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| Jamey Dunn |
So instead of doing what is right, and constitutional, they go with the flow out of fear they will be looked at as soft on crime or pro-sex offender! Wow, no wonder new laws pass with ease all the time (nothing we did not know already!). They don't mind stomping on some, just to save their own butts! Like the old saying goes, "If it isn't broken, don't fix it!" And they continue to try to fix or add to a broken law, eventually it will be so overloaded, that it comes crashing down! This brings a couple quotes to mind:
"If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law." - Winston Churchill
"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood." - James Madison
"The strictest law sometimes becomes the severest injustice." - Benjamin Franklin
"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." - Abraham Lincoln
09/2011
By Jamey Dunn
Unless you spend time in the state Capitol, you would likely never imagine that lawmakers spend a good portion of their time debating a single issue: sex offenders.
A cursory search of the General Assembly’s website shows two dozen bills that deal with sex offenders were introduced since the current legislative session began in January. They include bills requiring sex offenders to register with a university if they are students or workers there, and legislation that pushes the areas where they are allowed to live farther and farther away from places such as schools and parks.
There is a collective groan and eye roll from many Statehouse observers when some of these bills come up for floor debate, not because they think Illinois should take it easy on sex offenders — it would be a difficult task to find anyone who feels that way. It is because the passage of these bills is so politically charged that lawmakers fear voting against them — even bills that are nearly impossible to implement —because they do not want to get labeled as soft on crime by a political opponent during a campaign.
“Illinois for a long time has every new set of legislators come in, and they pass bills on crime because it looks good when you go back home and you say, ‘I’m tough on crime.’ So what happens is, we’re now layered with bill after bill after bill,” Rep. Rosemary Mulligan, a Park Ridge Republican, said in the last days of the spring legislative session while debating a bill that pertained to sex offenders. “Most of us will vote for it because it looks bad if you don’t, which is a mistake that happens when we continue to pass these kinds of laws.” Mulligan and 90 of her House colleagues voted in favor of the bill.
When I started out at Illinois Issues as an intern, one of my wry classmates observed that sex offenders were the only group with so much legislation concerning them that did not have a lobbyist. Apparently the idea was not a new one. Illinois Issues reported in June 2005 that future Senate President John Cullerton remarked after several such bills came up in a committee hearing: "It seems like every other bill deals with sex offenders. If they had any money, they should hire a lobbyist." Since then, at least one registered pedophile has come to Springfield to testify in committee about a piece of legislation that would affect sex offenders. And juvenile justice reform organizations lobby lawmakers if they think proposed penalties for minors are too punitive.
- So, was the man truly a pedophile as deemed by a panel of experts, or is that your opinion? Without knowing his crime, are we to just take your word for it? We all know the media, politicians and others throw that term around all the time, when it should not be.
However, because the issue is such a political hot potato, little public debate takes place over which ideas are workable and what penalties might hurt those who do not easily fit the description of a pedophile.
- This is the problem, most all in congress think all sex offenders, if not most, are pedophiles, when the opposite is the truth. Most are not, by definition, a pedophile, only a few are.
“The big thing is, nobody wants to be seen as being soft on sexual perversion,” says Rep. Jim Sacia, a Republican from Pecatonica. A former special investigator with the FBI, Sacia sponsored a bill that would give judges discretion when sentencing offenders in so-called Romeo and Juliet cases. Such cases involve young people who had consenting sexual contact — often within the context of a relationship — but one of the two is under the legal age. People in these cases have been labeled as sex offenders, sometimes for a decade or more, for something they did when they were young that was not a predatory act. “The registry is such a joke, in my opinion anyway, because we continue to treat Romeo and Juliet crimes the same way we do a sexual deviant,” Sacia says. “I literally have five couples that I know of in my district that the man is married to the woman now.” Sen. William Haine, an Alton Democrat, sponsored similar legislation in the Senate, and like Sacia’s bill, it also could not get the necessary support to pass. Haine, a former state’s attorney, says such offenders should not escape punishment but should not have to register. “Those cases should be prosecuted, and people should be deterred.”
- So, if you are going to be "tough on crime," and stomp on sex offenders just to save your own careers and reputation, why not get "tough" on all the other criminals out there?
One legislator points to a recent audit as an indicator that lawmakers must start thinking about how the bills they pass will be implemented in the future. “I’m as tough as anybody on these offenders, but we need to make sure what we are doing actually does something,” says Rep. Jack Franks, a Marengo Democrat. He says an audit of the Sex Offender Management Board (SOMB) is a prime example of good intentions that go nowhere in practice.
Auditor General Bill Holland found that the board, whose responsibilities went into effect in 2004, was far from fulfilling its primary goals of tracking sex offenders after they are released from prison. The board has not created a tracking system and does not have a solid plan or timeline to do so. According to the audit, 10,039 sex offenders in Illinois are currently eligible for board monitoring. The audit found that the board was impeded by a lack of staff and funding and by a lack of any laws supporting its efforts.
