You’ve probably either heard about the list or you’ve seen it.
It’s an online compilation of every person in Colorado convicted of what most people imagine are only the most heinous sexual crimes, revealing who they are, what they look like and where they live. Only the Colorado Sexual Offender Registry is not that simple.
Experts say the person you think you should fear most might actually be no more of a threat than anyone else.
Or they could be a serious reason to worry.
Or they might have been trouble at one time, but are no longer be a threat, and instead are being punished for whatever crime they committed long after they are released from prison.
But they’re one of about 18,000 people, about 800 in Aurora, thousands in the metro area, on a list that was created to help protect people from incorrigible sex offenders.
But critics say it’s nothing more than an inaccurate and misleading website that needlessly causes worry among Colorado residents and cruelly and dangerously continues to punish convicts long after they’re released from prison.
CLICK HERE FOR THE COLORADO SEX OFFENDER REGISTRY WEBSITE
Last summer, a federal judge fired at the state’s registry, ruling that in the case of three Colorado men, it exposed them to “punishments inflicted not by the state but by their fellow citizens.”
The ruling — in which U.S. District Court Judge Matsch blasted lower courts for their handling of some sex offender’s cases and called the registry itself “cruel” — felt to some opponents of the registry like it would be a blow to the registration system. Even Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman, who defended the registry, called the ruling “concerning,” and vowed to fight it.
But in the months since, not much has changed. Even the three men who challenged the registry, and who Matsch sided with last fall, are still on the registry. And the registry has added names since, growing to more than 18,000 names.
Alison Ruttenberg, the lawyer who represented the three men who challenged the registry said that until a higher court rules on Coffman’s appeal, the future of the registry remains murky.
“Everything is in limbo,” Ruttenberg said.
The List
On any given day, the number of registered sex offenders in Aurora hovers around 800, sometimes topping 1,000. Denver is sometimes home to twice that number. About 1,500 report living in Colorado Springs. In Arvada, it was 168 this week.
The list — which includes names, recent photos and a home address for offenders convicted of offenses ranging from indecent exposure to brutal rapes — had 808 names on it assigned to Aurora last week. That’s more than one offender for every uniformed cop in the city.
The aim, backers of the registry say, is to make sure residents know if someone with a sex offense conviction is living nearby. But opponents have long argued the registry punish people for crimes they have already served their time for.
“Police visit these people at least once a year. Neighbors are pulling these lists,” he said. “I’ve had clients who had knives pulled on them for nothing other than having to register as a sex offender.”
While the ruling last year against Colorado’s registry could be a sign that changes are coming, it isn’t the only sign that the current system could be tweaked.
Local and state lawmakers have grappled with ways to tweak the system, looking to crackdown on where registered offenders can live and just who needs to have their name, face and home address plastered on a public website for all to see.
Police have also called for changes, with Aurora police arguing the current system for the highest-risk offenders is a clunky fit for the cops tasked with processing thousands of registrations each year. Police have also said forcing offenders who are invalids and no longer pose any threat — in some cases offenders older than 100 — isn’t a good use of their time.
Getting off the list can be what Denver attorney Christopher Braddock calls “a death spiral.”
“They’re bouncing back and forth between places. They can’t find a decent job, they can’t get the stuff we need them to have to get off,” he said of many of his clients.
At any given time, Braddock can have as many as five clients who are attempting to get off of the sex offender registry in Colorado. It can be easy, he said. But that’s a rare occurrence. The easy cases, he said, are when clients successfully finish probation and have all of the right resources.
But most of the time the process is much more complicated. Braddock said, more than anything, it’s because a stigma is attached to the registry. That results in difficulties finding employment — sometimes it’s nearly impossible, the lawyer said. And without a steady job, offenders on the registry often have trouble finding housing.
Then, there’s the harassment issue, he said.
“Police visit these people at least once a year. Neighbors are pulling these lists,” he said. “I’ve had clients who had knives pulled on them for nothing other than having to register as a sex offender.”
All of those factors, associated with simply being on the registry, Braddock said make seeking, receiving and completing required treatment all the more difficult.
“They have a whole other set of problems beyond trying to get off the registry,” he said. “99 percent of people on this list they don’t have a house, they don’t have a job. They’re living below the radar and that doesn’t do anybody any good.”
And without being able to successfully finish the terms of probation — which often can include therapy — convincing a court or just to remove an offender from the registry is difficult.
“Generally, I see a lot of people who it took a few years to get there,” he said.
When Braddock, or any other attorney decides to take on a client, they first check to see if they are even eligible to try. Sometimes they aren’t, he said. But if they are, that’s when the work begins. First, it’s making sure requirements are met, such as filing petitions and lining up therapists and treatment providers. That can take some time, Braddock said, as many of his clients have older cases.
