By Josiah and Randall . . . We are writing on behalf of the statewide Pennsylvania Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws to express our deep concern over State Representative Ryan Warner’s proposal to allow the death penalty for individuals convicted of child sexual offenses. While protecting children is a cause we all share, this proposal is fraught with ethical, legal, and practical problems that demand our attention.

The problem with capital punishment

First, capital punishment is irreversible, and the criminal legal system is not infallible. Numerous cases have shown that innocent people can and do face wrongful convictions, particularly in highly emotional cases like sexual offenses. A single mistake under such legislation would have catastrophic and irrevocable consequences.

Moreover, harsher penalties can have unintended effects on victims themselves. Studies indicate that extreme punishments, such as the death penalty, may discourage victims who oppose capital punishment from coming forward. This is especially true when the perpetrator is someone they know — as is true with 93% of sexual harm cases. Instead of supporting victims, this policy risks silencing them and compounding their trauma.

Beyond these ethical concerns, Rep. Warner’s proposal directly conflicts with established legal precedent. In Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for crimes where the victim does not die is unconstitutional. Attempting to circumvent this binding precedent would embroil Pennsylvania in costly legal battles while offering no real benefit to public safety.

Additionally, the death penalty is a punishment that disproportionately affects marginalized communities. Economic and racial inequities plague its application, ensuring that the wealthy and privileged are better able to escape its consequences while vulnerable populations bear the brunt of this ultimate sanction.

Even law enforcement officials have raised red flags about this proposal. Beaver County District Attorney Nate Bible has warned that imposing the death penalty for child rape might incentivize perpetrators to kill their victims to avoid detection. This tragic consequence would only heighten the danger to children rather than protect them.

A Better Way

PARSOL believes there is a better way. By expanding prevention programs, increasing support for survivors, and ensuring fair sentencing that balances accountability with the possibility of rehabilitation, we can address the root causes of sexual abuse while upholding justice and human dignity.

Protecting children is too important to be undermined by measures that defy constitutional principles, ethical norms, and practical realities. We urge lawmakers to reject this dangerous proposal and to pursue evidence-based reforms that safeguard our communities.

A call to Pennsylvanians to Act

We encourage all Pennsylvanians to contact their legislators to oppose proposal.

Josiah Krammes and Randall Hayes are co-chairs of Pennsylvania RSOL. NARSOL’s Affiliate in Pennsylvania and can be found at @PARSOLOfficial

Published first in the Scranton Times Tribune and several other publications.

The post The case against capital punishment for child sex abuse first appeared on NARSOL.

By Sandy . . . They were married in a Texas county jail with a bulletproof pane of glass between them. The paths that took them to that point were twisted and tortuous, and the paths leading from it are even more so.

He was convicted of two sexual offenses many years ago and served two prison terms for them with the Texas Department of Corrections. In 2009 he was transferred to a halfway house and put in the Texas Civil Commitment program, which at that time was an out-patient program. In 2015, the Texas Civil Commitment Center (TCCC) in Littlefield, Texas, opened, a facility—and a program—with a history and performance inspiring anything but confidence and success. He was taken there, grabbed up in a sweep

across Texas by the state D.O.C. that could have been inspired by the pogroms in Nazi Germany that rounded up and removed Jews to concentration camps.

His wife Mandi sounds very matter-of-fact as she speaks about that time. She has told this story often. Mandi was employed from 2018 to 2021 at the Texas Civil Commitment Center—often simply called Littlefield— with a security company that contracted to TCCC. There they met, talked, and eventually the feelings of illicit friendship deepened into romantic ones. Mandi knew that they were breaking the rules, and she was terminated in 2021 on that charge.

New charges were brought against him for possession of contraband—a cell phone— and for failure to report internet identifiers, and he was returned to prison on the contraband conviction. Mandi visited him often there as well as having telephone conversations, and the relationship grew into love. It was while he was being held in a county jail awaiting transfer yet again back to prison for the internet charges that they married in April of 2022.

That was the last time Mandi saw her husband, and the few telephone calls she has been allowed with him since have been with a Littlefield employee on the line and precipitated by her having a serious medical condition.

