surprised by WAR: "it takes a moment to digest that such a group exists"

The Daily News (TDN.com) out of Longview WA ran an opinion piece expressing shock at an email they received in response to an earlier story about a vigilante "sex abuse sting." After telling the reader,

Let’s be clear, The Daily News does not support vigilantism, we think local law enforcement does a great job and we should stay out of their way 

...TDN goes on to explain which vigilante operations they do support.

There have been all types of vigilantes throughout history. Some romanticized in fiction like Robin Hood, Superman and Batman. And then there are groups and individuals like the Guardian Angels and John Walsh.

No one can dispute the amazing work of people like John Walsh from his television program “America’s Most Wanted” and we aren’t going to start. Nor are we going to weigh in on the pros and cons of what Curtis Hart did this past week.

True to part of their word, they do not weigh in on the cons of what Curtis Hart did.

What we are concerned about is what happened after we ran the stories.

We received an email from a group called WAR, Women Against Registry.

And then...the belly laugh:

It takes a moment to digest that such a group exists, a group that defends the privacy of sex offenders and is against a national registry.

It takes a moment. Really? A whole moment??

Their entire organization is about educating the public as to how the sex offender suffers after they have been convicted of a crime of a sexual nature and stopping laws that are put in place to protect society from sex offenders. On the homepage of their website, the group tag line is “Fighting the Destruction of Families.” 

We found this quote on the brochure emailed to us, “We, the members of WAR, feel that it is time to stop the cruelty. It is time to reform the registry for the good of the over three million family members of registered sex offenders who live under the invisible punishments of the registry every day.” 

So it appears, at first glance that this group is claiming that it’s the registration of the sex offender that’s harming the offender’s family, not the act they are found guilty of committing.

WAR is also against the reauthorization of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act.  

Once they loosened their grasp on their pearls, it seems they did read the email from WAR and absorbed what it said. Until...

In the midst of a re-telling of the Adam Walsh story, they lose all sense of perspective. After detailing the gruesome crime:

The details of the crime are disturbing, yet sadly, not uncommon.

Not uncommon? After discussing the decapitation of a child, they pronounce it not uncommon.

No wonder they are shocked that anyone could oppose the registry! They are completely disconnected from reality.

Women Against Registry are opposed to the Adam Walsh Act. They claim this law harms the offender and their families because they might not be able to keep or find a job, they are threatened by members of the general public, the offenders suffer from depression, anxiety and are teased.

 Teased. Yes, sex offenders are teased. They are also murdered right there in Washington state.

We don’t agree with the public harming, harassing, assaulting, either verbally or physically.

They don't agree with tormenting sex offenders in the same way TDN "does not support vigilantism."

But what about the victim? What about the family of the victims?

If TDN is concerned about the family of the victim, have they considered what it must feel like for the family to hear details of the child's death over and over again?

Is society better served by the public knowing where these predators are living? [My emphasis.]

Now, there's a question a good journalist would love to dig into. Is society better served knowing where these predators are living? Much research has been done on this question, leaving us to wonder which studies will be cited to answer it. Their answer:

We thinks [sic] so and, as parents, we appreciate these laws.

Oh, TDN! You think so?

If that's the best they can do to answer a question easily answered with facts, then it is time for WAR to fire off another email.

Maybe this time TDN will absorb all of what WAR says.

You think so?

Law and Order: SVU surprises me

I wrote a piece for the National RSOL (Reform Sex Offender Laws) website: 

A friend asked me to watch this week’s episode of Law and Order SVU, a show I stopped watching years ago because its enjoyment of perversion–what awful crimes can we detail for our audience this week?–was disturbing. My friend told me this episode, “Collateral Damages” (season 17, episode 15), was about child pornography, so I expected the show to get the details all wrong. Television so often does. 

Stop reading now if you do not want spoilers. 

The episode begins with an undercover operation in which the cops set up a popular local celebrity so that he will commit a sex crime against an undercover cop posing as a girl “almost 16 years old.” In a bare few minutes, the celebrity meets the “teen,” tells her she is a bombshell, gives her alcohol, convinces her to pose topless for him, photographs her, and begins to unbuckle his belt. That’s when the cops move in to arrest him for producing child pornography and for attempted rape of a child. 