Braddock said he believes that the system is based on the belief that adult sex offenders cannot be rehabilitated. “…which is completely bunk,” he said. “When you look at it, 90 percent (of people on the registry) shouldn’t be on the list.”
In Braddock’s opinion the registry is watered down with offenders who really aren’t a threat to the public.
The Law
Lawmakers, too, recognize that the registry isn’t perfect.
Arapahoe County State Sen. Daniel Kagan wants to make the registry more efficient. He sponsored a bill this session that he says “gives law enforcement options.”
The bill just recently gained a house sponsor but, Kagan said he believes the measure will have wide support if it’s able to pass committee. Prior to drafting the bill, the legislator talked to law enforcement, advocacy groups and district attorney’s offices throughout the state.
All agreed that there are some instances where the registry is not streamlined. For example, incapacitated offenders who physically cannot show up in person to renew their registration. That’s when police should be able to locate the person and register them, Kagan said.
The bill, Senate Bill 26, also would require the court to grant a petition to discontinue registration if a person on the registry hasn’t been convicted of another sex crime, the waiting period has expired and there isn’t any credible evidence the person will offend again.
Kagan said this aspect of the bill just makes it easier for people who can get off the registry, as there “is a lot of confusion when you’ve done your time.” Though, it’s important to note the bill doesn’t change anything about who is already required to register and when. Kagan’s aim was to streamline certain aspects of it so the list can work better for everybody.
“It’s important for all of us that the list reflects people who we should be aware of,” Kagan said. “Not thousands of people who are just thrown on there.”
At the Aurora police department, registering and keeping track of the more than 1,100 registered sex offenders is a daunting task, in part because the various offenders have to register at different intervals. Sex offenders convicted of a misdemeanor or the three lower-classes of felonies, for example, have to register with APD once a year. But offenders convicted of a Class 1, 2 or 3 felony have to register four times a year.
And with some offenders moving in or out of the city, switching addresses within the city limits and new offenders being added to the list, the department handled more than 3,000 registrations, re-registrations or de-registrations last year, according to Aurora police statistics.
The department’s Sex Offender Registration Unit — which is charged with those tasks, as well as finding convicted sex offenders who have failed to register — is made up of one sergeant, three detectives and a civilian secretary. That’s up from when the unit launched in 2006, when they had just two detectives manning the unit.
When the unit detailed its efforts for city council last spring, there were 1,136 sex offenders — “SXOs” in the vernacular of the police — when officers prepared their presentation.
While they all share the same SXO branding, the crimes they’re convicted of vary wildly.
In Aurora, a 36-year-old woman on the registry is there for a 2003 conviction of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”
A 54-year-old man is on the registry for two sexual convictions, one from Minnesota in 1987 when he was convicted of criminal sexual conduct, and another from 2014 in Colorado when he was convicted of attempted sexual assault. In the more-recent conviction, the registry says the man tried to overcome the victim’s will. In that case, the state deemed the man a “Sexually Violent Predator,” a designation reserved for offenders state officials deem the “highest risk.”
At an Aurora City Council committee meeting last summer, officers from the Sex Offender Registration Unit said they would like to see police scrap that Sexually Violent Predator designation in favor of a “tiered system” that they say would better assess the threats an offender poses.
“It’s important for all of us that the list reflects people who we should be aware of,” Kagan said. “Not thousands of people who are just thrown on there.”
A blanket approach to sexual offenders causes more issues that it solves, said Apryl Alexander, an assistant professor at the University of Denver Graduate School of Professional Psychology. Alexander has worked extensively with both victims and offenders across the country.
Alexander said that historically, treatment and supervision was a one-size-fits-all policy. But that was an ineffective approach that created more problems than it solved.
“We want to match the person’s level of intervention, the level of services to their actual level of risk,” Alexander said. “We are learning that (the one-size fits all method) wasn’t effective. So you were giving individuals that were high risk sometimes low level of supervision or individuals who are low risk high levels of intervention and supervision.”
The Sexting
Now psychologists are focused on using treatment programs focused around the risk-need-responsivity principles. That model centers around analysis of an offender’s risk to the public, which in turn determines the level and intensity of treatment and interventions, the need for services based on changing circumstances and recidivism rates, and a focus on the individual offender, their learning style, level of motivation and other factors that might impact treatment options.
Alexander pointed to the example of teens who have been caught sexting, which in some states classifies the individual, even if they’re under 18, as producing and transmitting child pornography. Being put on a state’s sexual offender registry doesn’t make sense for a teen engaging in “low risk sexual behavior” and who statistics show has about a 5-percent likelihood of re-offending.
