FYI. The Georgia Supreme Court today changed a few words in its opinion striking down state's residency restrictions as applied to a homeowner who would have been forced to move.
Quoted Text
Georgia Supreme Court Press Release
SUPREME COURT ISSUES SUBSTITUTE OPINION IN SEX OFFENDER RULING Atlanta, December 13, 2007 -- The Georgia Supreme Court today made a slight change to its recent ruling in Mann v. Georgia Department of Corrections et al. (S07A1043). In its order of November 21, the Court wrote, “We therefore find that OCGA § 42-1-15 (a) is unconstitutional because it permits the regulatory taking of appellant’s property without just and adequate compensation.” In today’s order, the Court substituted the word, “because” with the phrase, “to the extent that.” The rest of the 16-page order remains unchanged.
According to an article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution -- http://www.ajc.com/search/content/metro/stories/2007/12/13/offender_1214_web.html -- the State Attorney General claims that this means the opinion protects homeowners from having to move, but not renters or other nonowners. "Sarah Geraghty, a lawyer for the Southern Center for Human Rights, disagreed with the attorney general's office's interpretation of the decision. 'Courts in Georgia have repeatedly held that people who rent their homes have a property interest protected by the Fifth Amendment,' Geraghty said in a statement"
Mother in jail for letting son have sex POTSDAM — An upstate New York woman was sentenced to 30 days in jail for allowing her 13-yearold son to have a sexual relationship with a California woman he met online. Maria Conklin Matthie, 40, of Potsdam, was charged in June with endangering the welfare of a child, a misdemeanor, following the arrest of Kathryn Brauch, 22, of Huntington Beach, Calif. Brauch met Matthie’s son in an Internet chat room and traveled to Potsdam in July to meet the boy. Investigators said Matthie allowed Brauch to live with the family, knowing she was having sex with her son. Brauch was charged in a 12-count indictment with having repeated oral sex and intercourse with the boy between July 7 and 18 and with videotaping at least two encounters. The charges are pending in St. Lawrence County Court, where she pleaded innocent Nov. 26. She was being held in jail on $50,000 bail. Potsdam Justice Thomas Wheeler sentenced Matthie to jail Wednesday after rejecting a probation department recommendation that she be released under its supervision.
So who is the sex offender here? The mother or the 22 year old from California? Who will have to register? Clearly not the kid since he will be considered the victim here.
Uh Oh...time for a new sex offender law!
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE Law creates new way to be sex offender Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.
We now have another way to become a sex offender, slipped into law by our state legislators with no one paying much attention. Specifi - cally, slipped into a law providing for the “civil commitment” of sex offenders after they finish serving their prison sentences. If you look far enough down into that law, passed earlier this year, you will find it establishes a new crime of “sexually motivated felony,” which is a crime like burglary, for example, committed “for the purpose of … direct sexual gratification.” How would that work? How would one commit a burglary for the purpose of sexual gratification? Well, just the way it did work in Montgomery County, in the case of a 22-year-old guy from Delanson who was supposed to be looking after someone’s farm and took advantage of the owners’ absence to break into their house and steal a credit card, which he then used to hire a pair of strippers at the eyepopping rate of $600 an hour. True case. The guy’s name was Greg L. Soucia, and he is in jail right now, having just pleaded guilty to a “sexually motivated felony,” with the understanding that he will be sentenced to a fixed term of three years, plus five years of supervision once he gets out, rather than the flexible sentence he would have gotten for an ordinary burglary and a shorter period of post-release supervision. What interests me most is that when he gets out he will be registered as a sex offender, thereby becoming subject to all those local laws that will prohibit him from living within 1,000 feet or 2,000 feet of a park, day care center, playground etc., even though the sexual aspect of his crime was perfectly legal. Yes. It’s perfectly legal to hire young women to put on a strip show as long as no physical sex is paid for. It happens all the time. The Schenectady company that provided the service in this case openly accepted a credit card, after all. But if you put the two things together, the illegal burglary and the legal paying for strippers, all of a sudden you have a sex crime under this new law, and you have generated another sex offender for people to go into convulsions over. Isn’t that cute? We don’t know yet if young Mr. Soucia will be a Level 1, 2 or 3 offender. He will be classifi ed when he finally gets released, but he will be on the state registry and will be marked as a “predator,” in the terminology preferred by politicians. This means that if I, as a horny American crook, break into a house and steal money so I can wine and dine a woman I have my eye on, with a view to getting her into bed, she being entirely willing, I too would be a sex criminal, per New York law, and if the residents of Scotia, for example, learned I was later living on their block they would put up yellow caution tape on their hedges and would not allow their grandchildren to visit for fear I might attack while their backs were turned. Elected officials would flourish tape measures at public meetings to show how close I was living to innocent children. I didn’t know about this law until the case of Mr. Soucia was reported in this newspaper the other day. The Montgomery County district attorney, Jed Conboy, patiently walked me through the various chapters and verses of it and provided me with the sentencing standards, and now I am informed. It’s not necessarily true that someone convicted of a “sexually motivated felony” would get a longer sentence than someone convicted of a plain felony. He might or might not. But he would get a determinate sentence rather than an indeterminate one, he would get a longer probation period once he’s released, and, yes, he would offi - cially be a sex offender.
