Tag: Civil Commitment

IA: Audit says employee at Iowa sex offense treatment unit falsified husband’s work hours to collect more than $50,000

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[msn.com – 6/2/21] Iowa’s sex offense treatment facility is facing questions over falsified time card records said to have netted an employee and her husband more than $52,000 in unearned income. For more than a year, the administrative assistant manipulated records to show her husband — a part-time employee of the facility — was working at times he wasn’t, according to an investigation released Wednesday by the state auditor’s office. Over about 18 months, Renae Rapp was able to orchestrate at least $52,618.19 in excessive pay for her husband, Adam,…

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CA: Sexually Violent Predator Must Move Out Of Napa, Court Rules

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[patch.com – 3/30/21] NAPA COUNTY, CA — As a result of a hearing Monday in San Francisco Superior Court, a convicted sexually violent predator living in Napa County must be transferred to San Francisco County, Napa County District Attorney Allison Haley announced in a news release. Charles Leroy _____, 76, was released in September 2020 to live at 4018 E. 3rd Ave. in Napa County, where for six months he lived in close proximity to two schools and within a one-mile radius of 62 children, the Napa County District Attorney’s…

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MN: Case challenging constitutionality of the Minnesota Sex Offender Program can move forward

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[yahoo.com – 2/24/21] A protracted case challenging the constitutionality of Minnesota’s system for treating sex offenders outside prison has gained new life after a federal appeals court in St. Louis ruled that claims contesting the program’s unusual conditions of confinement can move forward. In a decision released Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit determined that allegations that clients of the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) were subjected to improper punishment and inadequate treatment should proceed. The decision sets the stage for another…

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TX: ‘Left to die’: Therapists say Texas sex offender treatment program too often fails on purpose

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[houstonchronicle.com 2/11/21] Texas’s civil commitment program for sexually violent offenders has earned a reputation as an unforgiving place. Much of that is by design. Each of the 378 men in it has already served his full prison term, some 20 years or longer. After their sentences were up, Texas evaluated them as too likely to re-offend, however, so they were ordered kept locked up indefinitely until ready to rejoin the free world. Their average age is nearing 60. The program’s sole facility, a collection of low buildings and temporary trailers,…

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MN: Civil Commitment of Sex Offenders Pretends Prisoners Are Patients

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[reason.com – 2/10/21] The practice evades constitutional constraints by casting punishment and preventive detention as treatment. Jacob Sullum | 2.10.2021 12:01 AM “It was my understanding that I was to do the treatment, then be released,” says Mike Whipple, who recently participated in a 14-day hunger strike at the Minnesota Sex Offender Program’s facility in Moose Lake. “Twelve years later, I’m still here, doing the same thing, over and over and over.” So far the civil commitment program has incarcerated Whipple three times longer than the prison sentence he served.…

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MN: Sex offenders at Moose Lake end 14-day hunger strike after reaching deal with state officials

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[bringmethenews.com – 2/5/21] A group of men at the Minnesota Sex Offender Program’s Moose Lake facility have ended their hunger strike after nearly two weeks. The group went on strike Jan. 21, demanding a “clear path” for release from the program, which has facilities in Moose Lake and St. Peter, where “treatment is a death sentence” because despite serving their prison sentences, they’re remanded to the facilities for an unspecified amount of time, a news release says. The group of about a dozen men called off their hunger strike Wednesday…

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New Zealand considers striking down civil commitment: Human rights test case for post-sentence detention and restrictions

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[stuff.co.nz – 2/2/21] A public safety law potentially amounting to a life sentence, was double-punishment for past crimes, the Court of Appeal has been told. A rare “full bench” of five judges was hearing a test case on Tuesday about the rights of mostly sex offenders who had finished their sentences but were still subject to restrictions, including three detained on prison grounds indefinitely under public protection orders. But the case was also about the hundreds of people under extended supervision orders after their sentences because they were believed to…

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VA: Virginia lawmakers squash repeal of civil commitment law

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[13newsnow.com – 1/28/21] RICHMOND, Va. — Virginia lawmakers have squashed a proposal to repeal a decades-old Virginia law that allows the state to hold certain sex offenders at a psychiatric facility after they complete their criminal sentences. Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday voted to send the bill to the Virginia State Crime Commission for a study, ending its chances of being passed this year. Democratic Sen. Joe Morrissey was the lead patron of the bill. He argued that the current system is unfair and punishes offenders twice…

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VA: Virginia bill would end civil commitment of sex offenders

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[abcnews.go.com – 1/19/21] RICHMOND, Va. — Two Virginia Democratic lawmakers are spearheading a push to repeal a decades-old law that allows the state to hold certain sex offenders at psychiatric facilities indefinitely after their criminal sentences if they are deemed “sexually violent predators.” Critics say civil commitment laws are fundamentally unfair and violate the constitutional prohibition against punishing someone twice for the same crime. Supporters counter that the laws protect society from repeat offenders who are unable to control their behavior. Sen. Joe Morrissey and Del. Patrick Hope, both Democrats,…

