It's difficult to talk about (let alone defend) the rights of sex offenders. Much like terrorism, the threat these individuals pose is blown to ridiculous proportions. Even worse, sex offenders are news even when there is no story.
Bill Nemitz wrote an excellent column in the Portland Press Herald on Sunday in response to a (non) story on sex offenders living near Portland High School.
I've copied the article below (Or click here to read at the Portland Press Herald on-line):
As red-hot news stories go, this one had it all.
A pair of adjoining rooming houses, home to more than a dozen registered sex offenders.
A high school almost across the street, not to mention a boys and girls club to one side.
A police chief, flanked by a city manager and top school officials, expressing surprise that there was no local law prohibiting sex offenders from living near places where kids gather – and promising that one will be drafted pronto.
Little wonder that by the time Tuesday's 6 o'clock news hit the airwaves, we had one resident of said rooming house who isn't a convicted sex offender jawing angrily on camera with one who is – the latter understandably cowering inside the doorway so the viewing audience couldn't see his face.
And little wonder that all over Portland and beyond, people were shaking their heads and wondering how such a thing could possibly go unnoticed for so long.
Well, it didn't.
Meet Thomas Jewell.
He's a Portland attorney who represents Downtown Properties LLC, which owns 263 and 273 Cumberland Ave. – both located diagonally across from Portland High School and a stone's throw from the Boys and Girls Club of Southern Maine.
According to Jewell, the owner behind Downtown Properties, not surprisingly, wishes to remain anonymous. But he authorized Jewell (lucky guy) last week to explain what is – and more importantly isn't – going on inside those dwellings that suddenly have the attention of Portland Police Chief James Craig, City Manager Joe Gray, Superintendent of Schools Jim Morse and Portland High School Principal Mike Johnson.
"Certainly on its face, having those kind of folks near schools sounds like a bad idea," conceded Jewell. "But I think if you go past that, it's not as black and white as it might appear."
He's got that right.
Last week's heavy-hitting press conference, spearheaded by Craig, came on the heels of a neighborhood alert that Brian Roy Haines, 33, had recently moved into 263 Cumberland Ave. Haines, also known as Brian Malmquist, was convicted and served time in 2006 for gross sexual assault involving a child under the age of 5.
But the media fest wasn't just about Haines. Craig told the press that 17 sex offenders, including 12 classified as "serious," resided in the side-by-side rooming houses.
And City Manager Gray announced that the City Council's Public Safety Committee is hard at work drafting an ordinance, based on a recently enacted state law, that will ban sex offenders from living within 750 feet of public or private schools as well as any municipal property used primarily by children.
Jewell, while not surprised by the "media circus" that followed, couldn't help but wonder where the real news was here.
For starters, he said, the actual number of sex offenders currently living in his client's properties is "fewer than the 17-person number that has been bandied about."
What's more, Jewell said, in the five years that Downtown Properties LLC has owned the buildings, it's been common knowledge among numerous state and local officials that some – but by no means all – of the tenants there were registered sex offenders.
Local police knew it. State probation officers knew it. And while those who run the city's general assistance program are officially prohibited from asking someone if he's a sex offender before handing him an emergency housing voucher, it's hard not to believe that unofficially they knew it too.
In short, in an era where few landlords want to have anything to do with someone whose mug appears (along with his or her address) on the state's sex offender registry, those willing to provide them a roof over their heads tend to get noticed – not to mention appreciated – in social service circles.
"To be very candid, there are only a few landlords and apartments in...
Portland that are available to sex offenders," said Denise Lord, associate commissioner of the Maine Department of Corrections. "This particular landlord is one we've been able to work with very, very effectively."
Here's how it works, according to Jewell.
A full-time manager signs in any guests before they enter 263 or 273 Cumberland Ave. The front doors are locked, but probation officers with active cases – currently, four residents of the buildings are on probation – have a key that enables them to show up any time and without warning.
And kids?
"A young person would look very out of place in that building," Jewell said. "This is not a place where they have kids around."
Add to that the fact that the sidewalk outside is one of the most visible and policed spots in the entire city and you start to see the disconnect between the somebody's-got-to-do-something rhetoric and the somebody's-already-doing-something reality.
"We've had many people there over the years," Lord said. "And our probation officer says that in the eight years he's been supervising sex offenders on probation in that building, we've had no incidents."
Jewell agrees – as do Chief Craig, school officials and Robert Clark, chief professional officer of the Boys and Girls Club of Southern Maine.
In fact, Jewell said, if you consider that sex offenders are banned from Portland's homeless shelter and are ineligible for Section 8 federal housing subsidies, you start to appreciate that Downtown Properties LLC is actually providing a "de-facto halfway house" for people who otherwise would have very few options.
"I think my client thinks he's doing a public service with this social-service network that has been jury-rigged to deal with the situation," Jewell said.
That said, there was certainly nothing wrong with the decision by both the high school and the Boys and Girls Club to send out letters last week reminding parents and children of the do's and don'ts when it comes to dealing with strangers.
And now that there's an ordinance in the works, it's a pretty safe bet that schools and playgrounds throughout Portland soon will enjoy the "protection" (real or perceived) of a 750-foot safety bubble.
But if you think keeping sexual offenders two-and-a-half football fields away from a school solves the thorny problem of reintegrating convicted sex offenders into society, think again.
As the correction department's Lord notes, the more you draw lines around places where sex offenders can't live, the more likely those offenders are to "drop off the registry."
"They don't tell you where they're living because they don't want to relocate or they can't afford to live anywhere else," Lord said. "So you actually have less information and less ability to manage the potential risk."
Jewell, who more than earned his keep as an attorney last week, put it more simply.
"It's a very difficult question on how to handle these folks – understandably, a lot of people don't want them next door," he said. "But they have to go somewhere."
Late Update: The Maine Law Court held on Tuesday, in the case of State of Maine v. Eric Letalien, 2009 ME 130, that the retroactive application of Maine's sex-offender registration requirements to people who had committed their crimes before the statute was amended violates the Ex Post Facto clause of the U.S. Constitution. In reaching this decision, the Law Court reasoned that the sex-offender registration requirements were punishment, and it is a principle of law across the world that it is inproper to create new punishments for conduct that has already occured. The Court's decision was unanimous.
