Mark
Bottom of Form / U.S. News & World Report, Feb 22, 1993 v114 n7 p21(1)
Keeping predators behind bars. (preventivedetention law for sexual predators) (Column) John Leo.
Abstract: Sexual-predator laws are a fair and effective method for preventing extremely dangerous sex offenders from repeating their crimes. Earl Shriner would not have raped and mutilated a 7-year-old boy if a sexual predator law had prevented his release from prison.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1993 U.S. News and World Report, Inc.
Every five years or so Charles Manson, head of the bizarre gang that murdered actress Sharon Tate, comes up for parole. The parole board dutifully goes through the motions, pretending that the freeing of Manson is a real option. Then it always throws him back in prison until the next hearing. Stripped of the legal niceties, what's happening to Manson is really preventivedetention. He will never get out, and shouldn't. He's too dangerous.
In an age of more and more horrendous sexual crimes, why can't we keep all of our Mansons behind bars indefinitely? That's the goal of WashingtonState's sexual predator law, passed in 1990 in the wake of the Earl Shriner case. Shriner stabbed, strangled and raped a 7-year-old Tacoma boy, then cut off the child's penis and left him for dead. The boy survived.
Shriner was a career sexual predator with a 24-year record of attacking children. In 1966, after being apprehended for choking a 7-year-old girl, he led police to the body of a missing 15-year-old girl. The girl had been strangled and tied to a tree. He was committed as "a defective delinquent" and psychiatrists said he was too dangerous to be at large.
But Shriner was let out again and again. He served 10 years for abducting and assaulting two 16-year-old girls. After his release in 1987, he served 66 days for stabbing a 16-year-old boy, then 67 days for tying a 10-year-old boy to a fence post and beating him. The children couldn't be made to testify, and the charges were plea-bargained down.
At every step along the way, authorities knew very well that they had an extremely dangerous predator on their hands. Before Shriner's 1987 release, officials knew that he "had hatched elaborate plans to maim or kill youngsters" when he got out. But he couldn't be committed because he wasn't mentally ill and hadn't performed recent and overt acts that might put the community in danger. (The major reason he hadn't, of course, is that he had just spent ten years in prison, where there are no children to attack.)
Deadly game. David Boerner, author of the sexual-predator law, says the system obviously failed, but "the failure was not caused by a mistake on the part of some official. ...The legal system seemed to work as it was designed." It basically operated like a game: Vicious predators were set free periodically, and to get them back in prison for a few years, authorities usually had to wait for another woman or child to be mutilated or killed.
It's a system that makes no sense, not even to the predators. Andrew Vachss, a lawyer who represents children, has spoken to many predators over the years. He writes: "They always exhibit amazement that we do not hunt them. And that when we capture them, we eventually let them go."
If Washington's law had been in place in 1987, the state would not have been forced to release Shriner. He would have been brought to trial (a jury trial, at the prosecutor's option) and his plans to maim and kill would have been introduced as evidence. He would have been stashed away (as he is now, finally, for a 131-year term) without making a 7-year-old victim pay the price for getting him off the streets.
The law avoids current psychiatric categories and speaks broadly of "a mental abnormality or personality disorder." The legislature spoke of "a small but extremely dangerous group of sexually violent predators ... who do not have a mental disease or defect...."
In other words, though the legislature used some pseudo-psychiatric jargon, it was outlining a way to commit people who aren't mentally ill. It produced a law that focuses on danger to the public and not mental incapacity, because research shows that most predators are simply violent criminals, and not ill at all.
What's wrong with such a law? Obviously jailing people for what they might do in the future cuts across the grain of American jurisprudence. And there is always the danger that the law will be applied broadly to people who are not hopeless career predators. Vance Cunningham, a three-time rapist jailed under the sexual-predator law after serving his time, has been making the rounds of talk shows (by phone) pressing this argument. There's a court challenge, partly based on the Cunningham case.
But as the Washington legislature said, the true target is not every sexual offender but a small group of extremely dangerous predators. It is not rocket science to figure out who these hard-core people are. The record of Earl Shriner, filled with sadism and escalating violence, is a common one in this group. So is the phenomenon of the predator telling authorities what he will do next. Westley Dodd, hanged last month in Washington for torturing and killing three boys, said in one of his court briefs, "If I do escape, I promise you I will kill and rape again, and I will enjoy every minute of it." Donald Chapman of Wyckoff, N.J., is now free after serving 12 years for a grisly rape and torture of a 23-year-old woman. His psychiatrist says Chapman has vowed to rape again and has called himself a failure for letting his previous victims live.
No sane society can let these monsters roam free. Society has rights too, and one of them is the right to protection from nonstop predators. Let's have more sexual-predator laws.
Article A13440629
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