I rolled my eyes and settled in for more simplistic nonsense. Then the show gets interesting. 

The celebrity makes a deal to help the cops nail a “pedophile ring” in exchange for a lighter sentence. (The word “pedophile” is tossed around in the show in a facile way that makes it obvious the writers did not bother checking the definition.) He provides information that helps the cops identify IP addresses, and they move in to arrest several men. In a twist, one of the members of the pedophile ring turns out to be one of their own, the Deputy Commissioner no one likes. 

The Deputy Commissioner’s wife, though, is well-liked, and her work as a children’s advocate attorney is respected. She and her husband have two children. 

We watch as their home fills up with cops. We watch the cops take the husband and father away. We watch the confusion of the wife and kids. We watch as they are told to go to a hotel so the cops can search the apartment. 

I wasn’t rolling my eyes anymore. My heart was pounding. I remember this. 

I remember the chaos, the anger, the fear, the confusion. 

Law and Order gets the bad guy, as usual, but this episode, too close to real life, is not neatly wrapped up. 

To protect the children from the media firestorm, they are sent to live with grandparents. The wife is told to take leave of absence from her job. She moves to a hotel to avoid the press. 

The husband tries to kill himself. The wife wonders how she could have missed seeing that her husband was sick. 

The celebrity who actually did sexually assault kids? He will serve about six months. 

The Deputy Commissioner heads to prison for four years as part of a plea deal that includes heavy duty treatment and registration. His anguish and shame and self-disgust is obvious. This time it is clear that he, while disliked by the cops and while guilty of looking at child porn, is also a beloved father and husband. 

A good man whose family will suffer because of what he did. And his family is my family: collateral damage.

When TV shows begin to show the inequities in the criminal justice system and the effect on the families involved, change is on the way.

NY registry is 20 years old; offenders leaving the list

What can we learn from what is happening in New York state? The headline says,"Thousands of NY state sex offenders due to disappear from public registry".

State law requiring Level 1 offenders to report their whereabouts to the registy for a 20-year period was up Jan. 1, News 12 Long Island reports. The law took effect in 1996.

What a relief for those thousands of offenders and their families!

Laura Ahearn of the Long Island advocacy group Parents of Megan’s Law told the station about 60 to 70 Level 1 sex offenders in Nassau and Suffolk alone will come off the registry this year.

“We have a stack of Level 1 offenders that have committed serious offenses against young children — as young as 2 years old — and they are going to be dropping off that registry,” Ahearn told CBS New York. 

The Level 1 designation can include child molestation, rape in the first degree and sodomy, according to the station.

Serious crimes, certainly. Those serious crimes landed those thousands of offenders on the registry for 20 years on top of any sentence they were given by the court.

If only Laura Ahern had taken this letter to heart.

More from FoxNews:

Long Island Republican Dean Murray has introduced a bill in the Assembly that would extend the 20-year requirement to 30 years.

Is Assemblyman Murray perhaps...running for re-election? Why, yes. Yes, he is. At the link:

Dean believes in common sense, bi-partisan solutions to cut job-killing taxes to make it easier for Long Islanders to live, work and raise their families.

For someone who wants to make it easier for Long Islanders to live, work and raise their families, he is introducing a bill that will do the opposite for thousands. An Assemblyman represents everyone in his district, including any registered citizens and their families.

Why should those thousands of offenders get another ten years on the registry? Have a large number of those thousands committed new sex crimes? Statistically,we know that is highly unlikely.

That could explain why the Assemblyman makes no mention of those new sex crimes.

Congratulations to those in New York who no longer need to worry about registration.

failure-to-register charges draw excessive punishment

A man with one leg was assigned an upper bunk; he injured himself getting off the upper bunk and after the ACLU sued, the sheriff's department owes the man $40,000. Simple enough.

In the second paragraph, the article tells us that the man is a registered sex offender. What sex crime did he commit to end up in jail?

[The man] was incarcerated at the time of his alleged injury for failing to register as a convicted sex offender. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years in the Indiana Department of Correction, with an earliest possible release date of September.

