Gov. Martin O'Malley will announce this week that he wants lifetime supervision of violent and repeat sex offenders, part of a flood of promised reforms in the wake of the murder of an 11-year-old Eastern Shore girl. A registered sex offender is charged with abducting Sarah Foxwell, whose body was found Christmas Day.
But as the Democratic governor introduces new proposals, some lawmakers want him to explain why get-tough laws already on the books have barely been used.
Emergency legislation from 2006 called for extra supervision of certain sex offenders, ranging from three years to a lifetime. Not a single person has been subjected to that extension, despite predictions it would affect at least 475 offenders every year.
That same measure created an advisory board to recommend overhauls of the entire sex offender system and issue its findings at the end of last year. The 13-member board was to include members of the governor's cabinet and citizens appointed by him.
The board has never met, and no report was produced.
Another law, enacted Oct. 1, 2007, requires judges to order mental health evaluations of all child sexual abusers at the time of sentencing as a way to help differentiate one-time offenders from dangerous predators.
Just two such evaluations have occurred, a tiny fraction of the people convicted of sexual abuse of a minor.
"It's worse than doing nothing," Del. Luiz R.S. Simmons, a Montgomery County Democrat, said of the little-used laws. "We have created the illusion that we are moving forward, when in fact we have been moving backward. It's as if we lost our weapon. We have a legislative weapon, and we put it in a drawer somewhere and forgot about it."
Such inaction stokes citizen cynicism that is especially potent in the current political climate, said John Bambacus, a former Republican state senator and emeritus political science professor at Frostburg State University. And with a gubernatorial campaign on the horizon, people are even more sensitive to election-year promises that yield no results.
"It's indefensible. This erodes confidence in the legislative process," he said. "Sex offenders - you can't find a more serious topic. It's not the kind of issue where you can fall asleep at the switch."
Aides to the governor say that many aspects of the 2006 legislation, which had been a top agenda item for Republican former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., were simply unworkable, if not outright illegal. They argue that O'Malley has made dramatic improvements to the supervision of sex offenders even without a board report.
If O'Malley were the type of official "who needed to wait for the recommendations of a board before taking action, then the fact that the board never met could be a problem," said Joseph C. Bryce, the governor's legislative affairs chief. "But he has never been that kind of person."
Shaun Adamec, a spokesman for the governor, said that under O'Malley's watch, sex offenders are now supervised by specially trained agents and are required to receive the strictest probationary terms. Many are monitored by global positioning ankle devices, with a zero-tolerance policy for violations.
O'Malley also dedicated resources to processing thousands of DNA samples which led to more matches on the database - and the arrest of numerous sex offenders - in the first eight months of his administration than in the previous eight years, Adamec said.
Aides outlined what they saw as problems with the 2006 legislation, saying the extended supervision provision, a responsibility given to the Maryland Parole Commission, seemed to trample the sentencing authority of judges. Public safety officials were advised that part of the law is unconstitutional, Bryce said.
And the sexual offender board, overseen by the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, didn't have enough people with expertise in sex offender treatment, the aides said, something the agency unsuccessfully tried to fix twice with more legislation.
"When [the governor] saw something that wasn't working, he went to the legislature to get it fixed," Bryce said. "I know of no better way to say to a legislative body that a law is nonfunctional than to put a bill in to fix it. The governor should be applauded for trying to fix a well-intentioned law that didn't work and couldn't work."
As for why just two mental health evaluations have been conducted on child sex offenders, despite the 2007 law requiring judges to order them, "We've sort of wondered why, as well," said W. Lawrence Fitch, director of forensic service for the state Mental Hygiene Administration.
Fitch said half a dozen psychologists on contract with the agency are trained to perform the evaluations. The state sentencing commission told Simmons that nearly 300 people have been convicted of sexual abuse of a minor in the past three years.
"We really don't know why we're not being called," Fitch said. "We can speculate ... it's possible the bench and the bar just don't know about the law."
The executive branch has no enforcement authority over state courts.
A spokesman for the Maryland court system did not return phone calls and e-mails requesting information Friday. Several Circuit Court-level judges, who did not want their names used, said they had no idea they were supposed to be ordering mental health evaluations of child sex offenders.
Some of the lawmakers who labored over the 2006 and 2007 proposals rejected the O'Malley administration's responses.
"This is complete spin on an incomprehensible failure on the part of the administration," Simmons said. "This is not about a particular governor. It's about the will of the Maryland General Assembly and the will of the public. ... There appears to be no interest in accepting any responsibility or requiring any accountability."
Del. Christopher B. Shank, a Washington County Republican who co-sponsored the mental health evaluation bill with Simmons and helped push through the 2006 legislation, called the reaction of the governor's office "major face-saving for an unconscionable dereliction of duty."
"The responsibility of the executive branch is to administer the laws we pass," Shank said, "not to pass judgment on them."
On Monday, O'Malley is expected to unveil his legislative agenda for the year, one that his aides said will directly address sex offender penalties.
The governor will seek lifetime supervision for anyone convicted of rape or attempted rape, repeat offenders and those convicted of sexual abuse of a minor, among other offenses. A violation of that supervision would result in more prison time without early release for good behavior.
Additionally, state public safety officials will ask for new regulations requiring registration for homeless sex offenders and juvenile offenders, and adding more crimes, including indecent exposure to a minor and possession of child pornography, to the list of offenses that land a convict on the state sex offender registry. Those proposals would bring Maryland into compliance with the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006.
O'Malley aides say the new proposals move the state well beyond the 2006 law that has lain dormant and would reactivate the Sexual Offender Advisory Board.
Lawmakers who wrote the legislation that created the board thought it would be a way for the state to conduct a sober, careful review of its sex offender laws after months of heated debates about whether to make longer sentences mandatory and restrict where offenders could live.
A more sweeping proposal failed in the regular session but was reintroduced at Ehrlich's request during a special session called to craft an electricity rate plan.
Ehrlich appointed members to the board just before leaving office after O'Malley defeated him in November 2006. Its chairman, former Prince George's County Sheriff James V. Aluisi, could not be reached Friday. The law states that the chairman is to call at least two meetings each year.
Simmons said he had no idea the board wasn't active and only inquired about it because he'd noted on his calendar that its report was due Dec. 31. About a week ago, he received an e-mail from an official in Public Safety saying that the board had never met.