SANTA ANA, Calif. (CN) — The Orange County district attorney on Monday blasted bills pending in the Legislature that would loosen California’s sex-offender registration requirements, largely eliminate its bail system, and allow shorter sentences for felony use of a gun, saying the changes would have “a dramatic and negative impact” on public safety.
Speaking at his office headquarters, Tony Rackauckas said the three bills “are part of a general assault on the criminal justice system taking place right now” that favors more lenient treatment of offenders.
Joining him at the news conference were two local leaders of the national victims’ rights movement, Broadcom co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III and Erin Runyon, whose 5-year-old daughter Samantha was sexually assaulted and murdered in 2002.
Nicholas, who sponsored a victims’ rights amendment to the state constitution called Marsy’s Law, named after his murdered sister, called the new bills “terrible public policy.” He said legislators should “reconsider these bills from the perspective of victims, something which seems not to have been done.”
California voters approved Marsy’s Law in 2008.
All three of the new bills have been approved by the state Senate and await action in the Assembly.
Senate Bill 421 on the sex offender registry and Senate Bill 10 on the bail system both were to be considered today, Tuesday, July 11, at a hearing of the Assembly Public Safety Committee.
Rackauckas and the other speakers on Monday focused on the sexual offender registry and bail proposals. The first, Senate Bill 421, would eliminate California’s requirement of lifetime registration for all sexual offenders and replace it with a three-tiered system.
California is one of only four states, along with Alabama, Florida and South Carolina, to require universal lifetime registration, according to the bill’s author, state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco.
“Whether you’re a sexual predator or an 80-year-old gay man caught having sex in a park in 1958, you’re … on that registry for life,” Wiener said in a legislative analysis of the bill.
The three-tiered system proposed by SB 421 is similar to ones used in many other states. The most serious offenders would still be required to register for life. But offenders convicted of misdemeanor or nonviolent felony offenses would stay on the registry for only 10 years. Those convicted of violent or serious felonies would stay on for 20 years, all provided they did not commit new sex crimes.
Rackauckas complained that people caught with thousands of child pornography images on their computers would receive the lightest treatment, while many rapists would land in the middle tier.
“We’re deeply concerned about the public’s ability to know who’s living next door to them,” the district attorney said.
Runyon, who founded the Joyful Child Foundation after her daughter’s murder, said SB 421 would let more than 10,000 offenders get off the registry because they committed their crimes before 1987. Another 45,000 or so would immediately be able to appeal their status, she said.
Supporters of the legislation — including the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, which is a sponsor of the bill, and the Alameda district attorney — complain that the California sex offender registry has more than 100,000 names on it and has become so unwieldy as to be of limited use in solving new sex crimes.