(The Center Square) – The Washington State Sex Offender Policy Board is contemplating revisions to its prior recommendation that sex offenders given lifelong community custody be given a pathway to have it ended.
However, one of the policy issues to be decided and would have to be included in any legislative proposal, is where the buck stops when it comes to releasing those offenders from community custody.
Under Washington state law, those convicted of sex offenses are given a risk level between level one and level three, with three being the highest risk to offend; the risk level is not correlated to the severity of the offense. Those deemed greatest risk to offend are given lifelong community custody in which they are perpetually kept under state supervision, whereas other sex offenders given community custody eventually have it end.
House Bill 2178 introduced earlier this year by House Committee on Community Safety, Justice, & Reentry Chair Roger Goodman, D-Kirkland, would have allowed level two and level three sex offenders to petition to be released from lifetime community custody after 10 and 15 years, respectively.
Lawmakers rejected the bill, while SOPB has yet to decide whether to maintain its recommendation for the concept moving forward.
Under the bill, the decision of whether to release a sex offender from lifelong community custody would have been decided by the Indeterminate Sentence Review Board, a quasi-judicial board within the Department of Corrections (DOC) which has jurisdiction over persons who committed the following:
crimes prior to July 1, 1984, and were sentenced to a state correctional facility;certain sex offenses on or after Sept. 1, 2001crimes prior to their eighteenth birthday and were sentenced as adults.
Although the release of sex offenders from lifelong community custody could theoretically be placed in the hands of a superior court judge rather than ISRB, some SOPB members such as King County Superior Court Judge Nelson Lee, who represents the Superior Court Judges Association on the board, is opposed.
In written testimony read by Chair Brad Mayhew at the board’s Sept. 19 meeting, Lee stated that while he wasn’t speaking on behalf of his association, he believed that while “I always prefer to have judicial oversight over the most aspects of my case as criminal or civil… I don’t think any of the Superior Court benches in Washington currently have the bandwidth to preside over every hearing in which a defendant is seeking relief from lifetime supervision.”
“I know you’re well aware of the reasons why the courts are so particularly overwhelmed right now,” he said in his statement. “I think a relief request should, for now, at least be handled by the ISRB with the hope that it is given all of the necessary resources and data and records to make informed decisions.”
Also speaking out against giving authority to a superior court judge was Alex Mayo, a non-SOPB member with sex offender advocacy group Washington Voices. “Sending this back to the courts is creating a very expensive process and it is also creating a resource drain because we don’t have the lawyers to be involved with this.”
Another question to be addressed by the board for any potential revised recommendation is whether there should be disqualifying events that permanently bar someone from leaving community custody, and if so what those events should be.
Mayhew told board members “I don’t know how everybody feels about it, but are there certain disqualifying events that we think would disqualify somebody from really from supervision permanently? Do we want to make a distinction between a temporary disqualifying event and maybe a permanent one? This is a path off for somebody who earns it, but we imagine there will be people who will never be relieved of that supervision duty.”
The board’s next meeting is scheduled for Oct. 17.
