
Even if it hurts our guts as parents to watch.
The public emotion against a convicted criminal accused of a heinous crime has no bearing though on charges against whoever shot him, the experts said.
In December 2003, a lady from York County, a good and decent person, a mother and grandmother named Janice Clark Smith, ended decades of abuse of herself and others by pouring her father a glass of wine – then shooting him dead.
Not a single person then or since has ever called George Manley Clark, the dead man, anything but a horrible, evil drunken monster. Not a single person came to his defense.
His daughter had killed the man who had been convicted of sexually abusing a family member, and who had beaten others for years, who had held guns at his children’s heads, who executed pets to scare his family.
If anybody ever deserved to be killed, so many said, it was George Manley Clark.
But his daughter was charged with murder, because the killing did not happen during the abuse. She chose to kill her father, and admitted that every time she was in court.
Her lawyer, bringing in dozens of people who corroborated the abuse, the horrors of this awful, evil man, always admitted the facts showed murder. The prosecutor who worked for Tommy Pope said murder.
Howard King, the judge, was so upset by the evils of what George Manley Clark did that he accepted a plea to the reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter, but still sentenced Smith to seven years in prison.
That judge, while acknowledging the terror that George Clark’s family had lived through, said in court in 2004 words everybody knew were coming, even when the dead man was possibly the worst person in York County: “Nobody can take the law into their own hands.”
After that story was reported in The Herald, the Smith’s family, her lawyer and others, were on “Larry King Live” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” A country and the world were appalled at what she had endured and many were upset that this lady had to spend even an hour in jail.
King, the sage interviewer without peer, said at the end of one show after shaking his head, that it sure seemed George Manley Clark deserved to be killed.
But the law does not allow even monsters to be killed after terrible crimes.
In 2002 in York, a Gastonia, N.C., man named Thurman O’Neill Smith Jr. was charged with murder after shooting his mother’s husband after allegations surfaced earlier in the day that the man had molested the man’s daughter when the daughter was 8.
The man accused of the shooting had another daughter who was abducted and killed in a 1981 case that was never solved.
Even though Thurman Smith was a father dealing with his children’s being hurt, police still charged him with murder.
A jury found Smith, who claimed the shooting was an accident, guilty of voluntary manslaughter. The conviction was later overturned, and Smith eventually pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter.
Something similar might happen all over again in Chester County.
“The courts sometimes seem miserably slow, and sometimes there is frustration,” said Shealy, the law professor. “But the law does not allow anyone to act as judge, jury and executioner.” ..Source.. by Andrew DysPosted by eAdvocate: A Voiceat8/05/2012 03:39:00 PM -
Catching Sexual Predators on Social Networks Requires Both Humans and Technology
Image via CrunchBase
Shane McGlaun (Blog) – July 12, 2012 9:02 AM
Predators are finding victims via social networks
Social networks such as Facebook and others use a mix of software and personnel to be on the lookout for potential sexual predators. What many users of Facebook may not know is that the site has a lot of technology in place for scanning postings and chats looking for criminal activity. This automated technology scans conversations and will flag questionable content for human moderators who can read it and then inform authorities if needed.
Reuters reports that the technology was used in March of this year when it flagged a suspicious conversation between a man in his early 30s and a 13-year-old girl who were talking about sex. When the man agreed to meet the girl after class the next day, Facebook employees notified the police who arrested the man.
“The manner and speed with which they contacted us gave us the ability to respond as soon as possible,” said Duncan, one of a half-dozen law enforcement officials interviewed who praised Facebook for triggering inquiries.
Most social networks are using a mix of technology and human moderators in an attempt to weed out predators. To train the automated software used to scan conversations looking for potential predators, Facebook and others are using online chat records of convicted pedophiles to teach the software what to look for.
However, more vigilance and better discovery techniques are needed. High-profile cases have come to light recently that clearly show companies need to invest more into technology and processes to catch potential predators. These cases include a smartphone app called Skout that admitted to having been used by three teenagers who were talking to adults that led to sexual assaults. The problem in that case was that the company wasn’t verifying that users of the teen section were under 20, making it easy for predators to access.
