British family man called pervert for photographing his children at park

"What is the world coming to?" asks father

From London's Daily Mail:

When Gary Crutchley started taking pictures of his children playing on an inflatable slide he thought they would be happy reminders of a family day out.

But the innocent snaps of seven-year-old Cory, and Miles, five, led to him being called a "pervert."

The woman running the slide at Wolverhampton Show asked him what he was doing and other families waiting in the queue demanded that he stop.

One even accused him of photographing youngsters to put the pictures on the internet.
Mr. Crutchley, 39, who had taken pictures only of his own children, was so enraged that he found two policemen who confirmed he had done nothing wrong.

Yesterday he said: "What is the world coming to when anybody seen with a camera is assumed to be doing things that they should not?" ...

His wife, a teaching aide and nurse, agreed: "It is very sad when every man with a camera enjoying a Sunday afternoon out in the park with his children is automatically assumed to be a pervert."

The story continues here.

California: More sex offender commitment mess

I've written several posts (listed here) on various controversies surrounding Coalinga State Hospital, California's costly boondoggle for civilly committed sex offenders.

Here is the latest buzz. (I am hearing all of this third-hand and I haven’t seen it reported in any official sources, so take it for what it’s worth.)

Due to a severe shortage of staff, the hospital is operating at full capacity with only about 700-some out of a maximum of 1,500 patients. That means that if a patient goes to court, he cannot return "home" until a bed opens up. Since the "hospital" is really a long-term detention facility from which few people are released, this can take many months. Meanwhile, the sex offender is housed in a county jail's protective custody unit, which is much more restrictive than general population housing.

Worse, if a patient is called as a witness in a fellow patient's civil commitment proceeding, he too can expect to lose his bed. It is hard to find willing witnesses when they've got to be willing to go to jail for you, for an indefinite period of time.

I'm told that the hospital has about 700-some patients. It could hold 1,500 if it had a full staff. But despite an intensive campaign, recruiters have found only 900 people so far who are willing to work there, or about 55 percent of the 1,600 they need in order to run all of the units and programs.

Meanwhile, I'm hearing that the expert witness panel of the state Department of Mental Health is being disbanded. Less expensive staff psychologists are replacing the contractors, some of whom were earning upwards of $1 million per year. The massive earnings were becoming a focal point for defense attorneys during cross-examinations of state witnesses. I'm told that jurors' eyes practically popped out of their heads when they heard about the "boatloads" of money, as one expert described her earnings.

If anyone finds published news on these topics I would be grateful if you posted them in the Comments section, so others can access them.

An L.A. Times article on the beleaguered hospital is here.

Postscript: On Aug. 10, 2008, the L.A. Times published an expose on the massive earnings of state SVP evaluators. The article is here; my post on it is here.

CNN features San Quentin education project

As part of its "Black in America" series, CNN has an upbeat story about education efforts in one of California's most famous prisons:

Lt. Sam Robinson, a 27-year veteran of San Quentin, gave a tour of 27 vocational programs run by about 3,000 volunteers as part of the Prison University Project, a nonprofit education program that offers many black men an opportunity to earn an associate of arts degree. It helps give those eligible for parole the intellectual tools to compete in a vastly changing job market.

Advocates say that many black men imprisoned across America, particularly nonviolent drug-related offenders, have enormous potential to become productive, law-abiding members of society through higher education in prison.

University of California at Berkeley professor Rebecca Carter volunteers as a biology instructor at San Quentin. During her first semester, she was startled by what she discovered. "I've been teaching on the Cal campus and teaching at the prison at the same time, and they were significantly more engaged when I was in the prison," Carter told CNN's Soledad O'Brien. "Not always more in command with the subject matter but more engaged, doing the homework, asking questions because they were passionate about learning."

The full CNN article is here, accompanied by video and photographic footage of the prison university.

Hat tip: Douglas A. Berman, Sentencing Law & Policy blog

Imprisoning LeFevre a costly, senseless ritual

Guest essay by Daniel Macallair*

Few examples better illustrate the vindictive nature of the American criminal justice system than the case of Susan LeFevre.

On April 24, LeFevre was arrested by federal marshals at her San Diego home 32 years after she walked away from a minimum security prison for nonviolent offenders in Michigan. At the time of her escape, she had just begun serving a 10- to 20-year sentence after she and a male companion pleaded guilty to charges of attempting to sell $200 worth of heroin to an undercover police officer.

Despite having no criminal record, the 19-year-old college student faced a crusading judge and the first wave of harsh drug laws. For a crime that may have resulted in probation in a neighboring jurisdiction, LeFevre received the maximum possible prison sentence.

Now a 52-year-old law-abiding mother and housewife, LeFevre has returned to Michigan where justice and corrections officials have stridently vowed that she will face the wrath of the criminal justice system.

While walking away from a prison sentence is never justified, the case raises troubling questions about the American criminal justice system and the purpose of imprisonment.

According to a recent study by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, the U.S. has the highest imprisonment rate in the world. With just 5 percent of the world's population, we have 25 percent of the world's prisoners.

Even more startling, the U.S. jail and prison population for drug offenses (458,131) exceeds the European Union's jail and prison population for all offenses (356,626).

