Ohio sex offender law not retroactive, justices rule

If there's one legal issue that may trump sex offender hysteria, it's the rights of property owners. So, what happens when those two issues collide head-on, as in the case of retroactive residency restrictions against property-owning sex offenders?

That's what the Ohio Supreme Court tackled today, in the case of Hyle v. Porter.

Appellant Gerry Porter Jr. and his wife bought their home in Cincinnati in 1991. Shortly thereafter, Porter was convicted of two sex offenses (sexual imposition and sexual battery). Some years later, in 2003, the state legislature passed its law forbidding convicted sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school. The city attorney ordered Porter out of his home. A trial court approved the order, and an appellate court agreed.

With one justice dissenting, the state Supreme Court held today that the residency law is not retroactive because its text does not specifically say that it is. The justices thereby sidestepped the more sticky issue of whether such a law, if expressly made retroactive by the legislature, would violate the Ohio Constitution's prohibition against retroactive laws that infringe on an individual's substantive rights, such as property rights.

Commenting on today's decision, the law profs over at Sentencing Law & Policy note that the Court "essentially kicked this hot-potato issue over to the Ohio state legislature. It will be VERY interesting to see how the Ohio legislature responds, especially since the defendant here is asserting property rights that can often change the usual political dynamics that surround crime and punishment debates."

The full opinion is here; a summary is here. The Sex Crimes blog has additional commentary.

"I've always been crazy . . .

. . . but it's kept me from going insane"

Those Waylon Jennings lyrics echoed in my head upon seeing today's article in the New York Times differentiating craziness from legal insanity.

The article, "Actions Considered Insane Often Don't Meet the Standards of New York's Legal System," highlights the case of David Tarloff, a chronic schizophrenic awaiting trial in the slashing death of a Manhattan therapist. But it is relevant across the board to the insanity defense, which is widely misunderstood by the general public and even many in the mental health professions.

The defense, which varies by jurisdiction but generally requires that the defendant did not know the difference between right and wrong, is rarely employed and is even more rarely successful.

As Ronald Kuby, a criminal defense lawyer, put it in the article, "You can be extremely crazy without being legally insane. You can hear voices, you can operate under intermittent delusions, you can see rabbits in the road that aren't there and still be legally sane."

Another public misconception is that successful use of the insanity defense allows people to "get off" for the crime. In reality, most insanity acquittees are sent to locked state hospitals that look very much like prisons. They often spend more time locked up than if they had been convicted of their crime.

The New York Times article is temporarily available here. A previous blog post of mine on high-profile insanity cases is here. Wikipedia has more information on the insanity defense.

More research debunking Internet predator myth

American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the 150,000-strong American Psychological Association, is tackling the hysteria surrounding sexual predation on the Internet.

This week's issue highlights new research showing that the risk to children - especially young children - of surfing online is greatly exaggerated. Those adults who do interact sexually with minors online generally target adolescents who are confused about their sexuality and interested in sex. In general, the adults are frank with the teens about both their own age and their sexual intentions.

In other words, most adult-child sexual encounters initiated online are consensual interactions and are illegal solely due to the minor's age. Youths with histories of sexual abuse, concerns about their sexual orientation, and patterns of risk-taking are especially vulnerable.

The data come from national surveys of children ages 10 to 17 augmented by hundreds of interviews with Internet sex crimes investigators.

The latest findings echo research presented last year by a panel of leading experts to the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus. See my blog post of June 27, 2007; that research is also available online (here), as is a video of the panel's presentation.

"There's been some overreaction to the new technology, especially when it comes to the danger that strangers represent," said lead researcher Janis Wolak, a sociologist at the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

The full article, "Online 'Predators' and Their Victims," is available here. An APA press release summarizing the research is here. More information on the research project is available at the Crimes against Children Research Center website.

Houston's embattled DA finally steps down

Allegations of racism in prosecutions

If Houston was a state, it would rank second only to the rest of Texas in the number of executions carried out in the past three decades. And behind this unprecedented juggernaut stands one man - Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal.

Rosenthal resigned from office Friday amid a high-profile scandal involving the release of dozens of pornographic, racist and political e-mails on his office computer.

Of potential interest to my readers, the scandal almost coincidentally brought out allegations of racism in the prosecution of crimes: Black potential jurors were allegedly struck because they were perceived as soft on crime; code names for blacks were bandied about in e-mails, and black leaders believed that prosecutors worked to punish blacks more harshly than whites.

The Houston Chronicle has the complete story, along with a timeline of events and links to other coverage. For more on capital punishment, including in Harris County, check out the amazing set of links at the prosecutor’s office of Clark County, Illinois.

Looking everywhere but straight ahead

The Kazmierczak school rampage and toxic culture

Pundits commenting on yesterday's Northern Illinois University shooting are doing the usual – feverishly searching everywhere but at the immediate environment for the causes. Was it a "copycat" crime or was Steven Kazmierczak mentally ill? Next, we'll likely hear about gun control, Hollywood movies, the Internet, and video games. (Perhaps it's the pundits who are the real copycats!)