“If you’re labeling that minor as a sex offender of that low risk behavior, it doesn’t make sense to have them on the sex offender registry, to have them on GPS monitoring when we know the likelihood of recidivating is low,” Alexander said. “The risk-need-responsivity model is matching the assessed level of risk and tailoring our interventions, our level of supervision to that level of risk.”
A teen-sexting law that had befuddled Colorado lawmakers for years finally passed in Colorado last year.
Dozens of states have amended child-pornography statutes in recent years in response to teen sexting, which psychologists call a common and not necessarily harmful behavior for young people who grow up with smart phones.
Colorado got there only last year.
The law was prompted in part after a 2015 scandal in Canon City, where more than 100 high school students were found with explicit images of other teens. Dozens of students were suspended, and the football team forfeited its final game of that season.
Fremont County prosecutors decided against filing criminal charges, saying Colorado law did not properly distinguish between adult sexual predators and misbehaving teenagers.
The 2017 law created new crimes for juvenile sexting after years of debate over whether it should be illegal for minors to share explicit photos consensually.
Under previous state law, anyone who had an image on their phone of a nude person under age 18 could be charged with felony child exploitation.
But teen sexting is common, and some say prosecutors needed a less-severe penalty option for teens who do it because the felony charge means that a sexting teen can end up required to register as a sex-offender.
And they did.
The negotiations were tricky because there could be a variety of explicit sexts. Everyone agreed that minors exchanging nude photos consensually should face only misdemeanor charges or even just mandatory education to be determined later.
“If you’re labeling that minor as a sex offender of that low risk behavior, it doesn’t make sense to have them on the sex offender registry, to have them on GPS monitoring when we know the likelihood of recidivating is low,” Alexander said
But prosecutors wanted to keep the option of more serious charges in cases where nude image are shared with others against the consent of the depicted juvenile in cases of harassment or bullying, a practice sometimes called “revenge porn.”
The law now makes it a crime to distribute sexually explicit images without the depicted juvenile’s consent. The crime would be a misdemeanor if the person sharing the image is also under 18.
The maximum penalty for the misdemeanor is two years in jail under Colorado’s “unlawful sexual contact” criminal code. Felony child exploitation is punishable by a maximum penalty of 12 years in prison, plus lifetime sex-offender registration requirements.
Alexander said that when analyzing the level of risk an offender poses, there are multiple ways to gauge whether that individual would be a risk to the pubic beyond the actual criminal act that landed them in jail. Factors like the level of empathy the offender has, any psychopathic tendencies they show or a lack of remorse.
“There are a constellation of different factors to assess the level of risk,” Alexander said.
Once an offender has served their time in jail, Alexander said the level and length of any treatment and supervision is really dependent on the individual. But a major hurdle to not only treatment but ensuring the safety of the public when it comes to sexual offenders is the restrictions placed on where an offender can live.
Lack of attainable and permanent housing is a major factor in increased rates of recidivism according to the data. In fact, proximity to forbidden areas like schools and playgrounds have no correlation to increased rates of offenders committing sexual crimes again.
“(Restrictions) are placing you on the outskirts, it’s placing a lot of individuals become homeless and so one predictor of actual recidivism is housing instability. And so this could be a person who is a little lower risk but not having access to meet their basic needs actually increases their risk of recidivism,” Alexander said. “One of the things we want to think about is, do we have policies that are based on the research and evidence?”
Alexander said data isn’t driving much of the policy around sex offenders and that is why there needs to be a big push to educate the public on the facts. While it might seem like changing restrictions on issues like housing might seem to be going light on offenders, Alexander said, in realit,y changing the system is what will increase the public’s safety and decrease the likelihood an offender out on parole or who has served their sentence won’t pose a risk.
Another factor in increasing the public’s safety is keeping people who are low to no risk, whether it’s children who were caught sexting or someone arrested for public urination that was charged and convicted of indecent exposure, from being placed on the sex offender registry. Wasting resources on those types of cases takes away from the police and justice system from focusing more on those offenders who do need high levels of supervision and treatment.
Just what the future holds for the state’s registry is hardly clear. Ruttenberg, the lawyer who successfully challenged Colorado’s registry last year, said she could see fights over state registries working their way all the way to the Supreme Court in coming years.
Ruttenberg said she doesn’t have a problem with a registry reserved for law enforcement, just the public registry that she said amounts to a lifetime punishment for people who in most cases committed one crime and won’t offend again.
That public database, she said, is too often used against those offenders.
“It’s the public, or employers, or people who are using them to discriminate,” she said.
CLICK HERE FOR THE COLORADO SEX OFFENDER REGISTRY WEBSITE
