Source: cbsnews.com 3/21/24
[ACSOL is posting this article to show how the actions of one registrant can negatively impact our efforts for justice]
ELK GROVE – A person of interest in a kidnapping case out of Madera has been arrested in Elk Grove, police announced Wednesday.
City of Madera police were looking for 54-year-old Otis McKinzy, a parolee and registered sex offender.
Police say McKinzy was living out of his car in Madera and was staying on the streets near the victim’s home near Yosemite Avenue and L Street. Early Wednesday afternoon, McKinzy allegedly carjacked and kidnapped the victim using a sharp object. At some point during the kidnapping, police allege that McKinzy sexually assaulted the victim.
It wasn’t until reaching Modesto that the victim was able to escape their own vehicle and run for help.
McKinzy took off in the victim’s car, police say, prompting the alert from police that he was last seen in the Modesto area. Police also warned that he should be considered dangerous.
This shouldn’t hurt the rest of us. But it should hurt the states/countries support of the registry since it did f*ck-all to protect this victim from someone who wanted to do this.
He was on parole and presumably registry compliant (in that no registry violation was also charged). So if registry proponents are to be believed, he shouldn’t have been able to commit these offenses.
Are we to believe that if there were no registry, he would still be at large?
Did they even know they were looking for a registrant in the first place? Or was his registry status not known until after he was identified by the victim? Or after he was arrested?
Someone please explain to me in explicit detail exactly what difference the registry made here.
So if even one of us reoffends, none of us get any fair treatment? Our rights go out the window? Then we’ve got a tyrannical government. We need to vote out politicians who treat us like trash. At least we still have a say in the process.
We need to demand to be treated on an individual basis here. Stereotyping gets us nowhere and is antithetical to real justice. If somebody murders or kidnaps someone, and I had nothing to do with that incident, that is NOT my fault.
“In a statement from Madera police, McKinzy had already served a 24-year prison term for a similar crime to Wednesday’s alleged incident.”
Calling this man a “registered sex offender” is like calling Jeffrey Dahmer a “sex offender” (which Wikipedia actually does). One of my issues with the RSO label is that it plasters over the specifics of a criminal history, sometimes badly (making a relatively insignificant crime sound serious) and sometimes to the benefit of the offender (hiding years of extremely violent behavior).
Unfortunately the actions described in this article can and will be used against us. Never
mind that the rate of re-offense while on parole is less than 1 percent and therefore this person and his alleged offenses are extremely rare. Given that the alleged events took place near to Sacramento, the state capitol, it is sure to be noticed by legislators and their staffers.
The registry sure wasn’t a deterrent for the person responsible for this offense and sure as hell didn’t prevent this crime from happening. Tell me again how the registry is a useful tool because to me it’s a dismal failure and it’s time for the registry to be abolished!!
He did 24 years for A similar crime, this falls back on CDC and the 290pc requirements that do nothing to protect the innocent, we all know the registry is only use to apply continuous punishment on PFR.
One things for sure, It’s gonna be a little harder for people with sexual offenses to get parole.
We should be using situation is like this to flip the script on legislations Smith vs Doe, to prove the registry is punishment and making people even more hostile and extremely dangerous.
This guy was gonna reoffend regardless of being on the registry and where he lived BUT because he was homeless at the time, It’s gonna reflect back on every other registrants who’s Transient in the state of California.
They don’t like transient offenders because they’re hard to track and the 290 requirements gives them thee ability to legally move to different locations within a 30 day period without having to notify law enforcement of the move until next appointment date.
The other reason they don’t like transients is because it’s hard to make a failure to register change stick without an address, and most people who are charged with failure to register, were convicted through witness testimony from a neighbor or A subpoenaed family member BUT if you’re transient, it’s your word against theirs.
He has a “low” Static 99 score of 2, too.
” Only one person is responsible for a crime.” ” Do you like to be punished for something that doesn’t involve you?” should be on signs outside capitol buildings before politicians perform the knee jerk shuffle.
These are the kind of people that need to go back to prison and stay there because he is a danger to society and makes the rest of us look like him in the public eye.