 Six years for failure to register. Not a fine, not a week or a month in jail: six years.

But he was arrested again in November for failure to register, and he was sentenced to serve the remainder of his probation in the DOC.

[The man], 30, was 15 years old in 2000 when he was adjudicated as a delinquent child for criminal sexual abuse in Macon County, Illinois, according to Tippecanoe Superior Court 1 records.

 Ah. His sex offense--his only conviction for a sex offense--was 15 years ago.

He was ordered to register as a sex offender for 10 years but failed to do so in 2006, 2009 and 2013, court records state.

He was sentenced to prison for each conviction, and his decade on the sex offender registry started over each time he was released. [My emphasis.]

In and out of prison for 15 years. Half  his life. The "crime" that sent him back to prison three times
was failure to register. Without the registry, this man would have lived a crime-free life after his initial offense of criminal sexual abuse.

What is criminal sexual abuse?

A 2014 Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (JJIE) article explains.

Illinois uses four broad categories to describe youth sexual offenses, three of which require juveniles to register as sex offenders for life. Only one charge (criminal sexual abuse, which usually refers to touching or fondling) garners a registration of 10 years.

Criminal sexual abuse carries the least punishiment of the four categories and yet this man is still paying for his misdeeds 15 years later.

Some would look at him and wonder why he hasn't learned his lesson yet. Register and get it over with!

Others would look at him and wonder why Illinois hasn't learned its lesson yet. Convictions for failure to register draw excessive punishment.

how it feels to register

How does it feel to have to register? Sosen.org carries a piece written by a registrant and he includes registration stories from other people. 

The writer tells us what it is like to register every three months:

The last week before I must register my family notices that I am irritable and tend to snap at them a lot.   I lose interest in most everything and do not eat very much.  I look at the date as many as twenty times a day.  I can’t be late.  I get sick often and I don’t sleep. Depression set in and I find it hard to concentrate.

About two days before I have to register I start playing the what if game.  What if the law has changed and I didn’t know it?  What if they change it to a strict 90 days and not the three month calendar date?  What if they arrest me for something I don’t know about?

Is he paranoid? Not a bit. Laws change and often registrants are not notified of the changes.

The same scenario plays out every time.  I take my wife into my office.  I make sure she has all my internet passwords and accounts.  I make sure she has our lawyer’s phone number close at hand.

Four times a year, he prepares to leave his family. Just in case.

The registration routine varies. Every jurisdiction does things a little differently. This man goes to an office where he has to go into the jail to register.

While the jailer retrieves my paperwork I look around the room.  Concrete block walls, brown in color.  It is cool around 65 degrees.  There are three holding cells behind me and a shower in the open [cell] to my left.  On more than one occasion I have been there when a prisoner was stripped and showered by force, once it was a woman.  I felt so badly for her.  She cried as they removed [her clothes,] showered her and threw her into a holding cell.  The jailers, one man and two women laughed and made comments about her body.  I was sickened by it and ask myself, Who are the sex offenders?

I know a man who, when registering for the first time, was asked to describe the child porn he downloaded. The officer asked, what race were the girls in the videos? None of those details were needed for the registration record; the officers entertained themselves by humiliating the man in front of his wife. So, yes, one does wonder who the creeps really are.

The writer tells the stories of other people who register or have a family member who does.

A mother says:

Every 90 days when my child is forced to register as a high risk, violent predator, for consensual sex at age 16, I feel a fire burn through my veins at how callously his life has been destroyed not only by the ignorance of the politicians but the citizens of this country who are under the myth that registries protect children. As a mother, parent and citizen I realize I have a responsibility to educate others with the truth on these laws and find ways to truly prevent child sexual abuse by using facts, statistics and education and treatment.

States that adopted the Adam Walsh Act assign tiers based on the crimes. Everyone convicted of this crime belongs to this tier; the tier assignments are automatic. No one looks at each registrant to decide if he or she presents a risk to the community. Lives of registrants and their families are profoundly affected, and unfairly affected, by that automatic tier assignment.

