The father of a 9-year-old girl who was kidnapped, raped and murdered in Florida urged lawmakers in North Carolina - the state of her birth - to approve tougher penalties for child molesters. Mark Lunsford, whose daughter Jessica was born during the two decades he lived in Gaston County, urged support of a bill that would lengthen minimum prison sentences and require child molesters be electronically monitored for life after serving their sentences. “The system has failed me and our children, not just in Florida but across the country,” said Lunsford, who has lobbied for similar laws in about 20 states.
02/26/2010, that is the projected date Hayley’s abuser will leave prison. My stomach turns at the idea of his release.
I’m pretty much in favor of the changes Lunsford is asking for in N.C. I don’t have any faith that the sex offender registry really does enough to protect families. The registry is good to know where these previous offenders are so your child can avoid that house and that the offender has to live away from the immediate zones around children’s areas. However, not all offenders are not registering or updating their registries when they move. I would like to see a more structured monitoring system for the more serious sex offenders.
Prisons aren’t about rehabbing people extensively. I don’t think anyone can really be rehabbed at the same time as living in a very hostile environment - that said, they deserve the hostile environment for their crimes. I just don’t seem them coming out of prison really a changed person.
In N.C., the structured sentencing changes have ensured that despite overcrowding prisoners are not released just due to overcrowding - they will serve at least 85% of their sentence as a given. I would like to see a system that releases sex offenders into a controlled or halfway house setting that can ensure they are going to counseling and are slowly re-entering society.
I don’t want to think about Hayley’s abuser getting out of jail but I have to think ahead. We’ve talked to Victim Services to protect her as much as we can now with blocking his access to this county for our prisons or work crews, getting on the update list for his status, tracking down his prison records and more. We can still file information with the state that will affect the conditions of his post-prison life and I certainly will be doing that.
April 26, 2007 at 10:30 am
So scary!
Keep smilin!
April 26, 2007 at 10:59 am
Our state has a sex offender registry, and through it we learned that a next door neighbor (3 doors down) is a pedophile. Truthfully, though, I am not worried about HIM.
When we bought our house, the registry wasn’t available, and we didn’t know. We used to see him walking around the neighborhood in the evening, talking to people and socializing. Once the registry was published, the guy started hiding in his house. The entire neighborhood knows who he is, what he has done, and is watching him carefully. He knows he is watched, and keeps a very low profile.
The ones I worry about are the offenders who fall through the cracks and “forget” to register.
April 26, 2007 at 12:17 pm
I share your concerns. Indeed, the registry was supposed to be a tool that enabled parents and concerned citizens about the presence of sex offenders in the midst. However, as most parents (such as myself) are very fearful of such individuals, it appears the only possible solution is to ban all registered sex offenders to colonies for the duration of their registration period.
It is obvious. Nobody wants sex offenders to live in their neighborhoods, or even their cities. I’m a parent, and I would fight tooth and nail to prevent sex offenders from living anywhere that children may live, even if their victims were people they knew. It means NOTHING to me; what means EVERYTHING to me is they committed an atrocious crime against children. That’s enough for me.
Unfortunately, these sex offenders have rights. If they are not in prison, they will probably get the ACLU to sue the city and we will have to spend thousands of dollars defending the restrictions.
The ONLY thing, therefore, is to create an amendment to the US Constitution, creating sex offender colonies to restrict where these convicted sex offenders live in the first place. How to do this?
The first thing that needs to be done is to create an outline of such an amendment. I looked at the process for how an amendment is created. Here is the process:
Under Article V, there are two ways to propose amendments to the Constitution and two ways to ratify them.
To propose an amendment
1. Two-thirds of both houses of Congress vote to propose an amendment, or
2. Two-thirds of the state legislatures ask Congress to call a national convention to propose amendments.
To ratify an amendment
1. Three-fourths of the state legislatures approve it, or
2. Ratifying conventions in three-fourths of the states approve it.
I would submit that the state legislature route would probably be more effective, but the congressional method can be tried first. It can effectively be used as a litmus test for voting, i.e., if someone doesn’t want to vote for proposing the amendment in congress, their 2008 opponent can have a field day in saying that the incumbent protects sex offenders at the expense of children’s safety, etc.
Such an amendment would solve many problems. First of all, the registry would not exist in its current form. Parents don’t have to worry where the sex offenders live, as they all would, by law, have to live in the colony. This also eliminates the need for GPS, as the sex offenders would be restricted to the colony in the first place. No worries about convicted child molesters stalking your children’s school or favorite park, or trolling on the Internet.
Next, registrants would constitutionally have to be subjected to non-court ordered search of their premises within the zone. In addition, all their mail and phone calls would constitutionally be authorized to be monitored for illicit activities. Internet usage would also be strictly regulated, with all file storage for every computer actually done at the server-level. In addition, emails would be assigned by the administration, no Instant messaging or accessing MySpace or other children sites allowed, and all keystrokes and sites visited will be recorded 100%. All costs for such usage would be borne out by the offender, incidentally.
