Harsher penalties may not work, some say

Published 6:00 pm Saturday, January 21, 2006

Lawmakers in Olympia are arguing over dozens of bills aimed at toughening sex offender laws, but some law and justice officials on Whidbey Island aren’t very impressed.

Island County Sheriff Mike Hawley is known for being very hard-nosed when it comes to rating registered sex offenders moving into the community. Island County Prosecutor Greg Banks aggressively prosecutes sex offenders.

Nevertheless, they both say it’s easy for politicians “to get tough on” sex offenses or other crimes, but too often they bypass real-world solutions to score political points.

If some of the toughest bills are passed, the Whidbey officials say they could actually decrease public safety by making it tougher to put offenders behind bars or into treatment. Or they could drain resources away from enforcement and prosecution.

“We have plenty of laws on the books, we just need the money to enforce them,” Hawley said, noting that some of the bills would amount to unfunded mandates for local government. He said none of the local legislators asked for his opinion.

Banks agreed. He said sex offenders deserve harsh penalties, but laws shouldn’t hamstring prosecutors.

“To me, the Legislature would have far more impact on public safety,” he said, “by providing more resources to local law and justice agencies, to victim advocacy agencies, and to mental health and substance abuse treatment. Not very exciting stuff, though. So it won’t get done.”

Lawmakers from both parties have been spurred to toughen the laws by high-profile cases. Joseph Duncan, a convicted sex offender from Tacoma, is accused of killing a family in Idaho to kidnap children for sex.

More recently, the father of a 9-year-old Florida girl who was raped and killed urged lawmakers in Olympia to adopt laws similar to what the Florida Legislature adopted in the girl’s honor, called Jessica’s law.

Among local 10th District legislators, Rep. Chris Strow, a Republican from Freeland, is most involved in sex offender bills. He’s a member of the criminal justice committee and announced last month that his priority for the 2006 session is to adopt meaningful legislation to protect children from sex offenders.

“We need to do what we can to make children safe,” Strow said. He added that the state’s sex offender laws “used to be cutting edge, but we’ve been lagging behind.”

Rep. Barbara Bailey, R-Oak Harbor, said both parties are working hard on the issue and she’s hopeful that important bills will be passed.

“I’m in favor of the toughest piece of legislation we can get out of here,” she said.

Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, D-Camano, is a little more cautious about tough new laws. She said the laws should actually increase public safety, not just make political statements. Also, she said laws shouldn’t bankrupt local government, but come with funding attached.

“I’m in favor of the toughest law that works and is something we paid for,” she said.

Haugen was upset by an commercial and recorded phone message campaign by the Speakers Roundtable, a Republican-friendly group, that politicized the issue by accusing Democrats of protecting violent offenders over children.

“It’s deplorable, absolutely deplorable,” she said. “I couldn’t believe they would lower themselves to do such a thing.”

Strow, however, stressed the importance of working in a bipartisan manner.

He co-sponsored bills that would tighten registration requirements for sex offenders and require global positioning system, or GPS, monitoring for certain sex offenders. He’s listed as a secondary sponsor on a half dozen other sex offender bills.

Strow said he supports the Republicans bill nicknamed “Jessica’s Law Plus.” Among other things, the law would set a mandatory minimum sentence of 30 years in prison for offenders convicted of first-degree rape of a child when the victim is less than 12 years old.

If passed, the bill would mean that child rapists would have longer minimum sentences than many murderers, but Strow doesn’t see that as a problem.

“The kind of person who is capable of doing this is capable of killing a child,” he said. “They are the worst of the worst. If we don’t keep them in prison, they’ll be out there in a situation where they might offend.”

One of the high-profile proposals is a bill the Republicans tried to pass through the House without as hearing. The bill, HB 2709, would require mandatory life sentences for people convicted of rape in the first degree and first-degree child rape.

The tough bills may sound good to the average person, but not so much to the people who have to work within the system.

“When the legislature acts emotionally,” Banks said, “more often than not, we end up with a bill that’s unworkable and has to be fixed over the next couple of sessions.”

On a practical level, Hawley said the technology for real-time GPS monitoring of sex offenders would be astronomically expensive and would have to be borne by agencies like the Sheriff’s Office, which run on a tight budget.

Strow, though, said the GPS monitoring bill would probably begin with a pilot program.

In regard to Jessica’s Law Plus, Banks said a mandatory 30-year sentence may make it difficult to prosecute cases in which the offender is a family member. Even though the act is deplorable, he said most families would resist prosecution if the offender would end up with a 30-year sentence -— a life sentence for older people. The families usually want the offender to get treatment more than anything else.

“If a family decides they don’t want a life sentence for grandpa,” he said, “they can make it impossible to prosecute.”

Last year, for example, Island County prosecutors went to trial on three cases involving sexual abuse against children. The result was one hung juries and two acquittals — the prosecutor’s only acquittals of the year.

“The public doesn’t realize how difficult these cases are to prove,” he said. “More often than not, you have to rely on the testimony of a child.”

If sentences are extreme, an offender will risk going to trial instead of accepting a plea bargain. That could mean more trials, more acquittals and more sex offenders on the streets.

But Banks isn’t opposed to any changes in law.

Banks said he and the state prosecutor’s association support a package of bills that would, among other things, increase the mandatory minimum sentence for the most serious sex crimes against children to 25 years when the offender is a stranger.

Banks said this makes sense because sex offenders who target children they don’t know are the greatest threat to public safety.

In addition to others, he supports a bill that would increase the penalty for possession of child pornography and mandate that people convicted of the crime register as sex offenders.

In 2004, the Legislature directed the Washington State Institute for Public Policy to study sex offender laws to determine what policies work best to increase public safety. The study is not complete.

“It seems to me that they should wait for the studies that they commissioned before undertaking any major changes in the way we prosecute, imprison, control and treat sex offenders,” Banks wrote. “Otherwise, what was the point of paying for all those studies?”

In all, well over a hundred bills regarding sex offenders were introduced in the two houses during the 2005-2006 biennium.

You can reach Jessie Stensland at jstensland@cmg-northwest2.go-vip.net/whidbeynewstimes or 675-6611.