Detainees at Littlefield—they are not allowed to be called prisoners—are permitted contacts through a laborious and potentially arbitrary process. The detainee initiates the procedure with a request and fills out a form; the next step is an interview with the requested person. The treatment team reviews the request and the recorded interview, and then the head of the treatment team decides the level of contact that will be allowed—mail, phone, or/and in-person visits.

Mandi’s application was stalled at the interview stage. She was not—and still has never been—granted an interview. Instead, her application was denied on the basis of her not being a “pro-social collateral contact” due to her willingness to break the “no fraternization” rule while she was working at Littlefield and her failure to report his illicit cell phone.

She was told in a telephone meeting with Littlefield employees that she would first need to take classes

from an approved, licensed, sex offender treatment provider. So she did, twelve different times, at her own expense. She still was not approved.In an interesting sidenote, information about the requirements of an approved sex offender treatment provider in Texas appears to be swathed in secrecy.

She was then told she had to take approved chaperone classes. She has. Twice. She was still denied.

Then she was told she needed to prepare and submit a “treatment plan.” She has. Several. Every one has been rejected, and she was denied any assistance in what to include or what she was doing wrong. In a telephone meeting early in December of 2023, Mandi was berated and belittled to the extent that she gave up and stopped trying. She later filed suit against the Texas Civil Commitment Office, its executive director, the head of its treatment program, and her husband’s case manager.

Before the end of 2023, Mandi was told by her doctor that tests showed she had a cluster of malignant cervical cells.

She was granted a very short, monitored telephone conversation with her husband to inform him of her diagnosis and the medical procedures she would be undergoing. None of those surgical procedures were successful in eradicating her cancer, and she was told she would need a total hysterectomy.

The request for a telephone call to inform her husband of her impending major surgery was initially denied—the lawsuit had now been served—and then was reluctantly granted, but only because she is her husband’s legal power of attorney. Permission for the call came with a litany of demands:

• Only legal matters could be discussed, nothing medical, nothing about her upcoming surgery.
• The call would, as the previous few calls about her surgical procedures had done, include a Littlefield employee.
• The call could be “absolutely” no longer than five minutes.
• They were forbidden to include any personal references or to say, “I love you,” to each other.
• They were forbidden to pray.

Mandi’s surgery is now behind her, and she has fully recovered. There still has been no contact whatsoever allowed with her husband. Her voice is restrained yet firm and articulate as she speaks. She readily agreed to this interview; she is eager to tell her story to anyone willing to listen.

I asked if she believed the refusal to approve her as a contact for her husband was a result of her fraternization with him when she worked at Littlefield. “At first, yes,” she replied. “I believe that now it’s because of my advocacy.” Her voice was still matter-or-facet while she spoke about  the facility itself, its top administrative staff, and the level of care and treatment it provides.

She spoke of food shortages. “I have been told by the wives and mothers of other men that they are fighting for scraps left on trays and are digging in the trash cans.”

Other issues she answered not only by what she has been told but also from what she knows from when she worked there. “Medical care?” I asked. Inadequate; neglectful; medicines not given. During Covid it was horrible.

“Special needs?” After a pause, her voice was, this time, washed over with emotion. “No. One gentleman, Mr. [name withheld] is almost blind; no accommodations are made for him; he gets no help from any employees at all. Wheelchairs are broken and not replaced. Many of the men are elderly. More bottom bunks are needed for those who are unable to climb up; more handicapped pods are needed.”

Forced civil commitment for persons who have completed court-ordered punishment for a criminal conviction is applicable to no classification of crime other than sexual. Currently twenty states have such provisions.

Littlefield staff and administration insist that the men in their facility be called patients or residents, not

prisoners or inmates, but they are involuntarily confined, locked in cells behind high walls topped with razor wire, unable to make a telephone call or receive a letter until the person calling or writing has been put through the full contact vetting process and gained the approval of the head of their specific treatment team.

