Commentaries on the issue: A policy perspective

Abstract

On July 29, 1994, Jesse Temmendequas invited seven-year-old Megan Kanka into his home to see his puppy. Once inside, Timmendequas forced Megan into his room, strangled her with a belt, and sexually assaulted her. She died from asphyxiation. Only after death did authorities reveal that Timmendequas had two previous convictions for child abuse. Timmendequas had been sentenced to ten years at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center, known as Avenel. With time off for good behavior, Timmendequas was released after serving only six years. At the time of murder, Timmendequas lived across the street from the Kankas with two other convicted sex offenders whom he had met at Avenel. The outrage of community members that convicted sex offenders could live anonymously in their communities led to the passage of Megan's in New Jersey. In 1990, Washington State enacted its Community Protection Act(1) after a seven-year-old Tacoma boy was lured into a wooded area by a recently released sex offender who orally and anally raped the boy and then cut off his penis. The man had a twenty-four-year record of assaults on young people, including the kidnapping and assault of two teenage girls and involvement in the murder of a fifteen-year-old schoolmate.(2) Registration of sex offenders with police is relatively unproblematic.(3) It is Community notification that has sparked the greatest controversy. In arguments before New Jersey's Supreme Court, lawyers opposed to Law criticized the law as stigmatizing and humiliating for offenders. They also said it was punitive, increasing the punishment to which offenders had originallly been sentenced, and was therefore unconstitutional.(4) In addition, they said that the law was an invasive measure that infringed the privacy and liberties of convicted sex offenders who had supposedly paid their debt to society. Other commentators point out that the stigma attached to sex offenders by society, and reinforced by notification laws, interferes with their ability to find jobs and places to live and to resume a normal life. Whatever the merit of these objections as a matter of law--an issue leave to those with legal backgrounds--they do not have much moral force. As mother, Maureen Kanka, expressed it, I have a dead little girl. How can they sit there and worry about if it's punishment? What about our kids? That's ultimately what it comes down to. Our kids have rights and it's time someone started addressing them.(5) It seems to me that Mrs. Kanka has framed the issue correctly. When a little boy has been raped and had his penis cut off, or when a little girl has been raped and murdered, worry about humiliating the people who committed these crimes seems a little overly sensitive. start then with the assumption that the paramount issue is the protection of children, that their rights to be safe from violent assault certainly outweigh the rights of predators not to be stigmatized. The trouble is that notification laws will not protect children. They are at best ineffective and at worst create a false sense of security that may actually expose children to risk. In addition, there is the danger of vigilantism that risks harming innocent bystanders and is contrary to the rule of law even when directed at the guilty. First, Law focuses on a tiny percentage of those who commit crimes against children, namely, dangerous strangers. Between seventy-five and eighty-nine percent of child abuse is committed by relatives and friends.(6) Yet Law explicitly targets for community notification predators whose sexual preference is for minor children outside his or her immediate family.(7) Thus, it fails to protect children from the most common kind of abuse, that inflicted by friends and relatives. Indeed, such laws may promote a false sense of security, lulling parents and kids into the big-bad-man mindset when many molesters are in fact trusted authority figures or family members. …