They Served Their Time for Sex Crimes. The State Won’t Let Them Go.
Great article in the NY Times today about civil commitment. Here’s an excerpt:
In 1996, Rodney Roberts was working two jobs, one as a paralegal and another as a salesman in a men’s store, and living in a Montclair, N.J., apartment with his young son, when a teenager was sexually assaulted in Newark.
Seventeen days later, officers with the East Orange Police Department arrested Mr. Roberts, who, as a younger man, had been convicted of conspiracy to commit rape.
They held him for a more than a month after investigators with the Newark Police Department added his mug shot to a lineup and asked the teenager whether she recognized any of the men as her attacker. She picked Mr. Roberts out of the lineup, they said.
Prosecutors charged him with rape and kidnapping. His public defender advised him to plead guilty to kidnapping, saying he would serve less prison time than if he went to trial for both crimes and was found guilty. Mr. Roberts followed the advice, and the sex assault charge was dropped. He received seven years in prison.
Still, when asked, he maintained his innocence, and the parole board denied him early release in 1998, 2000 and 2003, saying he refused to take responsibility for the crime.
By 2004, he was about to be reunited with his family when the attorney general’s office petitioned to have him committed to the Special Treatment Unit. Records show that the doctor who evaluated him determined that he did not have any particular urge to commit sexual assault. But the doctor recommended him for the unit anyway, saying he was likely to reoffend because of his arrogance and refusal to accept responsibility for his crime.
Mr. Roberts spent the next 10 years at the center, receiving no treatment, he said. Still, once a year, a panel evaluated him and ruled that he was too dangerous to go free.
Then a DNA test of evidence in his case showed that Mr. Roberts had never committed the rape in the first place. In 2014, New Jersey set aside the finding that he was a sexually violent predator and released him from the unit.
Mr. Roberts sued the state the following year for the wrongful conviction and commitment. More than a decade later, his case is still pending.
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This was certainly a a major travesty that should be looked into further. But this happens to black people daily and now you know how we feel being prosecuted for crimes we never committed and jailed forevermore just for being black in America.
Everything failed for Rodney Roberts, and in that light, everything continues to fail for Americans. There is no end in sight, no body to intervene, no leader to effect change, no coalition of associations, body of Congress, no effective special interest group. In the area of criminal justice reform, we have no leadership, beginning because the public is convinced in the guilt of anyone processed by this system.
Too much of the debate on criminal justice reform gets hijacked by slogans like “defund the police,” when the real need is targeted, structural reform across the whole system—especially in the parts no one likes to talk about. Police reform is important, yes, but standardizing use of force and cracking down on overused or abusive tactics like no-knock raids and civil forfeiture is more realistic and productive than blanket attacks on law enforcement.
But where you’re really hitting the nail is with the courts and prosecutors. That’s where most of the injustice hides. Prosecutors who suppress evidence or coerce plea deals ruin lives, and they almost never face consequences. The plea bargain system has become a conveyor belt for guilty verdicts, not justice. And you’re right—when courts develop patterns of poor judgment or bias, there’s no real system for calling that out or correcting it. That’s dangerous.
The post-punishment phase is even worse. Sex offender management is a disaster—more focused on endless punishment than real safety or reintegration. And prisons are still operating like warehouses for future crime, not places to prepare people to return to society.
In short, real reform should target:
• Police practices: standardization, accountability, demilitarization—not defunding.
• Prosecutorial misconduct: consequences for evidence tampering, lying, and abuse.
• Judicial oversight: tracking and correcting poor patterns in sentencing and rulings.
• Sentencing: fairer, more transparent, less tied to plea deal leverage.
• Reentry and rehabilitation: realistic support for returning citizens.
• Sex offender laws: total overhaul grounded in science and fairness, not fear.
Great write up. The one big problem with the prosecutorial portion is lawyers are guarding the hen house so to speak when it comes to meting out justice towards their fellow lawyers. The bar is set very high for them to even consider it. As one who tried, put together a great package for their review, they denied it because a court had not considered it. A court wouldn’t consider it because the Bar Assn hadn’t considered it. So, unless it is so obvious of a Brady violation, for example, the Bar Assn won’t rat out their own. Once they are no longer protected by their own, much like LE protects their own, and they are truly reviewed by those who can inflict change, it is a hard hill to charge.