A man says:

It feels like I have no rights, my country is waging war against me and my family, and nothing I have done in 23 years counts for anything. 

A woman writes about her husband:

As he gets older, he slips further and further away from feeling like he’ll ever find any kind of redemption on this earth.  He’s also distanced himself more and more from his family because they’ve given him little opportunity for redemption.  It’s very difficult to watch on a daily basis.

Registry laws do not offer redemption; instead the registry keeps them from finding it in the community. When someone is given the label that generates fear and disgust from the community, how is he ever to live down his past?

The rest of us get to move beyond the mistakes we made, big and small. For registrants, the country is waging war against them, passing laws willy-nilly, with no regard to the effect on the families of registrants...and no regard for the fact that those laws protect no one.

No one except politicians. When you vote for a candidate because he or she promises to keep your children safe, you aren't protecting children, you are protecting the politician's job.

Abolish the registry.

in the interests of justice, a 5-day child porn sentence

In Brooklyn, a man plead guilty to possession of child porn. Federal guidelines recommended a 6.5 to 8 year prison sentence. The judge sentenced him to five days.

Five days.

U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein wrote a 98-page decision explaining why he bypassed the guidelines and chose not to put the man in prison for possessing two dozen photos and videos — some showing men sexually assaulting girls as young as 3 years old, according to court papers.

 Ninety-eight pages! This judge wants to be understood.

"Removing R.V. from his family will not further the interests of justice," Weinstein wrote, using the defendant's initials. 

Not the interests of retribution or the interests of disgust and fear, but the interests of justice.

"It will cause serious harm to his young children by depriving them of a loving father and role model and will strip R.V. of the opportunity to heal through continued sustained treatment and the support of his close family."

The judge recognizes something important: the defendant's five children would be at risk if their father went to prison, he would not get needed treatment in prison, and the man is not a danger to society.

The existing guidelines, Weinstein wrote, do not "adequately balance the need to protect the public, and juveniles in particular, against the need to avoid excessive punishment."

Protecting juveniles includes the defendant's kids as well as kids who sext. Kids who sext, as foolish as they might be, should not be considered producers of child pornography nor do they deserve the long sentences called for in the guidelines.

...Weinstein thought [6.5 to 8 years] was too much time for an offender who did not make, swap or sell child porn or try to abuse children. He said the five days the man served before making bail, plus seven years of court supervision and a fine, were punishment enough.

Seven years of court supervision may not be prison but it is not a light sentence by any means.

The judge noted that the man was undergoing sex offender treatment and was deemed unlikely to relapse and that a psychiatrist testified he was not a danger to his own or other children. He also noted that the Internet has made child pornography accessible to a much wider group of Americans who might not otherwise have been exposed to it.

More and more people seek out pornography because it is so easily--and so privately!--available on the Internet. Mandatory reporting laws make certain that those who want help to stop looking at child porn have no sure way to get help without being turned in to law enforcement.

Those who favor tougher sentences point out that while many consumers of child pornography may not never [sic] lay a hand on a child, some do. And all, they say, play a role in a system that promotes the abuse of children.

Yes, some do. Why not punish them for what they did instead of punishing all child porn downloaders as if they did?

"The viewing has a market-creation effect," Cassel said. "It ends up leading inexorably to the rape of children."

Again, those who rape anyone, adult or child, ought to be punished for rape. Someone who commissions a sexual assault against anyone, adult or child, should be punished.

Those who look at a video of a crime should not be punished for a crime already committed by someone else or for a crime yet to be committed by someone else.

Jennifer Freeman, an attorney who represents child-porn victims in efforts to obtain restitution, called Weinstein's opinion "a diatribe" and said he was using the particulars of one case to indict the entire sentencing structure.

The entire sentencing structure is built around the idea that every child porn case is the same and every child porn viewer is the same. The particulars of each case ought to matter.

Because those who create vile child porn are so difficult to find and prosecute, the criminal justice system comes down hardest on those who are easiest to find.

Punishment by proxy.

