Sex Crimes

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Massachusetts lawmakers are trying to give prosecutors the power to demand that juries (not judges) decide whether offenders nearing the end of their prison terms should be placed in a state treatment facility.  The proposal was filed a week after a convicted Level 3 sex offender was arrested on charges he raped a young boy in a  library.

The ABA Journal has an article about a child pornography case in which the images are allegedly password protected on the defendant's laptop computer that presents some interesting constitutional issues.

Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell's proposed to place a special imprint of the driver's license of registered sex offenders.   She proposed the idea during her annual State of the State address and said that it is an idea "worth a discussion."

Law enforcement officials in a South Carolina town are designing their plan to enforce a new ordinance that bans sex offenders from moving into town.  State Attorney General Henry McMaster says the rule would likely stand up in court if challenged.

Around the Web

CrimProf Blog reports that a federal judge has denied a motion to suppress statements made by a Pennsylvania woman charged with transmitting obscene materials.  The woman is charged with six counts of sending lewd stories describing the rape and killing of children.  She is the first person charged in the district in decades for wholly written obscenity.

FourthAmendment.com has a post concerning a California Court of Appeals case where circumstantial probable cause was sufficient in a child pornography case.  The case is People v. Nicholls and the opinion is available here.

Crime and Consequences reports that a New Hampshire Senator has sponsored a bill to expand the state's  death penalty. The current law allows the death penalty for "murder during a rape or kidnapping, killing a police officer or judge, murder for hire, a murder during a drug deal or by someone already serving life without parole." The Senator wants to expand the law to apply to multiple murders and attempted multiple killings.

Crime and Consequences also has an interesting post about the Japanese death penalty system. In Japan, the following crimes are death-eligible: (1) murder of a prior rape victim in retaliation for reporting the crime; (2) rape and murder in two separate cases; and (3) murder of two people and attempted murder of a third.

The South Carolina House has struck down a controversial provision of Jessica's Law and altered another.  The new law removes a mistake of age defense.  Sex between teenagers is now a misdemeanor punishable by up to three years in prison, but does not require inclusion in the state's sex offender registry.

A spokeswoman for the Office of the Ohio Public Defender has stated that she believes that the constitutionality of Ohio's Adam Walsh Act-compliant law "will end up in the Ohio Supreme Court."  Numerous lawsuits have been filed, including two class-action suits claiming that the law in unconstitutional.

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CNN is reporting that lawyers for Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) have asked a Minnesota appeals court to allow Sen. Craig to withdraw his guilty plea arising from a public restroom sex sting.

A California state panel has found that the state's anti-predator law has caused many unintended consequences, including forcing many paroled sex offenders into homelessness, making residential treatment facilities off-limits, and threatening to steer police assets away from the most dangerous sex criminals.

A South Carolina man was sentenced for molesting an 8-year-old girl.  The man's defense claimed that he was sleepwalking when he molested the child and that he had a history of sleepwalking.

A helpful reader pointed me to this very harsh editorial attacking Ohio's attempts to comply with the Adam Walsh Act.

A South Carolina town has approved an ordinance that would effectively ban registered sex offenders from moving to the town.

Around the Web

Feminist Law Professors has a post with some frightening statistics about sexual assault within the military.

A county in South Carolina is joined the growing trend of jurisdictions that allows people to sign up for e-mail notifications every time a sex offender registers in the the county.

A Montana high school student is now facing expulsion after someone discovered that he is a convicted sex offender.

An Idaho man was arrested on suspicion of child pornography possession.  The man had been convicted of child sex abuse in Georgia roughly 20 years ago.

A South Dakota man who pleaded guilty to third-degree rape, criminal pedophilia and two counts of sexual contact with young boys was sentenced to 60 years in prison.

A Better Candidate for Death

While I'm against the death penalty for child rape in all cases, I agree with Professor Berman that the Kennedy case is a particularly poor choice of a defendant to execute.  In the alternative, Berman suggests a case in South Carolina which would certainly make more sense for capital punishment:

Vinson Filyaw was sentenced to the maximum sentence of 421 years, served consecutively, for kidnapping a 14-year-old girl a year ago and sexually assaulting her in a dirt bunker for 10 days near Elgin. Filyaw pleaded guilty Tuesday to kidnapping, 10 counts of first-degree criminal sexual assault, two counts of second-degree criminal sexual assault, impersonating a police officer, possessing explosives and attempted armed robbery.

 

Filyaw, 37, posed as a police officer and handcuffed the girl last September as she walked toward her home from a school bus stop. He took her into the woods and kept her captive in a bunker booby-trapped with homemade explosives.  The girl escaped after using Filyaw’s phone to send her mother a text message, helping authorities find the bunker’s location.... Filyaw said the rape and kidnapping spurred from a grievance with the Kershaw County Sheriff’s Department over a separate charge of sexual assault on a 12-year-old girl from 2005.

I agree that not only from a moral perspective, but also a strategic one, this case would make a lot more sense for prosecutors to have used as the test case for capital child rape statutes.

Alleged Dungeon Rapist Goes Free

The dungeon rapist case resulted in a surprising verdict - not guilty.  From CNN:

A jury has acquitted a convicted sex offender of charges he raped two teen girls in an underground bunker.

The jury found Kenneth Glenn Hinson, 48, not guilty of kidnapping, sex crimes and assault with intent to kill.

Hinson wiped his eyes and mouth and appeared to cry after the jury read its verdict, which followed about four hours of deliberations over two days.

"I think the verdict says it all," he said as he was escorted from the courtroom.

Authorities had charged that Hinson snatched the 17-year-old girls from their bedroom last year and dragged them one at a time to the underground room hidden beneath a tool shed, where he raped and bound them with duct tape. Prosecutors said Hinson expected the girls to die because the room had no air supply.

However, Hinson testified during the six-day trial that the girls had consensual sex with him. He said they made up the story so they would be able to take drugs from the underground room, which he used to store marijuana.

The two young women were not in the courtroom when Hinson was acquitted. Their mothers and other relatives wept. They declined to comment after the verdict.

If convicted, Hinson had faced a mandatory life sentence without parole under the state's two-strikes law because he was convicted of raping a 12-year-old girl in 1991.

The underground room was about the length and width of a mid-sized car with a ceiling about 41/2 feet high. Hinson testified Sunday that he had built the room behind his trailer where he lived.

Defense attorney Rick Hoefer spent much of his nearly two-hour closing argument Sunday picking apart what he called inconsistencies in the teens' testimony, including how long it took them to call 911 after their alleged escape and whether they saw Hinson with a gun.

Prosecutors said any discrepancies in their stories might have been a result of the trauma the teens went through.

Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors is a bit surprised by the verdict: "I wasn’t in 'the dungeon,' nor in the courtroom while the case was tried, but based on media accounts of what happened, this verdict seems preposterous."

Crime and Consequences is also covering the story.

Jeralyn at TalkLeft has a post up as well.

I think a notable meme in this case was the last part of the media report: that the inconsistencies in the victims' stories ultimately led to the defendant being set free.  The prosecution, on the other hand, tried to portray the inconsistencies as the result of rape trauma.  This mirrors the arguments made in the Duke Lacrosse case on both sides.  However, with Duke, the end result was even more definitive in favor of the defendant.  I wonder how this meme will continue to play out in the development of rape narratives in future cases.  Certainly, we could see a continued growth of the idea that rape victims are inherently unstable and unreliable which would represent an extension of historical myths to the detriment of rape victims.  Either way, this could be a very central narrative structure in certain types of stranger rape cases in the future.