The defendant was released from TDC to a local rooming house. There he was situated near a day labor office. He has served the entirity of his sentence; he is not on parole. The defendant sexually assaulted another homeless man with a broken beer bottle. The defendant wrote down an incorrect address for the rooming house on his registration document (he registers evary ninety days); he was off by 2 blocks. When officers went to check on him they found he had not been at the residence for about a week-he ran out of money and could not pay for the room. W e allege incorrect address, failure to reside at the address reported and failure to notify of a move. I say he should have gone to the local shelter and registered as living there....and then done so. Defense counsel of course thinks I am mean and punishing the D for being poor. This case will end in a plea or a trial. I told the D counsel that I doubted a local jury would give a pass on a case like this one. I guess I will have to counter some sort of indigence defensive position. Ideas?

[This message was edited by BLeonard on 09-04-05 at .]

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He obviously has an obligation to report any change of address regardless of financial circumstances. It is almost a strict liability crime. Your offer on the case simply depends on whether you have something better to try.

The absolute last thing that we need is a new breed of sex offender. Lots of time on their hands and unable to be tracked. Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. I sure don't want someone like that roaming my neighborhood, and I assume no one else does either. Two choices come to mind: Do something about it, or be a haven for all similarly situated perverts.

The defendant is either pleading to pen time or getting a trial...no in-between. I was just curious as to how my colleagues would voir dire the case. I think Beck is right; after proper admonition regarding registration the defendant is strictly liable for not doing so.

As an aside: What will we do about the hundreds (thousands?) of sex offenders we just inherited due to the storm? Do you suppose they are registering from the shelters? Should our local agencies go to the shelters and set up for them to register? Will they plead impossibility if we do not?

I'm all for the idea of making any displaced sex offender registrants register in their refugee abodes, but how do you arrive at the conclusion that there are hundreds or thousands of sex offenders subject to registration among the refugees?

"...what will we do about the hundreds (thousands?) of sex offenders we just inherited due to the storm?"

Though I think you're estimate is high, I think the assumption is reasonable. Considering the rapes in the Superdome, there likely are offenders in the group.

On Tuesday, we arrested a woman at BP Douglas Park with a sack full of phenal barbitol. She was stoned on the meds and presenting it to sell. She arrived on Monday with the Refugees and was staying on the other side of town at the old Gainesville Memorial Hospital.

Maybe the thousand(s) number is a little high, but in a displaced population in the neighborhood of 250,000 I don't think it is fanciful to to figure that there are several hundred, if not a thousand.

In Tarrant County there are 190 sex assault probationers, not counting parolees or those who are off paper. A quick google of sex offenders in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana alone shows that there are 905 registrants, so thousands may not be too far off.

addendum

A closer look reveals that there may be as much as a 25% duplication rate in the data on Jefferson Parrish...say 650 registrants.

The question is not how many but what to do about the ones that are here. If I am not mistaken, some jails had to be thrown open as well. Look, let's be honest: among those good people displaced by the storm are some particularly violent criminals. New Orleans had 190 murders so far this year at the time the storm hit.

[This message was edited by BLeonard on 09-09-05 at .]

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It is my understanding, too, that a lot of these people do not have any IDs. So unless the State of Texas is prepared to obtain and run fingerprints on everyone of the refugees (and imagine the ACLU howls of protest here), I do not see how you could get the LA sex offenders to register. If I were in a shelter, I would not be willing to volunter the information that I am sex offender. And since I have no ID, or since I could claim I lost my ID in the storm, you would have no way of finding me out until I get caught doing something.

I remember hearing some noise from Austin about some bill that would keep sex offenders out of emergency shelters and instead allow them to "shelter in place" at a local jail or state prison. Judging from the news reports on the conditions of the LA and New Orleans jails, if I were a sex offender, that would be the last place that I would want to be (or locked up at the Greyhound Jail I mentioned in an earlier post). You would also probably end up with more people staying at home trying to weather it out if the only legal option would be a local jail for shelter.

So what do you do?

I understand that our CS/CD officers are headed to the local shelters tomorrow to see who will self-report that they either need to register or admit to being on probation.

addendum

NBC reports that there were 1123 registered sex offenders living within NOLA city limits.

[This message was edited by BLeonard on 09-12-05 at .]

[This message was edited by BLeonard on 09-12-05 at .]

I read on some news website (either CNN or MSNBC) that sex offenders in Florida, or at least the higher risk offenders, are required to ride out hurricanes in jail. They report to the jails before the storm hits and then are released after. What Austin may be proposing isn't totally crazy.