Featured KS News Stories:
Sex offender recidivism can be decreased
Colleen Surridge
27 Sep 2006 1:48 pm
Parsons State Hospital and Training Center superintendent Jerry Rea says sex offender recidivism rates can be decreased.
Once sentenced to prison, sex offenders are required to participate in a treatment program before being released.
"So when you talk about management, it's very different," Rea said of PSHTC's offender treatment program that has mechanisms in place to prevent recidivism, which is when an offender returns to committing crimes.
Use of the new portable GPS/penile plethysmograph could help courts track offenders released into the community and watch offenders who are supposed to register with the state every six months or whenever they change addresses.
Other tools are needed in the community to reduce recidivism and offer support, PSHTC attorney Linus Thuston said.
Once offenders are returned to the community, they are not required to continue treatment beyond what was offered before their release. The only requirements are reporting to their probation officers and registering.
Statewide, 2,354 sex offenders were released from state prisons into Kansans communities between July 1, 1998, and June 3, 2002. Only 98, considered high-risk violent offenders, were ordered by the courts to enter Larned State Hospital's sexual predator treatment program.
"The others moved to towns becoming your neighbors," Rea said.
"Something's got to be done," Thuston said. "Once they are in the community, at best, they report to community corrections officers. After they leave the program, though, we don't know where they are or where they go. Who knows what they are doing."
Center would benefit abused
TIM POTTER
02 Sep 2006 12:00 am
Although there is wide agreement that child advocacy centers are an ideal way to investigate child abuse reports, Sedgwick County has none. That could be changing. A task force is working to establish such a center in Sedgwick County.
In the discussion of a recent Wichita child abuse case -- where investigators say two girls were starved and beaten over a 10-month period -- child advocacy centers have been touted as a better way to investigate reported abuse or neglect.
Critics call registry for sex offenders vague, unfair
Eric Weslander
27 Aug 2006 12:00 am
The other day, Brad Totman says, his wife came home nearly in tears.
Some neighborhood children who play with the couple’s 3-year-old daughter had said they couldn’t play with her anymore because Totman might “touch them.”
The reason: Totman is a registered sex offender, and his picture recently had been published in the local paper in Pittsburg near his home in Mulberry. His crime, which happened in the late 1990s, was having consensual sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 19.
That girl is now his wife, Kristal. They have been married three years.
Kansas has had an “offender registry” since the mid-1990s, designed to alert the public to the presence of dangerous criminals — mostly sex offenders — in their midst. Offenders must register with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and keep their name, current address and photo on a public site.
But Totman says it’s not fair — and misleading to the public — that the registry paints people like him with the same brush as it paints, say, someone who grabbed a child off the street or broke into a home and raped a person. He says the registry instills fear in the public, without providing any meaningful information about what a person actually did to land himself on it.
“It’s lumping you in with pedophiles and rapists, when in fact it’s a consensual thing, especially when you have a continuing relationship with the person,” Totman said. “I want to make waves. I want to see changes.”
“To me,” he said, “it just seems like it’s the new witch hunt.”
Notes: K-State player, on sex offender list, dismissed from team
Associated Press
14 Aug 2006 8:58 pm
A reserve basketball player at Kansas State was dismissed from the team Monday because his name appears in a registered sex offender database.
The 21-year-old player was registered May 5 for aggravated indecent liberties with a child. District Attorney Paul Morrison said [he] was under 18 at the time, but authorities did not find out about it until recently.
Perils of personal service
DIANE STAFFORD
08 Aug 2006 12:00 am
There’s a fine line between being careful and being paranoid, but Kansas Citian Tracey Hawkins, a safety and security trainer, thinks too many workers, especially women, set themselves up for trouble with their marketing materials.
Hawkins points particularly to the real estate industry, where business cards, yard signs and Web pages often provide a picture and personal information about the agent.
And because real estate agents meet strangers when they’re alone in vacant houses, the possibility increases for becoming a victim of a sexual predator, robber or murderer.
Hawkins, whose information is online at www.safetyandsecuritysource.com, shares safety tips in training programs sponsored by employers, and has trained some large clients in the Kansas City area.
As warrant is served, suspect shoots himself
25 Jul 2006 12:00 am
A wanted sex offender was declared brain dead Monday after shooting himself in the head while being served with an arrest warrant.
Johnson County sheriff’s deputies and the FBI’s dangerous-crimes unit were serving the warrant on Joey Carlton Ruttman, 29, at a home in the 16500 block of Metcalf Avenue in Stilwell.
As officers spoke with Ruttman’s father, they heard a noise. They entered the home and found Ruttman in the bathroom with a gunshot wound to his head. He was flown by helicopter to Overland Park Regional Medical Center. Johnson County Sheriff’s Deputy Tom Erickson said doctors told police that Ruttman was pronounced brain dead at 5 p.m.
