A Montgomery County judge has signed orders that would allow Texas to reclaim two violent sex offenders banished a decade ago to Utah and Virginia, where they committed new sexual offenses.
State District Judge Michael Seiler on Tuesday signed writs of attachment for Lloyd Joseph Wilson, 44, and Melvin Cody Whipple, 58, ordering that they be placed back in Texas’ custody upon their release from prison or discharged from supervision in the states where they currently are serving lengthy sentences.
The Houston Chronicle in September revealed the two men had been banished from Texas in 2004, in apparent violation of the Texas Constitution, after they completed prison sentences for sex crimes.
The men agreed to the banishments as part of their assignment to the state’s civil-commitment program, which is designed to keep high-risk sex offenders in state custody even after they have completed their prison sentences.
Despite assurance from prosecutors that Texas still has jurisdiction over Whipple and Wilson after their releases in Utah and Virginia, experts have questioned whether the writs of attachment, a legal maneuver most commonly used in civil cases to seize or reclaim property, carry any legal weight.
“This seems to be more about public relations,” said Melissa Hamilton, a visiting criminal law scholar at the University of Houston Law Center, who specializes in the civil commitment of sex offenders. Because it is a civil matter, she said, the state may not have the same ability to retrieve a person as it does in criminal cases: “It’s not a tried and true legal maneuver.”
The 2004 orders — signed by two different judges despite a prohibition on banishment in the Texas Constitution — required Wilson to reside in Virginia and Whipple in Utah. The orders also required each man to send Texas’ Special Prosecution Unit, the state agency that prosecutes prison convicts, updates every 90 days on their addresses and information on sex offender treatment they were undergoing.
Wilson is serving a 30-year sentence in Virginia for the 2005 rape of a 16-year-old girl, and he is scheduled for release in November 2031. Whipple is serving a 15-year sentence in Utah on a 2008 conviction for fondling an 11-year-old boy after showing him pornography. His release is scheduled for 2022.
The banishment revelations were the latest to rock the state’s controversial civil-commitment program and its supervising agency, the Office of Violent Sex Offender Management. Since the program’s inception in 1999, more than 300 convicted sex offenders have been ordered into what is supposed to be a treatment program for people who suffer from a “behavioral abnormality” that makes them a continuing risk to society. Not a single detainee has been released for completing the treatment program in its 15-year history. Nearly half of the program’s detainees have been returned to prison or jail for violating program rules.
Erin Faseler, section chief for the civil division of Texas’ Special Prosecution Unit, filed the writs on Sept. 30 to ensure that Whipple and Wilson will be sent back to Texas or that the state has the opportunity to reclaim them when they are discharged from prison.
“They are under civil commitment,” she said. “Regardless of what the civil-commitment order said at the time, they are under civil commitment in Texas, so they should be in Texas for civil commitment.”
Houston attorney Bill Habern, who is familiar with the civil-commitment statutes, said he expects the writs to be challenged in court.
“This whole process is out of hand,” he said. “First, they banish these people from ever coming back to Texas, which was illegal as can be, and now they want to get them back through a writ of civil attachment like they’re still Texas’ property. That’s legally outrageous. I think they lost legal authority over them when they kicked them out of the state.”
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