Compromise Emerging Over Confinement of Sex Predators

ALBANY – After rounds of fruitless negotiations, state lawmakers are finally moving closer to a bipartisan compromise on the politically sensitive issue of civil confinement of sexual predators.The Democratic-controlled Assembly is showing a willingness to change its civil confinement bill by restricting the sentencing options given to juries that have determined convicted sex offenders are mentally ill sexual predators.The Assembly bill, to which Republican senators have objected vociferously, gives jurors the option of sentencing sexual predators released from prison either to indefinite confinement in a special mental health facility or to “strict and intensive” supervision. Senate negotiators have denounced the supervision alternative as a deal-breaker, vowing to terminate discussions unless the Assembly backs down and removes the option from its bill.A compromise plan is emerging that would remove the option of supervision and thereby force jurors to sentence a sexual predator to civil confinement. Under a proposed plan that was gaining traction yesterday, however, lawmakers would pass a separate law mandating that convicted sex offenders not deemed to be sexual predators remain under super strict supervision while on parole. The supervision under the compromise plan would be outside the realm of civil confinement and would be part of the offender’s original criminal sentence.The plan offers the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, an escape hatch from what could develop into a political liability this election season. The more the Democrats delay in settling their differences with Republicans on civil confinement, the greater the risk they run being portrayed as soft on sexual predators, lawmakers say.Sexual predators as defined by lawmakers are people who have committed a felony sex offense and who suffer from mental abnormalities. Under the proposed bills, a sex offender can be committed to a mental ward for an indefinite period of time with annual reviews if a jury finds the person to be a sexual predator “beyond a reasonable doubt.” New York would be the 17th state in the nation to adopt civil confinement for sexual predators.Details of the plan have yet to be fully fleshed out, but both sides told The New York Sun yesterday that they would consider supporting the plan’s basic concept. Lawmakers are expected to resume the joint conference committee meetings, which are used to settle especially contentious issues, when they return from break after next week.“There’s a basis for compromise that exists,” said Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, a Democrat who represents a district in Brooklyn and is a co-chairman of the conference committee on civil confinement. “There are problems with it, but maybe we can make it constitutional.” He said it would be more likely that supervision as an additional punishment for sex offenders would pass constitutional muster if it did not apply to people already convicted of crimes, but instead applied to future sentences.“We would probably move in that direction as well,” a Republican senator of Brooklyn who is a member of the conference committee, Martin Golden, said.Republicans during negotiations repeatedly expressed a fear that if given a choice, jurors would go easy on sexual predators during sentencing and would vitiate the civil confinement legislation. By yesterday’s meeting, the fourth held by the conference committee, Republicans said they were on the brink of halting negotiations.“What brought us to a standstill was really one central issue, and that is the issue of civil confinement,” a senator of Erie County who is the other co-chairman of the committee, Dale Volker, said. “The whole concept of this process is civil commitment of sexually violent predators. If the jury decides by a unanimous vote beyond a reasonable doubt that the person is a sexually violent predator, we believe that the person should be civilly confined,” he said.

Compromise Emerging Over Confinement of Sex Predators

Compromise Emerging Over Confinement of Sex Predators

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