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Sat Nov 22 2008

Columns

Alexander Cockburn

Evil: the Quadruple Axel
February 22, 2002

The hoofprints of Lucifer are everywhere. And since this is America, eternally at war with the darker forces, the foremost Enemy Within is sex, no quarter given. Some bulletins from the battlefront:

In February 2000, Matthew Limon, who had just turned 18, had oral sex with a schoolmate, a boy just shy of 15. A Kansas court sentenced him to 17 years in prison, a punishment upheld by a federal court in February, even though, under Kansas law, had his partner been a girl, the sentence could not have been so severe.

Last July, Ohio sentenced 22-year-old Brian Dalton to seven years in prison because of sex fantasies he penned in his diary, and you can get decades in U.S. jails for possessing images created purely from imagination.

A woman teacher in Arizona on trial last month for a relationship with a 17-year-old boy faces 100 years in prison.

This brings us into an Olympian quadruple axel of evil: a sexually violent predator (familiarly known as an SVP) preying on a minor of the same sex. There's no quarreling between prosecutor and judge, jury and governor, and Supreme Court and shrinks. Lock'em up, and throw away the key. A few days ago I listened to Marita Mayer, an attorney in the public defender's office in Contra Costa county, describe the truly harrowing business of trying to save her clients, SVP's, from indeterminate confinement in Atascadero, the state's prison bin.

In California, as in many other states, SVP laws kicked in in the mid-1990s, the crest of the repressive wave provoked in part by hysteria over child sex abuse. The outfall of the aforementioned wave: mandatory minimum sentences, reduction or elimination of statutes of limitation, erosion of the right to confront witnesses, community notification of released sex offenders, surgical castration, and the prohibition of mere possession of certain printed materials.

Among Mayer's clients are men who pleaded guilty to sex crimes in the mid-1980s, mostly rape of an adult woman, getting a fixed term of anywhere from 10 to 15 years. In the good old days, if you worked and behaved yourself, you'd be up for parole after serving half the sentence.

But while these offenders were in prison, California passed its SVP law in January of 1996, decreeing that those falling into the category of SVP have a sickness that requires treatment and cannot be freed, until a jury agrees unanimously that they are no longer a danger to the community. (The adjudicators vary from state to state. Sometimes it's a jury, or merely a majority of jurors, sometimes a judge, sometimes a panel, sometimes a shrink.)

So Mayer's clients, serving out their years in Pelican Bay or Vacaville or San Quentin, counting down the months to parole date, suddenly find themselves back in jail in Contra Costa county, and are told they've got a mental disorder and can't be released till a jury decides they're no longer a danger to the community. Off to Atascadero they go for a two-year term, at the end of which they get a hearing, and it's almost always another two-year term.

"Many of them refuse treatment," Mayer says. "They refuse to sign a piece of paper saying they have a mental disease." Of course they do. Why sign a document saying that for all practical purposes you may well be beyond reform or redemption, that you are evil by nature, not just a guy who did something bad and paid the penalty?

It's the AA model of boozing as sin, having to say you are an alcoholic and will always be in that condition, one lurch away from perdition. Soon, everything begins to hinge on someone's assessment of your state of mind, your future intentions. As with the damnable liberal obsession with hate-crime laws, it's a nosedive into the category of "thought crimes."

So there the SVP's are in Atascadero surrounded by psych techs eager to test all sorts of statistical and behavioral models, phallometric devices designed to assist in the persuasion of judge and jury that yes, the prisoner has a more than 50 percent likelihood of exercising his criminal sexual impulses, should he be released.

Thus, by the circuitous route of "civil commitment" (confining persons deemed to be a danger to themselves or others), we have ended up with a situation that, from a constitutional point of view, is indeed absolutely evil: held in preventive detention or being locked up twice for the same crime.

"It's using psychiatry, like religion, to put people away," Mayer concludes. "Why not hire an astrologer or a goat-entrail reader to predict what the person might do? Why not the same for robbers as for rapists? What's happening is double jeopardy. If we don't watch it, it will come back to haunt us. People don't care about a child rapist, but the Constitution is about protections. I think it's shredding the Constitution.

"How do I feel about these guys? When I talk to my clients I don 't presume to think of what they'll do in future. I believe in redemption. I don't look at them as sexually violent predators, I see them as sad sacks; they have to register. They could be hounded from county to county. Even for a tiny crime they'll be put away. Their lives are in ruin; I pity them."

Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

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