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Tough talk, tough laws are easy answers

By HOWARD TROXLER
Published April 19, 2005

Another loathsome murder of a young girl. Another registered sexual offender charged. Politicians and furious citizens are crying for revenge against ... somebody.

And yet, before we grab our pitchforks and torches to go lynch all the perverts:

(1) There's a difference between the broader term "sexual offender" and the more narrow "sexual predator."

(2) A lot of the tough talk being thrown around about tougher punishment won't solve anything by itself.

(3) As usual, it's the unglamorous details that would do the most good. That means an intelligent approach to tracking the people we need to track. That also means money, time and work. It's hard.

The difference between the terms "sexual offender" and "sexual predator" is important but easily blurred.

At the moment there are 29,000 registered sexual "offenders" in the registry of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The list includes anyone convicted of any of an array of crimes, some involving children, some not.

There are just over 5,000 sexual "predators," who are guilty of the most serious crimes or of repeated offenses.

In other words, one out of seven persons in the state's registry is a predator.

Six out of seven aren't.

In no way do I condone their crimes, especially those involving children. Some offenders committed gruesome acts before there was a "predator" category. Others may be on the way to becoming predators. Some just got good plea bargains. Yet overall, it is fair to argue that most registered sex offenders are not of the little-girl-murdering variety.

The other day, I talked to a woman a little younger than me, a nice, normal, woman happily married, living in suburbia with kids in school. Many years and a lifetime ago, as a young adult, she had sex with a 16-year-old high school boy. So she's on the list. She lives in dread of the day someone zealously "outs" her.

Maybe you are saying: "Well, obviously, THAT'S not who we're after."

But the Sexual Offender Registry doesn't bother much with such distinctions. In terms of social stigma, sex crime is the new drug crime.

David Lee Onstott, the convicted rapist now accused in the murder of Sarah Michelle Lunde in Hillsborough County, was not a predator. He had exactly the same status on the registry as my suburban housewife: registered sexual offender.

Florida's first registration law said that sexual offenders who stayed clean for 10 years could be taken off the list. Later, in the name of getting tough, we bumped that to 20 years. Now we're talking about 30 years. For those who do not reoffend.

There's also the usual push for longer prison sentences, even life in prison for more crimes. Yet longer sentences will never get rid of plea bargains, or relatively weak cases in which prosecutors are forced to take the best deal they can.

So what are we supposed to do?

We now have three horrifying kidnap-murders of young girls in the Tampa Bay area in the last two years. In two of them - Carlie Brucia in Manatee County and Jessica Lunsford in Citrus County - the accused had been lost in the system.

John Evander Couey, charged in the Lunsford case, moved into her neighborhood without notifying the authorities of his change of address - and the probation workers who lost him didn't even know he was a registered sex offender. Amazing.

This is 2005. We ought to be close to the point that a guy in the wrong place sets off real-time alarms. Instead, we have the Hillsborough Sheriff's Office forced to go door to door physically, checking names and address. Excuse me, sir, are you the sexual offender who lives here?

We need nuts and bolts supervision more than pitchforks and torches.

Lastly, here is an even more vexing question about the most recent case, which was not about a system failure.

Which reforms by politicians, exactly, would have stopped Sarah's mother from dating a registered sexual offender? Which new laws would let her mother know Sarah came home a day early from a church trip?

To answer those questions, we're talking about a lot more than new laws and tacking up signs on telephone poles.

[Last modified April 19, 2005, 01:19:14]