Source: Reuters
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Trial begins in case over changes to state’s sex offender laws
Fire (instant messaging client) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In a federal courtroom in Lincoln, it wasn’t an accused sex offender but Nebraska’s sex offender laws on trial Monday.
If the state wins, convicted sex offenders would be forced to disclose to law enforcement the online names they use and sites where they’ve posted comments and to consent to searches of their computers and software.
And they would be banned from using social networking sites, instant messaging services and chat rooms that can be used by minors.
In the end of what is expected to be a two-week trial, U.S. Senior District Judge Richard Kopf will decide whether the state’s lawmakers went too far when they passed changes in 2009, as some three dozen offenders subjected to the registry alleged in the suit.
“This is a case that questions the constitutionality of what the state intended as a first-of-its-kind, one-of-a-kind piece of legislation,” said Rod Dahlquist, an attorney for the John and Jane Does who sued.
It comes down to this, he said: Can the state take away someone’s ability to use social networking, instant messaging and chat room tools based on a prior conviction?
Dahlquist said the law violated sex offenders’ First Amendment rights and was punitive and unconstitutionally vague.
Sex offenders, for example, couldn’t make anonymous posts on a political website without informing the state of their online name and where and when they posted it, he said.
Kopf asked him what then was the state to do. How could they get at the online places where predators find kids?
“The state has a right to be proactive,” the judge said.
Dahlquist said one way is to fund law enforcement so more could pose as teens online.
“I can tell you how not to do it,” he said. “And that is banning them from the Internet entirely, which is what they’ve done.”
His expert, David Post, a law professor at Temple University, testified later that the law could be read to apply to nearly all websites and even to sex offenders’ ability to make landline and cellphone calls and send text messages.
But, on the other side, Assistant Attorney General Katherine Spohn disputed the contention.
She said it doesn’t prevent all use of the Internet. Sex offenders would be free to look at websites, so long as they aren’t communicating, she said. They would have to notify law enforcement within a day if they did.
And the sites would have to expressly permit minors to use them in their terms of use, Spohn said.
“Why doesn’t the statute say that?” Kopf asked her.
She agreed the statute may be more complicated than it needed to be.
Spohn said the Internet today is the equivalent to a real-world playground, and the state is making efforts to protect children from predators who meet and groom them online over time until they agree to meet in person.
The goal is to protect children, she said.
Reach Lori Pilger at 402-473-7237 or lpilger@journalstar.com or follow her on Twitter at LJSpilger.
By LORI PILGER / Lincoln Journal StarJournalStar.com |
Posted: Tuesday, July 17, 2012 8:00 am |
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A father in Texas may have to face trial, as he is being labeled as a criminal by some experts for killing the molester of his daughter
Texas father kills his daughter’s molester
Very few people blame the Texas father for killing his daughter’s molester after he himself saw the suspect sexually abusing his daughter. The incident took place in Shiner, Texas, but the identity of those involved in the case is being kept confidential due to the sensitive nature of the case. According to the details, the 23-year-old father killed the molester after seeing him molesting his 5-year-old daughter. The horrific incident was taking place in a horse barn, where the father found the suspect brutally assaulting his daughter. Upon seeing this, the father beat him up using his fists.All around Texas, the father is being hailed as a hero, but now some legal experts have started saying that no matter what, the father should not have killed the man and his case should now be prosecuted. These experts maintain that no matter what the system of vigilante justice does not prevail in a civil society and hence the father should have stopped hitting the man when he had saved his daughter from him.
A Texas grand jury will be evaluating the case next week. They will look deeper into it to find out the circumstances of the killing and whether the father was indeed justified in hitting the man so hard that he died.
“Assuming it’s true that this guy was molesting the daughter … he would then have the right to defend her and hit him enough to have him stop,” James Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, told Fox News. “But you cannot summarily execute him, even though I can understand the anger he would have.”
He added, “The question is: When does it move beyond self-defense?”
The incident took place on last Saturday after the man’s daughter had gone to the barn to feed their chickens. The father was inside when, after a while, he heard screaming and when he ran to investigate, he found that the suspect, who is described as a family acquaintance and a horse groomer, was sexually abusing his daughter. He then started hitting the man and by the time eyewitnesses arrived, he was dead.
