We're losing the war on sex offenders, but not the way you think

By Chris Dornin

The whole world reels from not one, but two real-life CSI Miami/NCSI/Without a Trace/CSI New York/NCSI Los Angeles/Criminal Minds/Law and Order episodes. Anthony Sowell is charged with raping and murdering at least 11 women in the poorest part of Cleveland, and authorities suspect he committed the unsolved and eerily similar Strawberry murders of destitute women in East Cleveland when he lived there. Those horrific crimes stopped when he went back to prison for a few years.

The news comes too soon after lurid revelations about Phillip Garrido and his wife Nancy in Antioch, California, another bad neighborhood. The husband is charged with fathering two children by Jaycee Dugard, who was 11 years old when he allegedly abducted her. His wife is charged with helping him hide Jaycee and her children for two decades in a makeshift backyard minimum security prison. Should juries find them guilty, the Garridos and Sowell deserve the worst punishments.

But if recent history holds true, lawmakers in both states will file draconian legislation named for the two suspects or for their victims. Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner, D-Cleveland, has already filed a bill in response to the Sowell case. It boosts supervision of level III sex offenders like Sowell without reducing the police workload elsewhere. This group of offenders would register 12 times a year, not quarterly. Authorities would personally verify their addresses four times a year and notify the community about them at least once a year in addition to the Internet sex offender listings.

The coming prosecutions and the legislative debates in Columbus, Sacramento and Washington will further inflame a national hysteria that dwarfs what happened in Salem, Massachusetts 317 years ago. I grieve to see my country poised to take its revenge on all registered sex offenders for the atrocities of the worst few.

But that's how sex offender laws happen. They are part of a national mourning process. They are memorials to victims. The real question is how two people on the sex offender Internet registry for many years came so close to discovery so many times committing new crimes. Police received complaints and tips about both men and never duly followed up. There's plenty of blaming afoot, and there should be.

The Ohio media are blasting the Cleveland police for essentially ignoring reports of violent crimes against poor or drug addicted women. The Cleveland Plain Dealer has pieced together a time line of apparent police blunders.

12/8/08: A bleeding woman tells police Sowell tried to rape her at his home. Police arrest him on his third floor, but later drop the charges because the woman refuses further contact with detectives.
9/22/09: Deputies make a surprise visit to Sowell's house to verify his address, but never go inside. Hours later he allegedly chokes and rapes a woman in his home. She escapes and goes to the police. For weeks detectives are unable to find the victim for follow-up meetings.
10/20/09: A woman falls from Sowell's second floor window and neighbors call an ambulance. Sowell tells the EMTs the two were doing drugs. On a report from medical personnel, police go to Sowell's home, but he isn't there. They do not enter. The woman refuses to talk to investigators, and the cops drop the case.
10/27/09: The woman assaulted 9/22/09 contacts and meets with police.
10/28/09: Police obtain an arrest warrant.
10/29/09: Police find Sowell away from his house, enter the premises, and discover the first two of many rotting corpses inside.

Amid all these missed chances to catch Sowell, the whole neighborhood reeked from the flesh of 10 decaying bodies inside his home, not counting the skull in his refrigerator. The stink must have been horrific inside his lair.

The inspector general for California issued a similar damning report in November on the Garrido case. Authorities failed to properly classify and supervise Garrido, gave the public a false sense of security about the global positioning device he wore, should have caught him violating parole many times, and never asked about the 12-year-old girl in his home during a parole inspection. She was Garrido's daughter by Dugard.

One reason for these lapses, maybe the key reason, is the sheer size of the Internet sex offender registry. A national suspect list with nearly 700,000 names, most of them available on line, is almost useless to law enforcement and parents. We assume authorities are closely watching anyone so dangerous they have made it into the cyberspace foot stocks. That is a myth.

Ohio is the first state to comply with the federal Adam Walsh Act against sex offenders. Not only do they register on the Internet, but the state bans them from living within a thousand feet of schools, daycare centers and preschool programs. Those precautions did nothing to save Sowell's victims, if he is found guilty. He wasn't going after children, so far as we know.

