Sex Crimes and Deviants
Defense of sex and deviant crimes is a growing trend in criminal law since new laws pertaining to sex deviancy have emerged. Scandalous revelations among Roman Catholic clergy as well as lay folk vividly humiliated on NBC’s Dateline show, “To Catch A Predator,” have provoked a public outcry that society is suffering a sex-perversion epidemic. The Dateline show caught America’s fascination with the humiliation of adult males seeking sexual gratification from underage females. Based on the show’s ratings one might presume that our neighborhoods harbor numerous convicted sex perverts poised to strike at our children at any moment.
How fascinating was NBC’s “reality” exhibit of pathetic males who responded to an Internet chat-line “manned” by imposters, actual adults posing as under-aged females hungering home alone to meet a grown man for sexual pleasure. These poseurs were members of Perverted Justice, a vigilante group of assorted evangelicals from Texas, copywriters from Wisconsin, and even – according to Rolling Stone magazine – 20-something geeks and gamers involved in the greatest online game they ever played. Via Yahoo!, AOL and MySpace they enticed adult males to a hidden- camera-laden home where a barely pubescent-looking adult, in most cases female, preyed upon the predator by demurely inviting him to wait a few minutes while she coyly carried a basket of laundry and called out that there was some “sweet tea” waiting on the kitchen counter.
After Dateline’s host Chris Hansen walked onto the “set” and asked “What are you doing here?” the men typically cringed, cowered, bolted, and ran in various postures while Chris Hansen repeated his mantra, “Do you know who I am? I am Chris Hansen of Dateline NBC.” As every viewer knows, the men desperately fled the house but, in a theatrical climax, they were tackled, pinned, and cuffed by police officers who had been lying in wait. If convicted, those charged would face attempted sexual assault sentences ranging from probation to ten years in prison as well as being required to register as sex offenders for life. All this without an actual victim!
Recent laws against online predators have become increasingly harsh: Internet solicitation of a minor is now a crime in a majority of states, regardless of whether an actual minor is involved. By this year the country’s convicted sex offenders – including those who never met an actual minor – will be required by the new federal Adam Walsh Act to be listed on a national registry of sex offenders. There, on an easily accessed nationwide map, their photos and home addresses will appear next to sentences, aliases and whether or not a computer was used in their offense.
Twenty-four states, including California, now ban sex offenders from living near all sorts of public places – schools, parks, day-care centers and bus stops – effectively forbidding them to live in most cities. Moreover, some states, for example, California, require some sex offenders to submit to GPS monitoring for the rest of their lives.
Manufactured Crime
Anti-predator sting operations involving decoys outnumber actual crimes involving real victims. The problem began when To Catch A Predator, Dateline estimated that there were 50,000 predators online at any moment - an estimate that was never verified or confirmed by one shred of evidence. But a study conducted by the University of New Hampshire estimated that there were fewer than 2,900 arrests for online sexual offenses against minors in a single year. What is really fascinating is that only 1,152 actual victims – not decoys – were approached by strangers on the Internet; more than half this number was actually cops posing as kids.
This public frenzy about online strangers has diverted attention from the real source of child sex abuse: relatives and acquaintances. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics ninety-three percent of perpetrators of child sexual abuse are known to the child. The fanatical focus on “stranger danger” makes people less suspicious of those they know like relatives, acquaintances, coaches and clergy.
California Sex Offender Management Board
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Assembly Bill 1015 on September 20, 2006 creating the California Sex Offender Management Board. Introduced by California Assembly Members Judy Chu and Todd Spitzer, that bill had passed the California Legislature with nearly unanimous bipartisan support. The Board’s website states that there are 88,000 identified sex offenders (per U.S. Department of Justice, August 2007). But currently the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation supervises only about 10,000 of those 88,000 – and of those 10,000, only 3,200 have been designated as High Risk Sex Offenders (CDCR Housing Summit, March 2007).
The Board’s web site also agrees that, “While it is commonly believed that most sexual assaults are committed by strangers, the research suggests that the overwhelming majority of sex offenders victimize people known to them; approximately 90 percent of child victims know their offenders, as do 80 percent of adult victims [per Kilpatrick, D.G., Edmunds, C.N., & Seymour, A.K. (1992) Rape in America: A Report to the Nation. Arlington, VA: National Victim Center].
Crime in California in 1953
The following article appeared 56 years ago in Time magazine on Monday, March 2, 1953:
When two particularly gruesome sex murders occurred in California in 1949 and 1950, there was a statewide outcry that all sex offenders should be locked up for life, sterilized or even executed. California decided to go slow on new legislation and find out some facts, e.g.: How common are sex crimes? Who commits them? And why? Last week, after three years of study, a team of researchers at the University of California’s Langley Porter Clinic, headed by famed Psychiatrist Karl M. Bowman, turned up some of the answers.
Nobody can estimate how many sex “crimes” are actually committed, the researchers concluded, but in recorded court cases, the investigators could find no evidence of a great wave of sex crime, or that “sex fiends” were everywhere on the prowl. Serious sex offenses made up one-tenth of all the criminal cases tried in the superior courts. The fact finders considered the commoner misdemeanors (such as exhibitionism and peeping) as “socially offensive but non dangerous.”
No Deterrent. It would do no good to enact still harsher punitive laws, the researchers suggested, because the people who are going to commit sex crimes are so emotionally disturbed that they do not count the possible cost. Unhappily, there is no sure way to spot them before they go wrong. But the courts are making more use of the state’s “sex-psychopath law,” which provides psychiatric treatment for convicted offenders. And they rarely repeat their offenses after they get out on parole.
Today: Proposition 83 – Jessica’s Law
On November 21, 2008, a ruling by the Fourth District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana was the first by a California court to find that the residency restrictions in Proposition 83, a November 2006 initiative, are not just public safety measures but also would punish ex- offenders by forcing them out of their homes.
Prop. 83, called Jessica’s Law by its sponsors, imposes “traditional banishment under another name,” the court said.
The United States Constitution forbids laws that retroactively impose criminal penalties or increase punishment for past offenses. The challenge to Prop. 83 before the state Supreme Court argues that the ruling should prevent the state from imposing the residency restrictions on parolees who committed sex crimes before the ballot measure passed.
The state now is applying the 2,000-foot buffer zone requirement to any former sex offender who has been paroled since Prop. 83 passed, even if the parolee committed a sex crime many years earlier and was serving a sentence for an unrelated crime. At least 2,000 parolees fall into that category, and the number is growing by hundreds each month.
“You can’t criminalize conduct after it’s already happened, can’t increase the punishment, because everyone’s entitled to notice of what’s criminal now,” Attorney Galvan said.
State law previously prohibited only convicted child molesters from living within a quarter-mile of a school. Prop. 83 makes most densely populated areas of California off limits to paroled sex criminals, including nearly all of San Francisco.
The state initially sought to apply the residency restrictions to all 90,000 registered sex offenders in California, but federal judges ruled that it did not cover anyone paroled before Prop. 83 passed.
The case pending before the state Supreme Court argues that the limits should be applied only to those who committed crimes against children.
Taking a Stand
Attorneys have a duty to the Constitution of the United States. Standing back and not fighting violations to the Constitution that are to be upheld is a breach of that duty. When individuals take a stand for justice, equality and diversity they are in fact standing for themselves. The point to understand is that one may not ever be in the majority but one will always belong to a minority of some sort – in thought, belief, opinion or expression. Therefore, unless one is prepared to defend the rights of others, their rights will never be secure.
The ancient Greek historian Thucydides puts it succinctly when he was asked when justice will come to Athens and he replied, “Justice will not come to Athens until those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are injured.”