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MN: Sex offenders at Moose Lake protest harsh conditions after deaths from COVID-19

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[startribune.com – 1/18/21] Outbreak fuels long-simmering tensions over civil commitment after sentences. A group of sex offenders at a northern Minnesota treatment center is refusing to attend therapy sessions, while others are wearing black clothing as a show of solidarity, amid growing unrest after three men housed there died and scores more were sickened by the novel coronavirus. The acts of defiance were organized to call attention to what offenders see as poor infection-control practices and the historically low rate of release from the state’s prisonlike treatment centers in Moose…

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MN: Third COVID death at Moose Lake sex offender facility

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A client housed in a Minnesota sex offender treatment facility has died from COVID-19, state officials said Monday. Friday’s death at the Moose Lake facility is the third COVID-related fatality in the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) since the pandemic surfaced early last year in Minnesota. “We mourn his passing and extend our deepest sympathy to those who loved him and called him friend,” according to a statement from Human Services Commissioner Jodi Harpstead, whose agency runs the program. “The toll the pandemic continues to take in human lives is…

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Taiwan: Justices urged to keep forced treatment of molesters [Updated 12/31]

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[taipeitimes.com – 12/31/20] Victims’ rights groups and lawmakers yesterday urged the Council of Grand Justices to uphold the involuntary psychiatric treatment of sex offenders as the council is to hand down a ruling on the practice today. … Should the council rule against involuntary treatment, the government would have to set free 68 sex offenders — 57 at the Pei Teh Hospital and 11 at the Tsaotun Pschyatric Center — Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Sandy Yeh (葉毓蘭) told a news conference in Taipei. Sex offenders have a high recidivism…

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New Zealand: Sex offender on preventive detention comes round to ‘path to integration

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[stuff.co.nz – 12/1/20] A prisoner serving the harshest available sentence for sexual offending against children is “open to a graduated path of reintegration” and has been encouraged to get all the experience he can working outside of prison. The Parole Board saw Ivan James Wilson at Tongariro Prison last month. Wilson, 39, was given the open-ended jail term of preventive detention in Gisborne, in August 2010, for sex offences against a young male. … Wilson’s security classification was low, but was about to be reduced to minimum shortly after the…

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Williams Institute report : Over 6,000 people are civilly committed in the US

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[williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu – 10/2020] Black men and men with male victims are more likely to be committed Twenty states, the federal government, and D.C. have laws that allow for the indefinite detention of sex offenders designated as a “Sexually Violent Person” or “Sexually Violent Predator” (SVP) beyond the term of their incarceration. This report explores the implications civil commitment laws have for Black and sexual minority communities. In the 1990s and 2000s, federal lawmakers and legislators in 20 states and the District of Columbia passed laws that allow for the detention…

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IL: Inside the Endless Nightmare of Indefinite Detention Under “Civil Commitment”

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[inthesetimes.com – 8/19/20] In June 2019, after serv­ing more than 29 years in Illi­nois pris­ons, Otis Arring­ton expect­ed to be released to free­dom: He had fin­ished his time, which he describes as dif­fi­cult and trau­mat­ic, and his exit date was pend­ing. But three days before he was slat­ed to get out, Arring­ton says he was informed that he would, instead, be placed under a new form of con­fine­ment — one with no end date, met­ed out after he had already com­plet­ed the pun­ish­ment imposed by the crim­i­nal courts. “I was sup­posed to get out, and…

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NJ: Obscure New Jersey ‘Treatment’ Facility Has A Higher COVID-19 Death Rate Than Any Prison In The Country

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[theappeal.org – 6/4/20] With its innocuous name, the Special Treatment Unit (STU) sounds like a hospital. It’s a building in Avenel, New Jersey, housing 441 “residents,” as it calls them. It has what state officials have described as a “comprehensive treatment program” with cognitive behavioral therapy delivered by mental health experts. But the STU is actually a prison in all but name—it’s run by the state’s Department of Corrections and located on the grounds of the East Jersey State Prison. So-called residents live there involuntarily, often for decades on end,…

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The Truth Could Set Them Free

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Why did California destroy research into a group of people it says are dangerous enough to be locked up indefinitely? In late 2006, a public defender went before a Napa County judge to argue for his client’s freedom. ____ _____, a 49-year-old man, had been detained for seven years at Atascadero State Hospital under a 1995 California law authorizing “civil commitment” of people who have been convicted of sex offenses, a practice that keeps them confined long after they have completed their sentences. Full Article

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NY: Sex offenders form PAC to try and gain political voice

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[timesunion.com – 10/14/19] Voting blocs, where people support candidates on specific issues, have long played an outsized role in New York politics – from labor unions that focus on workplace rules, to environmentalists who place clean air and water at the top of the list. But now an unusual bloc is emerging from an unexpected place: the locked sex offenders unit at one of the state’s major psychiatric hospitals. Convicted sex offenders at Central New York Psychiatric Center are joining a PAC, or political action committee, which could conceivably raise…

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