“Current Illinois law makes it extremely difficult for the SOMB to develop a system to follow the progress of offenders who have completed their sentence,” the audit states. “Under current Illinois law, registration as a sex offender does not require either supervision or monitoring. Approximately two-thirds of registered Illinois sex offenders are not under any form of supervision. Thus, the law does not require that the vast majority of convicted sex offenders who have served their sentence be subject to any mandated supervision or monitoring. As a result, the SOMB faces significant challenges in devising a program to evaluate the treatment progress of sex offenders who are under no legal requirement to report this progress or even cooperate in a minimal way with the SOMB.”
- Those who have been convicted, sentenced and served their jail/prison time, as well as parole/probation, should now be free to do as they wish. If they commit another crime or any nature, punish them accordingly.
Franks says, “Sometimes the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”
He suggests that lawmakers create a commission to look at sex offender laws with a critical eye and make suggestions for clearing out redundancies and concepts that are not being used in practice.
- This is an impossible dream, as you can see from the above!
Some lawmakers say a bill to bring Illinois in line with federal legislation would be one way to make the system more coherent, but even Haine, a sponsor of such legislation, warns that such a change should be done with deliberative care.
- Yes, you all have a reputation to defend, instead of doing what is right!
The federal government is pushing states to pass their own versions of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, also known as the Adam Walsh Act, which would create national requirements for how states deal with pedophiles. If states sign on, it would allow for the sharing of registry information on a national scale.
- Look, sex offender and pedophile are not the same thing, so stop using the terms as if they are. Also, the law is called the "Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act," which was originally passed because it was said to protect all children who are abused, now it's basically the "Adam Walsh Sex Offender Punishment And Vengeance Act!" If it was implemented, as it was originally intended, then we'd also have a child abuse registry, and other registries for those who harm children in any way, but they called it one thing, then implemented it another way, after it passed, as most laws these days are.
But the plan has run into controversy. Ohio, the first state to comply, saw thousands of legal challenges from offenders who were ordered to spend more time on the registry than they were originally told. Some of them had already completed their required time and were told they had to start registering again because their crimes had been reclassified. In the end, the state’s supreme court threw out provisions of the bill.
- And not everyone in the world, has $150,000 or more, to defend themselves either. My question is, why isn't the ACLU and other so called civil/human rights organizations doing all they can to get these unconstitutional laws repealed? Like others, they don't want to look pro-sex offender? So it's a win/win for politicians, so they can exploit fear and sex offenders just to make themselves look "tough on crime," while actually doing neither.
Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming have all signed on to the federal standard. CNN reported that the number of offenders on Wyoming’s registry increased from 125 to 1,450 after the state moved to federal registration guidelines. Activists for juvenile justice reform and civil rights across the nation have voiced opposition, saying the plan paints with too broad of a brush and does not allow law enforcement officials to focus limited resources on those most likely to reoffend.
Those are some of the reasons that Haine says he put the brakes on his Illinois legislation. “I held the bill until October … so we can have people come in and offer their views before we take this leap.”
States were required to comply by the end of July or lose some federal funding in 2012. However, the Illinois State Police submitted the state’s compliance paperwork by the deadline. The feds say it will take about three months to sift through the entries and find out which states made the cut. Haine and a spokeswoman for the state police both say they are not concerned that the state will lose funds. “The federal government’s going to have to wait until we pass it,” Haine says. State lawmakers should be reluctant to take such sweeping changes handed down from the federal government, he says, without first seriously reviewing them. “In some instances, Congress adds things that some congressman dreams up from who knows where, and it may or it may not be a good idea.”
Haine says that when Illinois originated its sex offender registry, lawmakers did not consider some of the potential outcomes, such as the Romeo and Juliet cases. “This wasn’t well thought out a number of years ago when we started down this registration path. … It was a good thing to do, but it wasn’t done with critical thought.”
- And this shocks people? Hell, most laws are not thought out, they just see the title, some person reads through the bill (real quick), or a portion of it (the portion they want to use, so it gets passed), then they vote on it to pass it, all without reading the bill and thinking about it as well as all the potential consequences. Like Nancy Pelosi once said, "we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it," but once the bill is passed, they spend a lot of time going back fixing problems, or fighting law suits.
Haine warns that the politics makes a future rollback next to impossible. “Once we pass these things, and they are signed into law, it is very difficult to go back into the law.”
Haine says when sentencing is the topic of legislative debate, he likes to dust off a quote from former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. “He said, ‘The hallmark of the law is reasonableness.’ … And that’s what we’re trying to do here. It shouldn’t be based on an unthinking emotional reaction or a harsh vindictiveness. It should be reasonable.”