All registrants would be required to work, with their paychecks being handled by the administrators. Deductions for medical, rent, all services, and everything else would be done automatically, and any credit the registrant have be used for discretionary income ONLY from the colony store. Also, EVERY registrant will be required to go through treatment appropriate to his crime, and be certified as cured; otherwise, he can be subject to a felony charge and returned to prison.
Now, please keep in mind one thing: The sex offender colony is NOT…repeat…NOT a replacement for tough, appropriately long, non-paroleable sentencing guidelines in the first place! THAT IS PARAMOUNT. The colony would exist because society cannot handle the large amounts of offenders in their neighborhoods, with the inherent terror parents have with the knowledge that offenders are around their children. Therefore, the colony is SPECIFICALLY for offenders to spend their entire registration periods in a constitutionally-approved manner, eliminating the need for registries as they exist now.
Keep in mind, many offenders also are able to leave the registry for certain crimes after a specified amount of time has passed. Therefore, once a registrant’s time period has expired, he can petition the administration to be relieved of the duty to register and live in the SORERA zone. A panel of professionals, law enforcement individuals, and the offender’s victim representatives, will go over the request. If they feel the offender is ready to join society, then he can leave the zone and live anywhere he wants, although he will have to permanently register with law enforcement wherever he goes for the rest of his life. Bear in mind, also, that any registrant who has to register for life will NEVER get the opportunity to leave the zone. Only the most benign of the registrants will ever be allowed to leave.
So there you have it. With a constitutional amendment, we can control where they live, where they work, and how they communicate, with confidence that they won’t have a “relapse” when our own children are in striking distance.
Comments, please.
April 26, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Mr. Reese, aka Steven,
I have to assume you are being over the top to get a response from people. You seem to be posting this same stuff everywhere, some places throwing in some Nancy Grace comments.
We both know this is never going to happen and I don’t know if you are trying to simply being sarcastic to prove a point or you have some axe to grind. Either way, you found your way over here pretty quickly. I think you need to understand where I’m coming from as the parent of an adoptive parent of a child from foster care. 80% of the children in foster care have been sexually exposed.
I have a degree in political science and for the most part, I’m in favor of less government rather than more. I understand the idea of people serving a sentence and having done there time but we as a country do levy post-release standards on people and that is what I’m talking about dealing with in these laws.
As I said in the original post, some of my concern comes from the idea that I don’t think the prisons are offering or even able to really help sex offenders who need the help. Releasing them to a halfway house would enable them to get counseling in a less hostile situation. I hope they get it in prison too but I’m not dense enough to believe that the therapy works while being incarcerated.
I’m not talking about the 17 year old who has consensual sex with a 15 year old. I’m talking about the pedophiles, the people who have commited some very horrible offenses against children.
I’m not an alarmist or having a knee jerk reaction. I’m a parent who has spent years now trying to heal my child’s heart and soul from the abuse she went through. We will go through this again and again as she matures. It will color her life forever.
And for what it is worth, her abuser plead guilty and elocuted to what he did. He got nine years and two months. I don’t have to know where he is every moment of the day but I’d like someone somewhere to be aware if he possible violations the post-release rules.
April 26, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Thank you for your story. My nom de plume regarding my email address notwithstanding, I use either Peter or Steven interchangeably as some accounts will not let me use my real name (Peter), so I use my middle name, Steven, or barring that, my full reese persona. Incidentally, I applaud your research into my activities in other posts, as it shows that you have yourself give this issue some thought as well.
I read your response twice, and frankly I didn’t see where your ideals and my results-oriented solution conflict. We BOTH know that post-incarceration registered sex offenders create a potential problem in society. With your admirable effort to heal your children from his/her horrific experience at the hands of a sex offender, and your extensive research and educational fortitude in understanding the dynamics of foster children and their experiences with sex offenders, I am frankly puzzled at your non-response to my very specific recommendations vis a vis the sex offender colony amendment to the US Constitution.
Specifically, most parents will NEVER tolerate the presence of a sex offender who is listed on the Internet registry in their neighborhood. Whether they live 1,000 feet or 1,000 miles from a school or bus stop is irrelevent; they live near THEIR kids in THEIR neighborhood. So the laws will then become more restrictive as to their presence THERE as well.
As such, I’ve come up with the only Constitutional solution that will satisfy parents and communities, while preventing the ACLU and other legal opponents from “gumming up the works” with what the people REALLY want: total segregation of sex offenders from their children. THAT is why I came up with the sex offender amendment, to provide the CULMINATION of all the laws being proposed and the encroachment of sex offenders upon our neighborhoods.
And YOU call MY efforts as “sarcasm” or “ax-grinding”??
I urge you to poll your own readers without embellishing over anything that I’ve written in my original post. I will wager that the majority of them are in near-100% agreement with my solution. As far as “smaller” government, well, that only should apply to lawful, non-convicted criminals, and CERTAINLY NOT sex offenders.
And yes, I post to every link that I can find. Why not? I’m not “stirring up the pot”…the pot is well stirred. All I am doing is providing a direction to defuse and de-electrify this extremely contentious and volatile issue that, frankly, is America’s greatest threat, other than nuclear terrorism.