Man sentenced for sex crime with 13-year-old
19 Jul 2006 12:00 am
A 35-year-old Lawrence man has been sentenced to 60 days in jail followed by probation for a sex crime involving an acquaintance’s 13-year-old daughter.
James W. Blackburn was sentenced Tuesday in Douglas County District Court for a May 13 incident at a home in Eudora in which prosecutors alleged he touched the girl inappropriately after a night of drinking alcohol.
He initially was charged with aggravated indecent liberties with a child, but Dist. Atty. Charles Branson’s office dropped it to an “attempted” crime as part of a plea agreement, which put Blackburn in a gray area on the sentencing grid in which a judge can give the defendant probation or prison.
Lawrence Man Accused Of Sodomy Of Child
15 May 2006 8:43 pm
A 34-year-old man on the Kansas Sex Offender's Registry has been accused of new crimes against a child.
Joseph Schwartz, of Lawrence, was charged last week with aggravated criminal sodomy and indecent liberties with a child.
According to the district attorney's office, the alleged incidents took place in 2000 and 2001.
Schwartz was previously found guilty of child abduction.
Kan. Doesn't Ban Sex Offenders Living Near Schools
15 May 2006 1:49 pm
There is no law on the books in Kansas that prohibits sexual offenders from living next [to] schools.
Lisa Fleming monitors 70 sexual offenders.
Fleming took her concerns to the Kansas Legislature. But in Senate bill 506, a section requiring that offenders live at least 2,000 feet away from places like schools and day cares was crossed out.
"If you're going to err on any side at all, we have to err on the protection of the community," Fleming said.
But what passed was a measure that actually delays residential restrictions on sex offenders for a couple of years. The Department of Corrections made the request because it wants time to study the issue.
There is research out of places like Iowa indicating no correlation between residency restrictions and reducing sex offenses against children, and that up to 90 percent of crimes against children are committed by a relative or acquaintance with access to the child not impeded by residency restrictions.
Experts in Minnesota are concerned that restrictions could force sexual offenders to move to rural areas and be even more isolated with fewer job and treatment options.
Missouri is one of more that a dozens states with residency restrictions for sexual offenders. They must live at least 1,000 feet from a school.
Sex offender bill passes; private prisons shot down
Carl Manning
09 May 2006 12:00am
Passage of the bill, dubbed "Jessica's Law," was part of a deal worked out by House and Senate negotiators last week, after the House rejected a compromise bill bundling the popular sex offender measure with legislation the Senate wanted to allow private prisons in Kansas.
Kansas law prohibits housing state prisoners in private facilities in the state, but they can be housed in private facilities in other states.
Senators had argued for bundling the bills, because increased penalties for sex offenders would generate the need for an additional 1,000 prison beds by 2016.
"We'll be back next year figuring out where to put all these criminals," said Senate Majority Leader Derek Schmidt, R-Independence.
Sexual predator won’t be moving in
Megan Price, Scott Rothschild, Eric Weslander
29 Apr 2006 12:00 am
Sexual predator Leroy Hendricks won’t be moving to Leavenworth County.
The Kansas Supreme Court on Friday upheld a decision from Leavenworth County that prevented the state from moving Hendricks out of a special treatment program for violent sexual predators to a group home in rural Leavenworth County.
The court told the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services that because communities aren’t willing to accept sexually violent predators, the agency must do something to resolve the question of where those who leave the treatment program end up.
“We trust that SRS will call the dilemma to the attention to the only branch of state government empowered and equipped to address it: the Legislature,” Justice Carol Beier wrote in the unanimous decision.
The case centered on the placement of Hendricks, the first offender in the special sex predator treatment program to have reached a point where officials say he should be released into a monitored residence.
Hendricks, who has a long history of sex offenses involving children, is 71 years old and has several physical impairments resulting from a stroke and diabetes. He was the first person designated a sexually violent predator under a 1994 law that permits the state to confine predators indefinitely for treatment after they’re released from prison. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law, rejecting an appeal by Hendricks.
Last year, a judge ruled Hendricks could be released from the program at Larned State Hospital. But attempts to settle him first in Lawrence and then rural Leavenworth County were rebuffed. He is living at Osawatomie State Hospital and will remain there, officials said.
Child Rapist Goes Back To Trial
It was an unimaginable crime.
A 2 year old raped and sodomized at the State Fair.
Now the man convicted of the crime has a chance to get out of prison after a new trial was granted.
Low bond for suspected child rapist
A Hutchinson man is charged with raping an 11-year-old girl. The 47-year-old is charged with seven counts of child rape, indecent liberties with a child, and aggravated sodomy. When he was arrested two weeks ago his bond was set at $5,000.