The new law passed by our legislatures is anchored on a very slippery slope, from what I've read of the law there are going to be a lot more people convicted as sex offenders that shouldn't be.
No one can 'peg' the definition of a 'sex offender'......is an adulterer a sex offender???? as a society that, basically, had the same foundation (shaky as it was to keep), is now being shaken to the core.......we have come to the point of Seinfeld narcissism, Family Guy baseness, The Girls next door Mr.Heffner diry old man, MTV lesbo kissess etc etc......WE HAVE NO FREAKING IDEA ANY MORE AND NO PLUMB LINE OF WHICH TO SNAP........
we are still the same base human beings we have been since our creation----we have lost our discipline and self control........
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
Gansevoort man to get 5 years for sex crime Monday, December 24, 2007 By Kathy Parker Gazette Reporter
BALLSTON SPA — A Gansevoort man with a criminal history is expected to be sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to a sex crime involving a small child. Saratoga County Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Buckley said Jefferson Bell, 51, was arrested in July for a crime that occurred in 2005 involving a child under the age of 11. "[Bell] has an extensive criminal history including a prior conviction for a sex offense," Buckley said. "He will have to register as a sex offender when he gets out of prison." Bell pleaded guilty to a charge of first-degree attempted criminal sexual act in Saratoga County Court. He is to be sentenced in March.
Taking a fresh look at civil confinement for sex offenders First published: Friday, December 28, 2007
Among a fistful of early accomplishments of the fledgling Spitzer administration that still are lauded is passage of a law permitting civil confinement of the state's worst sex offenders after their sentences are served.
On its face, a tough piece of legislation intended to keep sex offenders off the streets and behind bars. Yet eight months after this controversial law went into effect, it's not at all clear how effective it really is. That is, if we define effective as providing a legal path for civil confinement. While admittedly we have only a handful of resolved cases to look at so far, the outcomes of mandated civil confinement trials are no where near as harsh as I suspect proponents of the law thought they would be. The civil confinement law in broad form works like this: A petition is brought against a sex offender before he's released from prison. A trial is held before a a state Supreme Court judge and jury. An assistant state attorney general serves as prosecutor and a member of a team of lawyers for the Mental Hygiene Legal Services in each of the state's judicial departments serves as defense. The single issue the jury has to decide is whether the individual suffers from a "mental abnormality," a finding that then provides the rationale for the presiding judge to sentence the individual to intense long-term supervision, or being locked up in one of three psychiatric facilities. From the state's perspective, the key to civil confinement is getting the jury finding of mental abnormality. Yet so far, the state has been able to persuade a jury only twice in five trials. The latest loss by the state was last week in Warren County. After a three-week trial, Ryan Dingman Sr. was found by a jury not to be mentally abnormal. He was released on parole. What distinguishes this case is that the jury did not take the state's bait, even though Dingman is a local sex offender from Thurman, the case was sensational as these cases almost always are, and, because of a technicality with his conviction, all five of his alleged young victims testified, along with 15 other witnesses. If the creators of this Republican-originated law expected the public to overwhelmingly endorse a throw-the-key-away approach to dealing with the mystifying complexities of sexual offender crimes, they have so far been proved incorrect. Even as the state lost the trial in Queensbury, it prevailed in two others, one in Kings County (Brooklyn) and one in Westchester County. One of those cases involved the abuse of children, the other, offenses against adult females. But again, all we have so far are indicators that a jury system is providing a far more complex and sophisticated pass-through for civil confinement than was anticipated. It's early. A spokesman for the attorney general's office says that statewide there are more than a 100 petitions at various stages, and that many of these will wind up before a judge and jury. In the 3rd Judicial District, which extends to Canada, we have 25 pending. Judicial districts with high numbers of prisons in them, such as we have, will get an inordinate number of petitions.y this time next year, says the AG's spokesman, we should have a clearer picture of how this law is working. Interestingly, the respondents, as the sex offenders with petitions hanging over their heads are called, can argue to have their case heard before a judge and jury in the county where they are incarcerated, or where the crime was originally committed. The Kings County respondent, who was found to have a mental abnormality, started out in the trial process in St. Lawrence County but opted to finish it back home. For him, it didn't work out so well. But for Dingman, and in August, for Douglas Junco in Washington County, another local, juries sided with them in spite of their horrendous crimes. A jury also sided with another respondent in Bronx County. Which, for the time being at least, is rather an uplifting element to an otherwise depressing piece of legislation. The general view so far seems to be that for more cases than I would have guessed a year ago, a sentence served is a sentence served, and that's the end of it. LeBrun can be reached at 454-5453 or by e-mail at flebrun@timesunion.com.