The focus of such confinement is supposed to be therapeutic, but little evidence exists that Littlefield offers an acceptable level of therapy or treatment. According to the Just Future project, at Littlefield “. . . thirteen people have been fully released from civil commitment from 2016 to present,” and they were released by the courts, not by completing the program.

Complaints against the facility and TCCC are longstanding and have been made by former employees as well as family member of those incarcerated there.

Mandi’s suit, filed pro se, moves slowly through the system. She gave a presentation at NARSOL’s 2023 conference in Houston. She is a past member of TACC, Texas Against Civil Commitment. She helped in starting a current petition calling for an investigation into TCCC.

Now she waits. No visits. No phone calls. No letters. No one helping her.

She waits.

The post A prison by any other name is still a prison first appeared on NARSOL.

Also published in the Digest, Vol. XVII-1 and the Washingtonn DC Patch, Jan 15.

By Sandy . . .  A freshman legislator in South Carolina is putting forth a bill this session proposing that sexual crimes meeting certain criteria be considered capital crimes. Incidentally, legislators in Arizona, Missouri, Tennessee, and New Mexico have all proposed the same legislation, and Florida passed a very similar bill last year. *Since the original publications of this piece, Idaho has passed legislation allowing the death penalty for certain sexual crimes against children.

While the author of at least one bill has cited the deterrent nature of the death penalty— which is unsupported and even appears to be false—that is not the issue of concern. These bills are not about the death penalty. Florida’s Supreme Court has ruled that capital punishment cannot be used in such instances. New Mexico abolished the death penalty in 2009. Arizona and Tennessee have gubernatorial holds on capital punishment being used. Other than blatant grandstanding in some if not all instances—Florida’s governor is running for president—these bills are about one thing: the continued vilification of persons with previous sexual crime convictions.

Sexual crimes causing harm to others, especially to children, are serious and deserving of equally serious punishment. However, due to the federal mandate for each state to create a registry of persons with sexual crime convictions and the subsequent federal mandate for these registries to be made public on the internet, an identifiable sub-group of people was created, a sub-group ready-made to be America’s bogeyman: the sex offender.

Every year since then, in virtually every state, new legislation is proposed and often passed increasing in some way the punishments and restrictions against those who are or have ever been convicted of a sexually based offense.

• The number of offenses requiring sex offender registration has increased almost beyond counting with some crimes of a non-sexual nature mandating time on the registry.
• Since it is a “civil regulatory scheme” and not part of punishment, virtually all laws and restrictions can be and are applied retroactively.
• Sentencing limits have risen, and states eschew formally adopting the federal guide[1]lines of AWA so that they can impose lengthier periods of required registration, some up to lifetime for all offenses.
• The tremendous power of the U. S. Marshals has been weaponized against those on registries in every state; they receive huge grants for this purpose, making them one entity among many with a financial incentive to retain registries.
• Law enforcement organizes and carries out sting operations bordering on, and sometimes entering into, the land of entrapment.
• Vigilantes have organized and “help the police” in “sting operations” while individual vigilantes have hunted down and murdered those on registries.
• The consequences of being registered fall to family members sharing the same home, including the registrants’ totally innocent children; entire families are, in effect, registered.
• States rush to heap on laws and restrictions not required in the federal mandate and are in competition with each other to have more laws, tougher laws, more restrictions.

And thus, legislation requiring the death penalty in certain cases where life has not been taken is proposed. The legislators in some of these states know their bills are unlikely to succeed. They all know that, pass or not, some favorable goals—from their points of view—will be accomplished. Their constituents will see them as someone who cares about children, their safety, and “law and order.” The negative image of people with past sexual crime convictions will increase; after all, if they are deserving of the death penalty, they must be monsters, perpetual predators, incapable of rehabilitation.

As long as a sex offender registry exists, those on it will be America’s bogeymen. Creating an underclass who are, on one hand, expected to emerge from prison or probation, get a job, and rejoin society, and on the other hand are perpetually kept or hindered from those objectives by being made into someone that no one wants to hire, socialize with, or have as a neighbor is counterproductive to public safety, contrary to research findings, and an incredible waste in human and financial resources.

The post Death penalty legislation is not about the death penalty first appeared on NARSOL.