[NYAPRS Enews] TU: Taking A Fresh Look At Civil Confinement For Sex Offenders

[Harvey Rosenthal]

Taking A Fresh Look At Civil Confinement For Sex Offenders  

Fred LeBrun   Albany Times Union   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.

 

By 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. 

 

http://timesunion.com/AspStories/storyprint.asp?StoryID=650690 

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