The kidnapping and killing in December of 11-year-old Eastern Shore girl Sarah Foxwell was horrible enough by itself to spur Maryland's lawmakers to action — the man accused of the crime had been convicted of a series of sex crimes against girls and young women but had always eluded serious jail time. Throw in the fact that the crime occurred just before the General Assembly returned to Annapolis for an election-year session, and it's no surprise that more than 75 bills to crack down on sex offenders were introduced this year. With few people willing to stick up for sex offenders, the risk appeared to be not that the legislature would fail to act but that it might go too far.
But a curious thing happened in Annapolis this year. For the first time in the several years that the legislature has been working to tighten sex offender laws, a vocal group of people — often family and friends of people who have been caught up in sex offender registries — began to push back. They said that people who are listed as sex offenders are not all created equal and that many regret their crimes and have gone on to law-abiding lives but live in fear that neighbors or employers will find out about their past. In particular, the legislature faced resistance to the idea that new reporting requirements for sex offenders would be applied retroactively and stigmatize people who pose no threat to the community. Sex offender laws should be more narrowly crafted, they argued, to target the most serious, violent, repeat offenders, not those who committed relatively minor offenses many years ago.
To a remarkable degree, the package of legislation approved by the House of Delegates accomplishes that.
Combining bills offered by Gov. Martin O'Malley with others sponsored by lawmakers from both parties, the legislation would expand registration to include some non-violent offenses, but it changes the state's registry to make it easier for citizens to get a true picture of the risk posed by those who are listed. It would adopt a new federal standard to list offenders in three tiers depending on the severity of their offenses and would include a plain-language description of the crimes. The amount of information the state would collect would expand, but it would be easier for citizens to make sense of it.
The package of legislation, some of which is still pending in the Senate, also calls for the creation of a juvenile sex offender registry, which would be available only to law enforcement officials.
What's particularly important about the proposed system is that it is a first step toward national standardization of how sex offenders are tracked. In the case of Sarah Foxwell, the most serious offenses committed by Thomas J. Leggs Jr., the man charged in her murder, were committed in Delaware. Mr. Leggs was listed as a sex offender in Maryland, but in Delaware, where he had pleaded guilty to raping a minor in 2001, he was deemed "high risk." If this new law is enacted and other states follow the federal guidelines, offenders won't be able to shop around for the least restrictive states, and if an offender moves, his new state will know immediately how to classify him.
Other legislation might also have led to more restrictions for Mr. Leggs. One bill would expand the circumstances in which evidence of past sex crimes could be brought up as evidence at trial. In Mr. Leggs' case, they were not, which might help explain why he was frequently able to plead to lesser offenses and avoid serious jail time.
Another O'Malley administration bill calls for lifetime supervision of serious repeat sexual offenders. They would be required to accept measures such as GPS monitoring and polygraph tests, measures that have proven effective in all but eliminating recidivism. In addition, legislation approved by the House would eliminate good behavior credits for serious sex offenders; require a judge, instead of a district court commissioner, to decide whether a sex offender should be eligible for pre-trial release; and increase the mandatory minimum penalty for second-degree rape or second-degree sexual offense against a child younger than 13 from 5 years to 15 years. A Senate version of the legislation would increase the minimum to 20 years.
The cautionary note about all this legislation is that it is only as good as the administration's execution of it. Tougher sex offender laws passed during a special legislative session in 2006 was essentially forgotten. A sex offense advisory panel never met, and legislation requiring extended supervision of some offenders was never used. The O'Malley administration says both bills were flawed, and new legislation moving through the General Assembly fixes and expands those laws. But if those laws were unworkable or potentially unconstitutional, it should not have taken four years for the administration to do something about it. Our leaders need to be held accountable to make sure they don't just pass laws to look tough on sex offenders but that they actually do something about it.