From: Jrtm Area: Mundane To: All 12 Dec 96 21:31:42 Subject: Sex Offenders UpdReq * Crossposted from: FIDO Civil Liberties Echo On Tuesday, December 10, the attorney general of Kansas went to the Supreme Court to argue for the constitutionality of applying, retrospectively, a law that would keep "dangerous" sex offenders in custody after their sentences are served. Specifically, the Kansas law would allow corrections officials to involuntarily commit a person, convicted of a sex crime, to a treatment facility -- indefinitely -- after his sentence ends, if he suffers a personality disorder or mental abnormality that makes him likely to commit sex crimes again. Now I'm not in favor of sex crimes, but neither am I in favor of this first cousin to _ex post facto_ legislation. We, the people (actually they, the people of Kansas), through elected representatives, decided at one time that the punishment for child sexual molestation was five to 20 years. By what right can the Kansas Legislature impose a virtual life sentence on someone who already was sentenced to a lesser term? Naturally, the case used to test this law is an extreme one, involving a human monster of sorts. Leroy Hendricks has been convicted five times of child molestation. He has admitted that he can't think of anything, short of his own death, that would keep him from doing it again if freed. Nevertheless, he was sentenced under the law to a term of years. That sentence is now over. He has done the time for the crimes he committed. Under the Kansas law that was passed while Hendricks was serving his latest sentence, though, he could now be involuntarily committed for "treatment" with a probability of being locked up forever, because of the probability that he'll commit another molestation in the future. The Kansas authorities are trying to incarcerate someone now for a crime to be committed later. Isn't that like Bill Cosby's joke that the Ferrari is so fast that when you buy it, you're automatically given ten speeding tickets? How about passing a law that says, if you have ever had a parking ticket in the past, next time you get one, your car gets confiscated because, if you keep it, you'll just keep getting tickets? How about having the municipal court giving life sentences in prison to every person convicted of minor assault, if they've ever been in a fight before? Could the courts start making every person who's been caught in arrearages on child support pay a $20,000 prepayment so they won't get behind again so fast? The law was held to be unconstitutional in 1994 by the Kansas Supreme Court, because it denies due process of law, among other reasons. Amazingly, in the Supreme Court argument, my favorite oxymoron, Justice Rehnquist, asked Hendricks's lawyer, "So what is the state supposed to do, just wait until he goes out and does it again?" With all due respect, Your Honor -- duh. That's what the criminal-justice system does; it punishes people who have gone out and committed crimes. We have judges, not psychics. We convict on evicdence, not precognition. Somewhere in America there is someone who will murder someone next week. We can't arrest him or her for that crime now. And if the legislature of a state wants to be so repressive as to imprison for life people who may be dangerous in the future, let it make its laws imposing such sentences -- but let them operate proactively only, on people who commit their crimes after the law is enacted, and not be applied to people who were given a finite sentence. Willy-nilly lengthening of sentences already pronounced is for countries like the Turkey of "Midnight Express" -- not any of the United States. Pax vobiscum. John Mitchell Post FUN!! BBS, FIDO 1:280/103, PODS 93:9301/5 estron@thirdwave.net ... Get a CD-ROM and run as many bytes as Bill Gates has dollars . . . 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718