Samantha86 is based in New York City, New York, United States of America, and is an Anchor for Allvoices.
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There’s Hope Even for Sex Offenders
The war on sex offenders makes sense only within a large historical context. My generation grew up practicing air raid drills in classrooms where the teachers made us crawl under our desks in case the real thing took out Cleveland or Buffalo. Neighbors were stocking their bomb shelters with canned goods and ammunition. We lived through the Cuban Missile crisis unsure if hour by hour the human race would survive.
There was a doomsday pressure on everyone. Sen. Joseph McCarthy tapped into it to wield as much power as President Eisenhower for a brief time. His aggressive Senate hearings on Un-American activities blackballed dozens of alleged communists in labor unions and Hollywood. Even a Pulitzer Prize winner like Arthur Miller fell into temporary disgrace.
The Colonists hanged 20 accused witches in Salem in 1692 and crushed another under tons of stone. Consorting with the devil was a sexual offense in those days. The judges and juries were dealing with huge stress from failed crops and the fear of Indian raids.
Now we have reached the depth of a great recession that rivals the one 80 years ago for its high unemployment and social unrest. Joblessness on this scale contributed to the widespread inner city riots in the 1960s and 1970s. The same misery, but worse, fueled the rise of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin a generation earlier. People are scared that way now. They want vengeance and safety.
We have started the second decade of a war on terror that may never end and knows few traditional limits. We watch Iran and North Korea try to join the short list of nations with the unilateral power to trigger the war to end all wars. Every few months some anonymous stranger guns down a dozen strangers. We all feel that carnage in the intimacy of the quarter hourly internet news cycle as if it happened next door. We want to save ourselves from so many threats. We want to lash out at them. The quickest, easiest way to do that is symbolically.
So we register sex offenders as surrogate terrorists and post their personal information as if it were bin Laden’s bio on the Internet for everyone to see. Failure to report to police on a quarterly basis earns a sex offender a new felony charge. We ban them from living near schools, daycare centers and school bus stops with draconian penalties for violations. We civilly commit them when they finish their prison terms. We make sure those are long sentences by stacking charges in multiple consecutive bids. Each image of child on hard drive becomes a separate felony. We give sex offenders special license plates. The police notify the neighbors when a sex offender moves in nearby. The neighbors evict them, or force the landlords to do it for them, sometimes subtly, sometimes with raw violence.
Eight years ago Lawrence Trant stabbed a registered sex offender in Concord, NH, and tried to burn down two apartment buildings that housed seven sex offenders and an equal number of non-offenders. Police found a hit list in the assailant’s apartment he had gleaned from the sex offender public registry. The names of his intended victims were checked off in red.
“I hope I’ve done a service to the community,” Trant told the Boston Globe during an interview from prison. “These guys are sexual terrorists.”
On a hot night three years later a mob chanting, “skinner, skinner,” burned a scarecrow on the wooden porch of registered sex offender Gloria Huot. She was away from her home in Manchester, NH, but her female roommate watched the whole thing with her two teenage sons and an infant she was babysitting in their three-unit apartment building. A few days later a sex offender vigilante website posted these remarks about Huot, still available at http://www.forums.militarystangs.com/archive/index.php/t-6133.html.
“pervs deserve to pay the price for the rest of their lifes – whatever that price may be. if its just humiliation and a little bit of harassment, i’d say they should consider themselves lucky” Smokin’Red35th
“wow this is why these fah-kers need to die.” Bobbys97R
Stephen Marshall, a vigilante from Nova Scotia, executed two registered sex offenders in Maine in 2006 before killing himself on a bus in Massachusetts surrounded by police. Like Trant, he found his victims on the Internet registry. One of them, William Elliot, had slept with a girlfriend a few days shy of the legal age of consent in Maine when he was in high school.
Samuel Lane, the former police chief in Pembroke, NH, used to teach sex offender safety workshops for the volunteers in his Neighborhood Watch program. “Sex offenders often have multiple victims,” Lane told a group of scared parents a couple of years ago. “It’s not uncommon for them to have one victim while grooming another and deciding two others are too old now.”