It's hard to vilify Kazmierczak. He wasn't a neo-Nazi or a Trenchcoat Mafioso. As his photo hints at, he was a thoughtful, studious, respectful, and award-winning young man.

Coincidentally, I just today finishing reading expatriate journalist Mark Ames' masterful analyses of such rampages, "Going Postal." Rather than blaming all of the usual external and individual suspects, Ames points straight at the institutional environments in which these crimes occur. The killings are doomed rebellions by normal people stressed and bullied until they break, he argues.

Yesterday's case is unusual in that we have a more direct document we can examine – a scholarly article co-authored by the killer himself. Kazmierczak was, after all, a would-be scholar with interests in corrections, political violence, and peace and social justice.

The prophetic 2006 article, "Self-Injury in Correctional Settings: 'Pathology' of Prisons or of Prisoners," strikingly parallels Ames' thesis.

"When conditions of existence become overwhelming, people may either acquiesce or resist," wrote Kazmierczak and colleagues. "Rather than see SIB (self-injurious behavior) as only the acting-out of aggressive prisoners or simply as an attention-seeking activity, we should examine the debilitating conditions of prison existence and culture as contributing factors. In this view, SIB becomes symptomatic not only of individual mental health, but of the pathology of prisons as well."

Replace the word "prison" with "school" or "workplace" and, voila, you have the answer.

I recommend Ames' original and provocative analysis of the "toxic culture" that produces these doomed rebellions. My review is on the Amazon page for "Going Postal." See also my related post about the Virginia Tech shooting massacre. Kazmierczak's article was published in the February 2006 issue of Criminology & Public Policy; a subscription is required to view it.

Happy Valentine's Day

It's been a busy week, with little time for blogging. So, without further ado, I present a few highlights from the news media and blogosphere:

Of apes and jurors

You may have heard about this new study; researcher Jennifer Eberhardt and colleagues were shocked to find people subconsciously associated black faces with apes. (It's in the current issue of the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology.) Jury consultant Anne Reed (of the Deliberations blog) has some astute thoughts on how this unconscious bias factors into jury deliberations, and what can be done to combat it. She's also collected some additional resources on the topic; see also my earlier posts and resources on race and juries, here and here.

Trolls evicted

I wrote awhile back about the sex offenders in Florida who had set up an exile community under a freeway overpass because they weren't allowed to live anywhere else. Now, those men are being evicted from their open-air tents. Some men evicted from under another overpass have set up camp in the remote Everglades; maybe the latest evictees will join them.

Religion and child custody

Remember the circumcision battle I blogged about a few months ago, in which one parent characterized the Judaic practice as religious freedom and the other called it sexual abuse? In recent decades, child custody disputes pitting different faiths and religious practices are on the rise due to an increase in interfaith marriages and a broader rise in custody conflicts. Although family court judges try to avoid rulings that favor one faith over another, it doesn't always work. New York Times reporter Neela Banerjee chronicled the complex dilemma yesterday in "Religion Joins Custody Cases, to Judges' Unease."

Bounty hunting: A corrupt American institution

Speaking of religion, have you heard of "Dog the Bounty Hunter"? I happened to catch it on cable TV when I was channel-surfing at a hotel recently. The show glorifies born-again Christian bail bondsman Duane "Dog" Chapman, a foul-mouthed religious convert who brags of capturing 6,000 runaway felons.

But from another perspective, Adam Liptak of the New York Times has written an expose on the bail bonds industry which, as it turns out, is a corrupt and uniquely U.S. institution. "In England, Canada and other countries, agreeing to pay a defendant's bond in exchange for money is a crime akin to witness tampering or bribing a juror - a form of obstruction of justice. Courts in Australia, India and South Africa [have] disciplined lawyers for professional misconduct for setting up commercial bail arrangements," writes Liptak in "American Exception: Illegal Globally, Bail for Profit Remains in U.S."

As Liptak chronicles, bounty hunters have enormous extrajudicial power. In many states, they can legally break into people's homes without warrants, temporarily imprison them, and force them across state lines without an extradition process.

"Most of the legal establishment, including the American Bar Association and the National District Attorneys Association, hates the bail bond business, saying it discriminates against poor and middle-class defendants, does nothing for public safety, and usurps decisions that ought to be made by the justice system," writes Liptak.

The full story is here, along with a short video.

Yet another call for juvenile justice reform

Last but not least, An Illinois group has called for an end of life-without-parole sentences of juveniles, based on interviews with 100-plus prisoners who received such sentences when they were ages 14 to 17. The oldest of the men is now 47. The report, entitled "Categorically less culpable: Children sentenced to life without possibility of parole in Illinois," is here. A press release is here, and The Northwestern Law School website has more resources.