California moving to “evidenced based” policies for Sex Offenders
California, which has the largest sex offender registry in the US, has been taking steps in the right direction over the past couple of years.
The State recently migrated towards a “tiered” system that would allow some registrants (those deemed “lower” risk to re-offend) to be removed from the registry eventually. While the plan wasn’t perfect, because it tiered people based on offenses rather than actual risk, California is now seeking to enact a new bill to help them introduce empirical evidence into their practices.
Senate Bill 1198 will establish a mandate for sponsoring research that will become the foundation for evidence-based laws.In addition the California Sex Offender Management Board would be expanded by two members with expertise in juvenile sex offending in order to review and recommend best practices and policies in the management of juveniles who sexually offend.
The migration will probably be a slow process, but at least things are moving in the right direction in California (and several other states).
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we are all vicious apes who want to step on other peoples feet or kill them, suppress them. It’s what makes us feel whole as an ape. Nothing, and I mean nothing will happen in Fl. It is “hang em high” territory.
The registery is bullshit and useless… If someone want to committ a crime he will do it… Registery or not…
I wonder whatever happened to the proposal that therapists and psychologists that conduct the court ordered therapy send to the state or that state board. I believe Jill Levenson was one of them. Did it fall on deaf ears ? pushed aside ? This was a while back, but the proposals were common sensibly good.
I remember this from a while back. One of the proposals was of course a risk assessment and the one that stood out for me was a post sentence relief from the registry if therapy was completed and the RC has no priors. It probably fell on deaf ears as as usual.
I wanted to share this with everyone. This is the hysteria that the public has, just over images!
When a Broward lawyer was convicted of possessing more than 1,000 child pornography photos and videos, which he viewed at home and at his law firm, he was sentenced to 17 ½ years in federal prison.
But earlier this month, in a growing trend, a federal judge in Fort Lauderdale also ordered David Rothenberg to pay a total of $142,600 in restitution to nine of the children who appeared in the disturbing digital images. Much of the material involved torture and extreme violence.
Though Rothenberg never met any of those nine victims, more and more judges are issuing rulings that recognize that he – and others like him – still caused them a significant amount of continuing harm.
Rothenberg, and other criminals who download child pornography via secretive online networks, are all links in “these complicated and sordid chains of exploitation,” Senior U.S. District Judge William Zloch wrote in his restitution order in the Rothenberg case.
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In the despicable world of child pornography, research shows the internet has dramatically increased the number of criminals who sexually abuse children, sometimes in particularly violent ways, then trade or share video and photographs of the exploitation online – and on-demand – with other people who derive pleasure from viewing it.
David Rothenberg, 48, formerly of Margate, is serving 17 1/2 years in federal prison for possession of child pornography. The ex-lawyer was recently sent to the Broward County jail system to face separate state charges he sexually abused an underage girl in Broward County. (Handout / Broward Sheriff’s Office)
Experts say most of the harm the children suffer is caused by the person, most commonly a family member or so-called friend, who sexually abused them and created a permanent record of it.
But victims of these kinds of crimes say the abuse continues – even after the main perpetrator is caught – because they can’t stop other people from viewing what happened over and over again.
One of the victims, who uses the pseudonym Vicky to try to protect her identity, is owed $9,000 for the one image that Rothenberg possessed of her.
“I live every day with the horrible knowledge that many people are watching the most terrifying moments of my life and taking grotesque pleasure in them … Unlike other forms of exploitation, this one is never-ending,” Vicky wrote in court records.
Vicky was sexually abused by a relative from the time she was 5 years old until she was 13, according to court and other records. When she was 17, she found out that images of her being abused had been widely shared online.
She describes the difference between the damage done to her by the initial abuser and the damage done by the people who download and view the pornographic images of her as the “difference between a contained, cancerous tumor and one that has metastasized and is spreading.”
Her distress grew after she learned that the explicit photographs of her are some of the most widely traded in the world.
“This was followed by men who had seen the pornographic images of her actually seeking her out in person and on social media,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Anita White wrote in court records.
Someone actually tracked down a more recent non-explicit photo of Vicky from Facebook and created a video that featured that photo and images of her abuse, which was also shared online, court records show.
Some victims report that they have been recognized in public by people who viewed pornographic images of them online. Most need medical treatment and ongoing therapy to help them overcome the psychological damage that was inflicted on them. Many say they suffer severe stress and panic attacks when someone looks at them for a little too long in public because they fear that the stranger has seen them online and may want to harm them.
“A lot of people are under the impression that these are just pictures,” said Carol Hepburn, a Seattle attorney who represents Vicky and other victims of child pornography. “They don’t understand that these are crime scene photos – and videos – that show children being raped and crying out in pain, that are being circulated again and again and again for other people’s sexual gratification.”