The Ohio Parole Department guarded kids this Halloween from all the latter-day registered witches on the Internet like Sowell. So did California, Texas, Florida and many other states. Hundreds of sex offenders sat out the holiday at district offices in Dayton, Cincinnati and Columbus. The rest stayed home with the lights off while officers made compliance checks.

There's a huge problem with these efforts to control the very few, very worst sex offenders. The statutes are so harsh on everyone else they face double punishment for a past crime or pre-emptive punishment for a future crime. Sex offenders are a widely diverse group of scapegoats for something huge that scares us. Maybe it's the economy or the war on terror or the next act of mass destruction like the fall of the World Trade Towers or all the above. We need to see in every sex offender a Jeffrey Dahmer, an Anthony Sowell, a Phillip Garrido, an Osama bin Laden.

The politicians guard a secret that scares me more than these villains. The Al-Qaida training camp we call the sex offender registry includes flashers and teenage statutory rapists; peeping Toms and roadside relievers; convicted hookers and Johns; possibly innocent husbands accused during traumatic divorces; streakers and frat party drunks who took a maybe no for a yes; and distraught fathers or brothers with just a single victim who was a family member.

The basketball coach who acts out his crush on his ninth grade point guard makes the hit list. So does the cheerleader caught sexting photos of herself to underage schoolmates. The roster even includes a small percentage of stereotypical, mean-stranger, serial pedophiles. One of them could keep rotting corpses in his house. Nobody would find the source. The dangerous repeat criminals on the registry look just like the large majority of contrite and well punished human beings who will never have another victim.

Attorney Margie Slagle of the Ohio Justice and Policy Center, a nonprofit law firm, blames the Cleveland horror in part on the state's recent compliance with the Adam Walsh Act. Before it took effect, experts evaluated each offender and placed only the worst recidivism risks on the public registry. The federal law assigns offenders instead to three risk tiers based entirely on their categories of crimes, a poor indicator of dangerousness. Many level one offenders have pled down from more serious crimes. Many level three offenders have multiple convictions for a single criminal course of conduct against one victim.

The Ohio registry change forced authorities to verify the addresses of thousands of folks who never registered in the past. Many others now register four times a year instead of once. The spike in workload strains Ohio law enforcement departments amid widespread cuts in public funding.

Slagle's office worked with the Ohio Public Defender and the Civil Liberties Union on a writ to block the change in the registry. The Supreme Court refused to hear this direct appeal in 2007 and required a lower court ruling first. The parties in that eventual test case, State v. Bodyke, held Supreme Court oral arguments in early November.

Slagle's firm helped an alliance of victim advocacy agencies intervene on behalf of Christian Bodyke and other defendants. The amicus briefs call the change in registry retroactive and punitive, and say its very size makes it useless. Thousands of low-risk offenders would disappear from the registry if Bodyke wins.

"One of the three Supreme Court judges mentioned the Sowell case to suggest the registry is not working," Slagle said. "Under the old law resources were targeted to the most dangerous people, and the others could rehabilitate. What happened in Cleveland doesn't surprise me in the least. The police are so busy knocking on doors they're not doing the work of protecting the public. And that's a shame."

She warned that no law can prevent people like Garrido and Sowell from committing crimes. The registries divert scarce enforcement resources because the police waste so much effort on low-risk offenders.
"All that money and time could be used for patrols and investigations," Slagle said, "perhaps resulting in discovering crimes sooner."

One of the interveners on behalf of Bodyke is the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center, a nonprofit child protection agency. Patty Wetterling lost her son Jacob two decades ago. A masked gunman kidnapped him, and the boy's body was never found. Lawmakers named the first federal sex offender registry law for Jacob. At first it created a non-public roster of potential suspects to help police solve future kidnappings. Today after several iterations it has morphed into a public shaming gallery. Patty Wetterling opposes making the names public, because the stigma drives sex offenders underground, makes them unemployed, destabilizes them and renders them more dangerous.