He projected a collage of mug shots of local sex offenders he compiled from images on the State Police website. “Doesn’t that guy in the middle look like a troll?” the chief asked. “We have 21 of these guys in Pembroke right now. It’s near the prison in Concord and two halfway houses. Theyhave a low cure rate and a high recidivism rate.
They’re wired wrong.” Jennifer Frank, a campus police detective at Plymouth State University, has been teaching similar workshops on Internet safety at high schools and middle schools around New England for several years. In 2010 she displayed student Facebook pages in front of the Cawley Middle School in Hooksett, NH, including half a dozen images belonging to the children of registered sex offenders.
Then she posted their fathers’ Internet mug pages from the sex offender registry. The students picked up on the linkage right away. Charles Littlefield, the Hooksett superintendent, told me the children of offenders were “traumatized.” Steve Harrises, the Cawley principal, said he was “blindsided” by the assembly.
Something worse happened when Frank went to Fall Mountain High School. She outed the victims of local offenders. Steve Fortier, a school parent who is not a sex offender, gave this testimony about the event at a legislative hearing a few months later.
“Many of the sex offenders whose information was shown are family members of teens who were sitting in the audience,” Fortier said of Det. Frank in written testimony. “Because most youth sexual abuse is committed by a family member or someone else known by the victim, there was an even more troubling consequence. Many of the victims of the sex offenders were watching the assembly. This re-traumatization, including the stigma associated with being a teen sexual abuse victim, was, in my opinion, not worth whatever gains were made through the assembly.”
Other Fall Mountain parents have told me kids ran out crying and stayed away from school for days. When I called Jennifer Frank to get her side of the issue, she said her workshops protect children from the dangers of the Internet. She also said she uses only material readily available to the public. Her boss, Col. Creig Doyle, stood by her work.
There is a far better way to help sex offenders rejoin society and avoid recidivism. The Canadians keep a nonpublic sex offender registry for the police to use in solving crimes. There is no Internet shaming roster. And they do a superb job helping sex offenders find jobs, apartments and a support system.
The Mennonites in Canada arguably lead the way in rehabilitating and mentoring the most dangerous sex offenders. Their program model is called Circles of Support and Accountability, and it serves the kind of people California, Kansas and New Hampshire would civilly commit after they finish their prison terms. It’s the worst of the very worst.
A 2007 study led by Robin J. Wilson of the Humber Institute of Technology found that offenders in the Circles program had a 2.1 percent sex offense recidivism rate after 34 months in the community. A control group of comparable very high risk offenders elsewhere in Canmada had a 12.8 percent sex offense recidivism rate, which is still quite low compared with conventional wisdom.
Eileen Henderson is the Restorative Justice coordinator for the Mennonites in Ontario. She said half a dozen highly trained volunteers meet with a newly released offender, find out what help they need, and stand with them almost constantly in the beginning.
Some offenders eventually reunite with their family members, although that doesn’t always happen. The Circles program helps them understand the immense harm they have created and learn ways to repair that harm. It’s not always directly to their victim. It can be by living safely in the community, by changing the choices they make and by doing community service.
“I believe in the power of redemption,” Henderson said. “I’ve seen people change when they work through their issues of shame. They get a glimmer of themselves as people of value. They’re not garbage.”
Maybe that’s hope for a troubled age.
Corrections.com author, Chris Dornin, is a retired State House reporter and the founder of Citizens for Criminal Justice Reform.
By Chris Dornin, Retired Statehouse reporter Published: 04/09/2012 our source: http://www.corrections.com/news/article/30086-there-s-hope-even-for-sex-offenders
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Christine McCallum Sentenced To 29 Months For Sex With 13-Year-Old Student
The Huffington Post | By Andy Campbell
Posted: 03/28/2012 1:33 pm Updated: 03/29/2012 10:22 am
Christine McCallum at an earlier court hearing.Former Massachusetts teacher Christine McCallum was sentenced to 29 months in prison and 10 years probation for raping and drugging a 13-year-old student.