This man wanted the car… that’s what he wanted… the car. Everything else was, “Freebie crimes” he added in, because why not? If he gets caught stealing the car, he dies in prison for that… so, he made the most of the situation? If this goes bad, he dies in prison for the car. Everything else is… what are they going to do, make him die in prison twice?
If he wanted anything else, he would have… gone someplace dark, secluded, away from all eyes and ears, and gotten what he wanted there. Not what he did, because all he really wanted was the car…
That’s my guess, but not knowing the full details of his first conviction… all I can do is guess. Based on what is here… all he wanted was the car… but he also took full advantage of all the other free possibilities? This man was in an “all you can eat” buffet of options… one price for everything, so he got everything he could? Take a little, take a lot… price remains the same…so… he took a little of everything?
This is not a “Sex Crime”, this is a car jacking, with freebies added in. He paid the price for the buffet, so he took all he could get…but all he really wanted was the car. Kinda like, all I ever really wanted at the Casino Buffet was the prime rib… but, I still took some other stuff too… all included in that one price, so might as well.
We need an answer when people ask what to do about guys like this. If the state doesn’t do something, the community will. So there has to be an adequate answer to this kind of behavior. I don’t think our system has the best answers, but it does have answers. We need our own answers, a competing vision that doesn’t ignore the harm done by someone like this.
24 years down time , and then have to live homeless, with no real help , heck they should have just ask him if he just wanted to go to his prison home rather than sleep in his car and register every other week , what he did was wrong , but I can see the hopelessness after being down that long , full of anger as we, as other feelings, regardless we will all wear it sadly because of this registry ,
This person was homeless, and on parole. This individual would have been expected to be an enhanced risk compared to people off supervision, and yet, even with parole supervision requirements (and likely an ankle monitor also) this person was still able to reoffend. Let’s face it, if a person is in the community, nothing short of an armed 24/7 chaperone would likely stop a determined individual from committing any crime, let alone a sexual one.
These examples further reinforce the fact that the registry serves no legitimate law enforcement or public safety purpose. Police didn’t need a registry to know if this individual had a criminal record, and the public would not have been meaningfully helped by having access to his, or the one million plus other profiles of individuals who have been on The List.
How could this outcome have been avoided?
What if there was no registry, and the person was able to move forward with his life? What if he was given a chance to live with dignity, rather than be shunned into homelessness with the weight of the world’s disapproval on his shoulders? What if he was given employment and housing opportunities that enabled him to provide for himself rather than being buried under the weight of desperation for his basic needs? What if he didn’t have to carry such a burdensome financial obligation to the state for his monitoring and supervision? Would he still have chosen a path of self-destruction anyway?
What if this woman wasn’t fed the lie that the registry helps keep people safe? What if she was educated in the reality that the police can’t help prevent her from being a victim of a crime and took steps to ensure her own safety by being better prepared to respond and prevent being a victim of crime? What if she had been given self-defense training or was educated in the simple ways she can prevent being carjacked in the first place? Think of the trauma she could have avoided.
One thing we can be certain of is that we need a fundamental shift in the way we deal with the plague of crime. People are beginning to realize that the government is not your protector to shield you from being affected by crime (take a look at Haiti). They can only investigate and punish, and are not even very good at doing that. Innocent people are falsely linked with crimes and guilty parties escape justice. Worst of all, the system does nothing to address the roots of criminal behavior, mostly because it doesn’t understand it in the first place – why it happens and what the off-ramps are to steer people away from it.
When we realize that the solutions to crime lie elsewhere, we may begin to see real life change in the lives of both victims and offenders.
This man was in prison for 24 years which most likely makes him institutionalized in the first place then he is homeless. Like a lot of released individuals, who have committed any number of crimes that have large sentences, they find it so hard to readjust they will commit a crime just to go back to the environment they know, prison. Sadly, those stories do not get the proper attention they should in the media but a sex offender gets all the attention. Sentencing reform needs to happen to actually honor “truth in sentencing” laws.
There is a long list of children with laws named after them following their tragic murder, and these laws result in us paying the price for the rest of our lives for a crime we had nothing whatsoever to do with.