The civil confinement law in broad form works like this: A petition is brought against a sex offender before he's released from prison. A trial is held before a a state Supreme Court judge and jury. An assistant state attorney general serves as prosecutor and a member of a team of lawyers for the Mental Hygiene Legal Services in each of the state's judicial departments serves as defense. The single issue the jury has to decide is whether the individual suffers from a"mental abnormality," a finding that then provides the rationale for the presiding judge to sentence the individual to intense long-term supervision, or being locked up in one of three psychiatric facilities.
I don't understand. A mental abnormality? Well of course it is! I certainly wouldn't call it 'sane behavior'. And if it is a mental abnormality, which it must be, than they should ALL go to a psychiatric facility right from the get go! Why pay for prison time and pay again for a psychiatric facility?
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
Supreme Court will review La. law allowing death sentence for child rapists By MARK SHERMAN Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether a state can execute someone convicted of raping a child, one of the few remaining crimes that does not require the death of the victim to result in capital punishment. Patrick Kennedy, 43, was sentenced to death for the rape of his 8-year-old stepdaughter in Louisiana. He is one of two people in the United States, both in Louisiana, who have been condemned to death for a rape that was not also accompanied by a killing. The Supreme Court banned executions for rape in 1977 in a case in which the victim was an adult woman. Kennedy's lawyers say the death penalty for child rape violates the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment. The justices were scheduled to hear arguments in the case in April. The last executions for rape or any other crime that did not include a victim's death were in 1964. Forty-five states ban the death penalty for any kind of rape, and the other five states allow it for child rapists. Kennedy's case is the only time a state has sought to execute someone. Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas allow executions in such cases. The Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the sentence. "Our state legislature and this court have determined this category of aggravated rapist to be among those deserving of the death penalty, and short of first-degree murder, we can think of no other non-homicide crime more deserving," Justice Jeffrey Victory wrote. Chief Justice Pascal Calogero dissented, saying that with the possible exception of espionage or treason, "the Eighth Amendment precludes capital punishment for any offense that does not involve the death of the victim." The child rape case is the second capital punishment case from Louisiana this term at the Supreme Court. The justices already are considering whether a prosecutor improperly excluded blacks from a jury and then inflamed the all-white panel with references to the O.J. Simpson case. In addition, the court is weighing whether the way Kentucky executes prisoners by lethal injection - procedures similar to those used in three dozen states - violates the Constitution. Kennedy was convicted in 2003 of raping his stepdaughter at their home in suburban New Orleans. The girl initially told police she was sorting Girl Scout cookies in the garage when two boys assaulted her. Police arrested Kennedy a couple of weeks after the March 1998 rape, but more than 20 months passed before the girl identified him as her attacker. His defense attorney at the time argued that blood testing was inconclusive and that the victim was pressured to change her story. Kennedy's Supreme Court lawyers also pointed out that Kennedy is black and that nearly 90 percent of people executed for rape in the United States were black. "This court should pause before condoning a practice so heavily tinged with the scourge of racism," said Stanford University law professor Jeffrey Fisher, Kennedy's lead lawyer. The state said the court should turn down the case because Louisiana law is narrowly tailored to apply only to people convicted of raping children younger than 12. Last month, jurors in Caddo Parish, which includes Shreveport, sentenced Richard Davis, 35, to death for repeatedly raping a 5-year-old girl. Before their deliberations, local prosecutor Lea Hall told jurors: "Execute this man. Justice has a sword and this sword needs to swing today." The case being considered by the Supreme Court is Kennedy v. Louisiana, 07-343.
Audit: sex offender registration effective but needs improvement 1/15/2008 By: Web Staff
ALBANY, N.Y. -- State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli says New York's sex offender registration program is effective, but there are areas that need improvement.
An audit found that while Division of Criminal Justice Services is on the ball when it comes to registering sex offenders once they're out of jail, communication with police needs some work.
The audit also found there was poor follow-up with police if offenders failed to confirm their address and inaccuracies with sex offender driver's license information.
DiNapoli said recommendations were made to the DCJS, which is addressing the problems.
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