In June 2008 she gave an interview to Richard Wright, author of Sex Offender Laws: Failed Policies, New Directions. She told him she never wanted a statute named for her son.
"When these guys are released from prison," she told Wright, "we want them to succeed. That's the goal. Then you have no more victims. All of these laws they've been passing make sure that they're not going to succeed. They don't have a place to live; they can't get work. Everybody knows of their horrible crime and they've been vilified."

If she's correct, we are all losing the war on sex offenders, and the collateral damage is only beginning. I came to that oddball view as a New Hampshire Statehouse reporter watching sex offender laws take shape. I'm also a religious volunteer into New Hampshire Prison and a former correctional counselor there.

The Internet registry can summon vigilantes. They don't wear white hoods yet, but Rico M. Rutherford, 32, was gunned down in Cincinnati in September, three months after completing six years in prison for sexual contact with a child.

Another sex offender, John Stouffer, 25, was stabbed in his bed in Newark, Ohio, in August. He was on the registry for propositioning a child. Neither man had actually penetrated his victim if that counts for anything, and it should. Newark Detective Steve Vanoy told me Stouffer's alleged killer has been indicted along with four accomplices. The police officer declined to say if Stouffer died because he was a sex offender, but all five defendants knew he was one.

Sara Andrews, the Ohio parole director, said her department is mindful of child safety on Halloween. Her officers tell parolees that somebody will be out there checking on them.
"It's a common-sense approach," she told me. "Sex offender registration and monitoring make people feel confident. It's also for the offender's benefit. They can't be accused of being out chasing kids."

A research article this summer, "How Safe Are Trick-or-Treaters?: An Analysis of Child Sex Crimes Rates on Halloween," showed no holiday spike in child molestations, and only one in 500 crimes that night is a molestation.

Senator Joseph McCarthy led a similar campaign to root out closeted Commies in the 1950s. Decades later authorities rounded up accused daycare mass molesters and satanic ritual child abusers, jailing dozens of innocent people in retrospect. Twenty-one innocent witches accused mostly by children died in Salem in 1692, 20 by hanging and one by crushing him under boulders.

Ohio almost made sex offenders use psychedelic green license plates. The existing laws are tough enough. Across the country, they condemn roughly 700,000 registered Americans to banishment, joblessness, divorce, humiliation, emotional breakdown and the whims of the posse. We can hurt them better, of course. But the enemy is not a wolf stalking the playground. We are that enemy, and here's how.

A 2006 report to the Ohio Sentencing Commission said 93 percent of child sexual assault victims knew their perpetrators well, over half were related to their victim, and 93 percent had never been arrested for a previous sex crime. That means the Internet sex offender registry identifies one of the next 10 perpetrators. The rest will strike, maybe from the child's own home, like a 747 into a skyscraper.

An Ohio corrections study in 1989 said 8 percent of sex offenders committed a new sex crime within a decade. The recidivism rate for incest was 7.4 percent. That news belies the myth that all sex offenders are incorrigible. A statewide Ohio sex offender intake report for 1992 said 2.2 percent of child molesters were strangers to their victims, and 89 percent of perpetrators had never been convicted before.

A report by the U.S. Justice Department in 2004 tracked 9,691 sex offenders for three years after release. The cumulative recidivism rate for new sex crimes was 3.5 percent. It was 2.2 percent for child molesters. A report this spring by the Indiana Corrections Department said sex offenders released in 2005 have compiled a 1.05 percent recidivism rate over four years.

What if Indiana is onto something important? It provides intensive treatment in prison and on the outside. Sex offenders get a fair second chance after they serve their time. That's a lot cheaper than jailing them until death behind razor wire or in their own living rooms. It also dignifies a democratic society.

Chris Dornin, a retired journalist, can be reached at cldornin@aol.com.