McCallum, 29, was arrested in January 2009 and convicted of raping the boy up to 300 times over a 21-month period. She pleaded guilty to 12 counts of child rape, one count of drugging a person for sex and one count of providing alcohol to a minor, according to Enterprise.
The former Abington elementary school educator started tutoring her victim and his 11-year-old brother in 2005, FOX 25 reported. After a 20-month period, the two boys started living with McCallum and her husband part-time.
McCallum had sex with the 13 year old for the first time in February 2006, and used alcohol and marijuana to persuade him.
The sexual relationship ended almost two years later when the boy, then 15, became interested in a girl his own age.
In an impact statement, the boy’s father described McCallum as “a true predator and a monster” who destroyed his life, WATD-FM reported.
“You put my two sons at grave risk on many occasion with out my knowledge, you gave my kids drugs and alcohol with no regard for their well being, only to fulfill your own selfish needs,” the father said in court. “To me you are true predator and a monster.”
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Car-fire victim a sex offender
Car-fire victim a sex offender
2-5-2012 Pennsylvania:
State police from the Embreeville barracks today identified the man who died last week after setting his car on fire as 38-year-old Thomas J. Evasew of Phoenixville.
The coroner ruled the death a suicide. Court records show that Evasew was paroled last May after serving a 6- to 23-month sentence for disseminating and possessing child pornography. He was still on probation in that case, court records said.
Troopers responding to a reported vehicle fire at 5:18 p.m. Wednesday at 3285 Phoenixville Pike found a 2005 red Ford Focus “fully involved in fire,” police said. Inside the vehicle they saw the body.
State police said they were assisted at the scene by the Chester County Fire Marshals, Chester County Coroner’s Office, East Whiteland Fire Company, the county’s Hazmat agency, and agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. ..Source.. by kathleen brady sheaOur Source: eAdvocate -
Laws Based on RAGE and FEAR
Sex Offender Laws Are Based On Rage and Fear By Chris Dornin, Retired Statehouse reporter Published: 03/12/2012 
Nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford was kidnapped from her Florida home, raped and buried alive in February 2005. Lawmakers filed the 82-page Jessica Lunsford Act in her memory on April 1. Gov. Jeb Bush signed the new law on May 2. That’s light speed for any legislature. It passed unanimously in both houses.
The most draconian sex offender code in America at the time had a mandatory 25-year minimum sentence for any sex crime against a child under age 12. The bid was life without parole for perpetrators older than 17.
Bill O’Reilly of FOX News urged viewers to push their governors for even tougher laws to protect kids. “This is literally a life-and-death battle to save our youngest and most vulnerable citizens from abuse, torture, and murder,” O’Reilly warned. “I hope you’ll do your part.”
New Hampshire and 16 other states had passed versions of Jessica’s Law within a year. That’s how sex offender laws get made. By rage and fear in a hurry.
“People who prey on children are the most dangerous criminals in our state, targeting our most precious and vulnerable citizens,” Gov. John Lynch told the New Hampshire Senate Judiciary Committee. “It is time for us to send a clear message in New Hampshire. If you prey on children, we will send you to prison, and we are going to keep you there for a long time.”
Rep. Peter Batula, prime sponsor of the predator bill, said the state needed to keep from becoming “a haven for sexual predators to move over the borders.”
NH Attorney General Kelley Ayotte told senators about 17 repeat sex offenders who had gotten off too lightly. She testified that the sex offense recidivism rate for pedophiles “is between 90 and 94 percent. Offenders who sexually abuse children have a lifelong problem that is not amendable to treatment.”
Sex offender laws have bred a universal hysteria about sex offenders by branding them all as equally and intolerably dangerous. The Michigan public registry law promises to help the public know about sexual predators living near them “who, by virtue of relatively high recidivism rates among such offenders and the devastating impact that sex crimes have on society, pose a serious threat to society.”
The US Justice Department made the same argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark Alaska v John Doe case. The court ruled that the Alaska public registry is not an ex post facto punishment. In their amicus brief, the feds said sex offenders pose a huge threat because of their high recidivism rates and the injury they inflict on children.