Every time law enforcement catches anyone who creates, distributes or possesses child pornography, investigators seize every video and photograph and send them to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va. Each image is analyzed and compared to databases of known victims and images of unknown victims are reviewed for clues that might lead to the victims and their abusers being identified.
Victims, or their attorneys, can request to be notified every time their images are discovered in the possession of a new offender and can request restitution from each person who is convicted. But there are so many copies of the photos and videos that it’s impossible to stop them from being shared online.
“I think the ages of the victims in child pornography cases are getting younger and younger, especially since I first started working in this field over 14 years ago,” said James T. Lewis, the FBI agent who supervises the agency’s Child Exploitation Task Force in South Florida. “With young people having smart phones at an earlier age, it makes them more vulnerable to sexual predators. These predators also seem to using advanced technology and social media apps to hide and trade their collections child pornography.”
Lewis said his agents try to focus on people who produce child pornography, people who trade large volumes of illegal images and offenders who hold positions of authority and trust.
Experts who evaluate the harm victims have suffered use mathematical formulas to try to calculate the anticipated cost of their counseling, the mental and emotional setbacks they suffer, the loss of future earnings and the other effects of the ongoing damage.
“The victims have a great need for therapy just to enable them to get up in the morning and leave the house,” Hepburn said. “Many of them have physical and psychological injuries and suffer a lifelong loss of income.”
The numbers involved in Vicky’s case are astounding.
At least 660 defendants, including Rothenberg, have been convicted of possessing pornographic images of Vicky that they either downloaded online or obtained from other criminals, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
And more than 800 restitution orders – totaling more than $850,000 – have been issued by judges who ruled that Vicky is owed compensation. The average amount of those financial judgments was approximately $1,280, according to court records.
But Vicky’s attorney, Hepburn said those restitution orders don’t amount to anything like a payday for the victims.
Hepburn said she represents about a dozen victims. The youngest client was 2 years old at the time of the abuse and is now 8 and her oldest client is in her 30s and was abused when she was a child, Hepburn said.
Hepburn and James Marsh, a New York attorney who also represents child pornography victims, said the actual collection rate for the victims they represent is about 10 percent of what they are owed. That’s partly because many of the offenders are serving lengthy prison terms and have little or no assets and it can be complicated to try to collect the debts.
“A court could order $10 billion in restitution from a homeless defendant and the victim would never see a dime,” Marsh said. Records show that less than one-third of federal child pornography convicts were ordered to pay restitution, he said.
Victims’ advocates support proposed legislation, which has stalled, that would establish a minimum amount of damages for different levels of child pornography offenses, make enforcement more uniform, and simplify the whole process for victims.
Critics say the process is arbitrary and punishes some offenders, who are less culpable, more than they deserve because the issue is a hot-button one.
More judges nationwide are ordering offenders to pay restitution in these cases and the amounts of restitution awarded are also increasing. Justice Department statistics show that more than $10.6 million worth of fines and restitution were ordered last year, compared to $7.5 million in 2015 and $5.4 million in 2014. The number of people convicted of child pornography offenses remained steady, with slightly more than 1,900 convictions in each of the three years.
In Judge Zloch’s order in the Rothenberg case, he wrote that he followed a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that left it to each judge’s individual discretion to try to evaluate the relative level of responsibility that each defendant bore for the ongoing damage to the victim.
The judge ordered Rothenberg to pay amounts ranging from $3,000 to $42,600 to each of the nine identified victims.
There is no evidence that Rothenberg, 48, formerly of Margate, shared any of these particular images with other people, according to court records. He was arrested, pleaded guilty and sentenced last year in the federal child pornography case.
Rothenberg, who has been disbarred, is still facing separate state charges that he sexually abused an underage girl in Broward County. If convicted of those offenses, he could face life in prison and any punishment imposed would have to be served after his 17 ½ years in federal prison.
Big J That’s all very interesting and I have never seen anything like what your describing nor did I know it even existed and I don’t think I’m any better off knowing it. I don’t know why your bringing it up on this web page , the people your talking about are in prison and not reading this sight. You must think your a really important person for knowing about all that. That stuff has absolutely nothing to do with the sex offender registry so what’s the point.
My “victim” was my then 17 yr old girlfriend (we were legal by FL statute) who had a friend take photos of her then stored them on a shared computer where she edited them, intending to give them to me as a gift for Valentine’s Day. I never even saw them. But now I’m SO for CP. CP of someone I was legally involved with and never saw the photos. I’d like to think my case is a poster child for measured sentences and judicial discretion. But instead I’m lumped in with people that have thousands of photos of small children being tortured and abused.