09/20/2011
By Mike Ward
After years of legal decisions requiring state parole officials to provide hearings before they impose sex-offender restrictions on felons never convicted of a sex crime, two courts have taken the unusual step of blocking the restrictions.
- Why would you impose sex offender restrictions on someone who hasn't committed a sex crime in the first place? This is like treating someone as a murderer for DUI!
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| Wave your rights, or else! |
Last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered the restrictions — officially called Condition X — removed from the parole conditions for a Houston kidnapper because he was not afforded a due-process hearing before they were imposed and because he had not been convicted of a sex crime.
The decisions were the latest setback for the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and state corrections officials, who have insisted for years that, to ensure public safety, they could impose the stringent conditions on parolees without a due-process hearing.
- Hell, when people can just decide themselves what they can and cannot do, why even have laws?
Although previous court rulings have required the hearings, the state has not routinely offered them. And parole attorneys say the two recent cases indicate the courts are losing patience.
"However long the rope is that the state has been hanging onto for several years, they're finally reaching the end of it — and this decision shows that," said Richard Gladden, who represented parolee [name withheld] during a five-hour hearing Tuesday before Yeakel.
Huntsville attorney William Habern, who also represents [name withheld], said that in 40 years of parole law work, he had never seen a judge block parole officials from enforcing parole conditions.
"The issue here is someone's liberty, whether they should be prohibited from going to church, being around children, not being able to go to college and many more things, for something they were never convicted of," Gladden said .
For their part, assistant attorneys general and parole officials referred questions to their spokespeople, who declined to comment.
Although Yeakel approved a preliminary injunction blocking the enforcement of the restrictions on [name withheld], the judge declined to specifically keep the 40-year-old restaurateur from having to undergo a new sex-offender evaluation.
"I am not stopping anyone from going forward" to resolve the legal issues with current state parole policy, Yeakel said, noting he was only stopping enforcement of the conditions against [name withheld].
"The issue is squarely before me, but it does not need to linger long," he added, suggesting that the issue should be resolved quickly — either between attorneys or in a court hearing he plans to schedule soon.
[name withheld] pleaded guilty to drug charges in 2003 in Johnson County, south of Fort Worth, and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. While he was initially indicted on charges of aggravated sexual assault of a child, the suit notes that his sentence order states that "the Sex Offender Registration Requirements (in state law) do not apply to the Defendant. The age of the victim at the time of the offense was not applicable."
Despite that, state records show that when [name withheld] was paroled in the summer of 2007, parole officials required him to register as a sex offender, placed him under the restrictive sex-offender conditions of release and ordered him to participate in a sex-offender treatment program.
[name withheld] never received a hearing in which he could challenge the designation, Gladden said. In fact, until recently he was not provided with many details from his parole file, Gladden said.