The reason why the United States imprisons 740 out of every 100,000 citizens compared to Europe's rate of 110 per 100,000 is the size of its prison establishment and the acceptance of imprisonment as a sentence for both violent and nonviolent offenders. Other countries choose to use prison sentences very sparingly on the understanding that prisons are cruel and brutalizing places that should be reserved for only the dangerous. Instead, European countries prefer to rely on penalties such as day fines that are tied to the individual's income....

LeFevre's imprisonment will cost the state of Michigan more than $300,000 during the next 10 years. This does not include any additional periods of imprisonment imposed for her earlier escape. Many in the prison establishment will argue that requiring LeFevre to serve her sentence is necessary to demonstrate the criminal justice system's resolve and to deter others from similar actions. Others argue that special treatment for LeFevre cannot be justified since special considerations are not extended to other inmates.

Effective criminal justice systems measure their success by the number of people successfully returned to the community, not the number of inmates maintained in prison. Incarcerating individuals such as LeFevre who pose no danger to society and who are forced to leave behind children and spouses simply renders her punishment a costly and senseless ritual.

In this instance, society would be best served by allowing LeFevre to return home, leave the past behind and continue her productive life.

*Reprinted with the written permission of the author. Originally posted on the Saginaw (Michigan) News online edition. Daniel Macallair is executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice and teaches criminal justice at San Francisco State University.

Bizarre verdict: Both sane and insane

Kier Sanders was a severely psychotic and delusional 21-year-old when he shotgunned his grandparents to death in Tupelo, Mississippi back in 1985. Amazingly, he wandered the streets of America for two decades before finally being apprehended in 2005 and put on trial for double murder.

The defense, insanity, was no surprise.

The verdict, both guilty and not guilty, was.

Apparently worried that the 43-year-old Sanders might be released if they found him not guilty by reason of insanity, jurors acquitted him in the death of one grandparent, but found him guilty of murder in the other.

After deliberating for 45 minutes, the jury sent a note to the judge asking when Sanders might be released if they found him NGI. The judge, following the law, ordered them not to consider that issue. The strange verdict came four hours later.

The judge sentenced Sanders to life in prison, noting that if he was ever paroled he would then be committed to the state hospital as NGI. The verdict and sentence will be appealed, Sanders' attorney said.

Psychologist John McCoy of Memphis, who treated Sanders in 1983 and who testified for the defense that Sanders was not malingering, reported on the case for the National Psychologist. His article, along with contact information for him, is here.

Sex offender news roundup

Florida sex offenders may possess porn

Florida sex offenders on probation can possess pornography so long as it does not relate to their ''particular deviant behavior pattern,'' the state's Supreme Court has ruled.

The case involved Donald Kasischke, a 61-year-old Miami man with a doctoral degree in gerontology. He was on probation following a year in prison in the sexual molestation of a 15-year-old boy. Probation officers had searched his home and found pornographic photos of young males having sex, but it could not be determined that any were underage.

The ruling involved a condition of Kasischke's release stating that:

"Unless otherwise indicated in the treatment plan provided by the sexual offender treatment program, a prohibition on viewing, accessing, owning or possessing any obscene, pornographic or sexually stimulating visual or auditory material, including telephone, electronic media, computer programs or computer services that are relevant to the offender's deviant behavior pattern.''

The Miami Herald story is here.

Part of national registry ruled unconstitutional

The law making it a federal crime for a sex offender to travel to another state and fail to re-register in that jurisdiction is unconstitional, a federal judge in Montana has ruled. The Montana Attorney General will now appeal the ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The case involved 58-year-old Bernard Waybright, who was convicted of a misdemeanor sex crime in West Virginia. Waybright traveled to Montana several times without registering there, a violating of the federal Sexual Offender Registration and Notification Act.

The complete ruling in US v. Waybright is here. The news report in the (Montana) Missoulian is here. Analysis and news roundup of the case is here.

Coming soon: Instant sex offender alerts

Want to find out when a sex offender moves into your neighborhood. In Washington, a new system will allow you to get instant "real-time updates" and email alerts. Whoopee!

(Too bad that 90 percent of people arrested for sex offenses do not have a prior record. But these laws presumably make people feel safer.)

It's all part of the Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (SMART) program, established by the U.S. Department of Justice under the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006. SMART has just issued its final guidelines for implementation, available online here.

Under the new guidelines, all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam, are required to establish online sex offender databases that are easily searchable by name, zip code, and geographical radius. All states and U.S. territories must also participate in a similar one-stop-shopping federal database, the National Sex Offender Public Website (NSOPW).

Jurisdictions are also "permitted and encouraged" to provide public access to sex offenders' email addresses, by allowing members of the public to query whether a specific email address belongs to a sex offender.

All adult sex offenders and some juveniles as young as 14 are included in the national and state databases. (See this fact sheet for more information on juvenile registration requirements.) Registration is for life for offenders designed as “Tier III,” and for minimum periods of 15 to 25 years for Tier I and II offenders, respectively.

The FBI, which maintains the National Sex Offender Registry (NSOR) database, may freely share registrants' information with "other appropriate databases."