New Hampshire State Sen. David Boutin sponsored a bill two years ago to encourage police departments to use active public notice when sex offenders are released into a neighborhood. He filed the legislation to please constituents hoping to drive all the sex offenders from his home town. Joel Dutton, a man on the sex offender registry there, had been charged with a new sex crime. When Dutton made bail, his neighbors started a website against him with these and similar comments:
“You show true restraint by not beating the tar out of this lowlife.” Chris Johnson
“I hope you guys get rid of the bastard. What a piece of crap.” MTgirl
“This is an incestuous family of whack-jobs and psychopaths, and it makes me feel good to know they are going down.” Steve
“Hang’em high and let the sun set on em. Only in a perfect world right? Haha” Josh T
Boutin echoed those feelings in Senate testimony for his legislation. “Late September of 2009 a convicted child sex offender heinously struck again and was charged with felonious sexual assault against a 7 year old Hooksett girl,” Boutin told lawmakers. “Quick adoption of this bill and dissemination of notification guidelines to local law enforcement will go a long way towards preventing another sexual assault, with regrettable consequences for the victim, family and community, who all share in the burden of the pain.”
Boutin failed to mention that the prosecutor had already dropped the case against Dutton for lack of evidence. A neighbor had accused Dutton of molesting his own niece, who still lives with Dutton, his wife, and his brother in law. The bill died on the Senate floor, even in an election year
A growing body of research calls into question the wisdom of all this crusading against sex offenders. Dr. Karl Hanson, a corrections researcher for the Canadian Department of Public Safety, is a pioneer in the risk assessment of sex offenders. He has also co-authored numerous studies of sex offender recidivism, including several meta-analyses that followed large groups of offenders over many years. One of his projects found a 13.4 percent sex offense recidivism rate after five years. Another reported a 14.3 percent after six years. A third found a 14 percent rate after five years, 20 percent after 10 years and 24 percent after 15 years.
Recent American studies suggest even lower rates. One by Sarah Schelle of the Indiana Department of Corrections, entitled “Juvenile Recidivism, 2010,” said that only two of 71 juvenile sex offenders released in 2007 had committed new sex offense within three years. That’s a 2.8 percent sex offense recidivism rate, although the sample size was small and the tracking period was shorter than Hanson used. The comparable rate for hundreds of adult sex offenders in Indiana the same year was 1.05 percent three years after release.
A report in July 2011 led by Mark Rubin of the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service followed 900 sex offenders released from prison or probation in Maine between 2004 and 2008. Within three years after release 3.8 percent had been convicted of a new sex crime. The study entitled “Sexual Assault Trends and Sex Offender Recidivism in Maine, 2010” can be found online by clicking here.
Rubin told the Portland Press Herald the public still thinks sex offenders have high re-offense rates. “There’s really no data to support that theory,” he told the newspaper.
A report in March 2012 by the State of Connecticut tracked 746 sex offenders for five years after release from prison in 2005. Only 3.6 percent had been charged with a new sex crime, 2.7 percent were convicted, and 1.7 percent had returned to prison for that new crime. The author of the report, Ivan Kuzyk, noted these low rates contradict a conventional wisdom that sex offenders have very high sexual re-offense rates. “The real challenge for public agencies is to determine the level of risk which specific offenders pose (to) the public,” Kuzyk said. Here is the full report.
I wrote a piece for Corrections.com a couple of years ago entitled “Facts and Fiction about Sex Offenders ”, which summarized similar low American sex offense recidivism rates in study after study: 1.2 percent after two years in Britain; 3 percent after 4.3 years in Iowa; 8 percent after a decade in Ohio; 5.3 percent after three years in a 15-state federal study; 3 percent after three years in Alaska; 4.7 percent after three years in Tennessee; 2 percent after three years in West Virginia; 3.38 percent after 10 years in California; 7.2 percent after 25 years in Utah; 2.3 percent after three years in Arizona; 3.8 percent after three years in Delaware; 2.4 percent after three years in Illinois; 1.8 percent after three years in New Mexico; 4 percent after three years in South Carolina. My article on this literature is still available elsewhere on corrections.com.