Judge Weinstein has long opposed the lengthy sentences recommended for child porn offenses.

lessons from Waco biker shootout: dubious behavior by authorities crushes families

The Dallas Observer carries an interview with John Wilson who was at the Waco Twin Peaks restaurant May 17, 2015, when all hell broke loose and nine men were killed in a shootout. Reports say 177 people were arrested that day; 171 were charged with organized crime activity, and 106 were indicted for murder. 

That's a lot of paperwork.

The interview includes some interesting and infuriating details--the cops refused to give aid to bikers who were dying of gunshot wounds, and refused to let anyone else care for them, either--but some of his observations apply to more than the Waco biker gunfight.

Asked if the prosecutor had information on each of the 106 people indicted on murder charges, Wilson says:

No. No — that’s why the grand jury indicted 106 people in a day. They obviously didn’t review 106 cases. The DA says, “Here’s a list, and this is what we allege they do, and indict ‘em for these murders.” And one of the guys — shows you how much the grand jury looked at this case — there were nine people killed out there; they had 10 people listed. They had a guy that wasn’t even out there shot listed as one of the killed, yet they were able to indict 106 people for that person who wasn’t even shot there. A completely different person. That shows you how much burden of proof there is for the grand jury — how little the grand jury looks at anything … The grand jury indictments are a complete joke. They don’t mean anything. All it does is let the DA go to the next step, where he’ll sit there and try to make plea bargains with people so they can’t sue him for false arrest. If they plead anything, they had reason to arrest you. I did nothing illegal. As far as I know, I’ve seen no evidence that they have saying that I did. If they come up with something, it’s wrong, because I didn’t. [My emphasis.]

It is worth remembering that prosecutors have powerful motivations to push defendants to take a plea agreement; protecting the government from false arrest accusations is only one more.

The interviewer asks how the aftermath affects families and Wilson's answer is all too familiar:

Well, you know, most of ‘em weren’t self-employed. Most of them not only have that to deal with, but they lost their jobs. Some of them have lost their homes. Some of them have lost custody of their children. Then go try to find a job when you’re under indictment for killing 10 people. [Chuckles.] It’s had a terrible effect on them. I can’t go out and contact these guys and reach out to them and stuff, but I can assure you there are families being crushed over this. You have 177 families, not individuals, that were affected by this. There are children who will not go to college now because of this. And their parents, in 90 percent of the cases, had nothing to do with the violence or anything wrong. And these children are being punished. These wives are being punished. And this is gonna resonate for generations …

Heartbreakingly familiar.

Over 100 were indicted for murder before a proper investigation was completed and without serious consideration by the grand jury. 

And it’s all being done just so that the local DA can save face for handling this the wrong way. It’s a tragic thing. I’m not saying there aren’t people who should be in trouble. There probably is. But it’s hard for me to believe that [McLennan County District Attorney] Abel Reyna didn’t wake up in the middle of the night and think, 'Dang, I wish I’d have done this thing differently.' Because now if he drops charges on everybody, then he’s gonna face a storm of civil suits. They’ve got to make this thing stay alive long enough to try to get people to plea. [My emphasis.]

Again, the need to get defendants to take a plea agreement. If defendants take plea agreements, there are no trials, no need for the prosecution to prove their cases.

It's a sweet deal for the prosecution but families are being crushed.

Conor Friedersdorf has a piece in The Atlantic about the Waco biker gunfight in which he says it seems likely that two to four of the dead bikers were killed by rounds fired by police. Friedersdorf is appalled by the way the cases have been handled.

[Prosecutors] are entrusted with charging murders in a state with the death penalty. Their due diligence is sufficiently inadequate that individuals totally innocent of murdering William Anderson––and known to be innocent of that by everyone––still find themselves on the wrong end of an indictment for that crime. And an indignant district attorney calls that “a minor error”! 

Dubious behavior by the Waco authorities hardly ends there. From the start, they’ve actively suppressed evidence, making it impossible for the public to know how many of the nine dead bikers were shot by other bikers and how many were shot by police. In September, I noted an Associated Press report that the gunfire that day “included rounds fired by police that hit bikers, though it isn't clear whether those rifle shots caused any of the fatalities.”

Dubious behavior by authorities? Hardly a surprise to anyone who has been through the criminal justice system.