Hanson said the earliest Canadian and American sex offense recidivism studies found unusually high rates because the investigators looked only at high- and medium-risk populations. Most were repeat offenders to begin with. Hanson is familiar with the recent U.S. studies, but questions some of those low numbers because parolees in states like Iowa and Alaska can return to prison after a new sex offense without counting officially as re-offenders.
“I know that first-hand,” Hanson said. “The way they capture their data underestimates the recidivism. And not all repeat offenders go back to prison. Or they might return in a different state.”
In an unlikely alliance, victim advocates have begun standing up for sex offenders in litigation and battles over legislation. Atty. Margie Slagle wrote an amicus brief representing the Cleveland and Texas rape crisis centers in the Williams v Ohio case. They intervened on the side of the plaintiff, a sex offender challenging the public registry law before the Ohio Supreme Court as an ex post facto punishment. Slagle helped Williams to win last summer. Below is a passage from her brief.
While protecting Ohioans from sex offenders is a compelling interest-and indeed, it is the core mission of the amici- none of the changes implemented as part of Ohio’s AWA has been proven to achieve that goal. Research shows that the law’s more burdensome requirements on law enforcement, the public, and sex offenders can cause higher levels of recidivism and thus pose increased danger to the community. More onerous sex offender registration and community notification laws threaten to harm the very people they are intended to protect and to undermine goals of community safety and treatment of offenders. These laws perpetuate myths and create a false sense of security.
Research demonstrates that victimization can be reduced when sex offenders successfully reenter the community. These changes also put law enforcement agencies, already in budgetary crises, in the position of spending precious dollars on monitoring low risk individuals with a limited impact on public safety. Thus, any argument that Ohio’s AWA is simply a remedial law designed to protect children and the public from sexual abuse and sex crimes is seriously flawed. Ohio’s AWA is not based on empirical evidence or proven research, but on fear and misinformation.
In an interview, Slagle said prosecutors and other officials pander for votes by playing the sex offender card. “The sad truth is we leave parents and children more vulnerable when lawmakers pass laws based on myth and not facts,” she said. “The public registry makes thing so difficult for them. Part of rehabilitation is getting them accepted back into the community.”
Hanson said the research fails to support claims that the public sex offender registries deter sex crimes or prevent recidivism. “The recidivism rates before and after implementation of registries are essentially the same,” he explained. “When policies are going to affect other people, it is worth collecting data first.”
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Florida eases penalties for teen sexting
By the CNN Wire Staff2011-10-01T21:54:49ZCNN.com
Florida passed legislation easing the penalty for sending or receiving nude photos or videos.(CNN) — Before Saturday, a Florida teenager who sent or received nude photos or video could have been charged with a felony and forced to register as a sex offender.
But a new law, recognizing the proliferation of cell phones and computers, eases the penalties for “sexting” infractions.
A first offense is punishable by eight hours of community service or a $60 fine; the second is a misdemeanor and the third is a felony.
State Rep. Joseph Abruzzo, D-Wellington, sponsored the legislation, which was approved in June.
“When our child pornography laws were written, they failed to take into account advances in technology, such as cell phones,” Abruzzo said in a statement published on the website of CNN affiliate WPBF in West Palm Beach. “(This bill) modernizes these laws to ensure that children’s lives are not ruined due to youthful indiscretion. This reform will let our youth know that such behavior is wrong without labeling them sex offenders for the rest of their lives.”
CNN could not immediately reach Abruzzo for comment Saturday.
Under House Bill 75, teens who receive explicit images won’t be charged if they took reasonable steps to report it, did not solicit the image and did not send it to someone.
A recent Associated Press/MTV poll of Internet behavior found one of three teen and young adult respondents said they’ve taken part in “sexting,” which includes sending sexually charged texts. The survey is part of MTV’s “A Thin Line” campaign, a multi-year effort to stamp out digital abuse.
Seventy-one percent of the survey’s respondents said that “sexting” is a problem for Web users their age.
Ten percent of respondents who said they’d exchanged sexual messages said they’d done so with people they know only online — a steep drop from the 29 percent who said they’d done so in 2009.
“There’s probably a lot of kids who don’t realize how this (sexting) could impact their life,” Karl Bergstrom of Fort Myers told CNN affiliate WINK.
NJ FAIR ~ News 
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