Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger Thursday signed into law
Assemblymember Simon Salinas’ bill to bring
”
fairness
”
to the placement process for sexually violent predators.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger Thursday signed into law Assemblymember Simon Salinas’ bill to bring “fairness” to the placement process for sexually violent predators.
The bill will require all sexually violent predators on conditional release from Atascadero State Hospital in San Luis Obispo County be placed in the county where they last lived.
There were no clear laws determining where sexually violent predators were to be released and predators were shuffled from county to county because no one wanted them, Salinas, D-Salinas, said. The highly-publicized cases of Brian DeVries and Carey Verse prompted Salinas to draft the bill, he said.
Salinas introduced the bill in January, after the public outcry over the moving of DeVries to Monterey County. DeVries was moved there after he met with an intense public protest in Santa Clara County where he was originally released, Salinas said.
Verse was originally placed in Marin County, but has been moved several times and is now being considered for placement in Merced County. A judge will decide where he may live during a hearing today.
“When it was signed, I had a sigh of relief after a whole year of working on this,” Salinas said. “There were no clear guidelines of where these guys would go and nobody was putting the welcome mat out for them. This clears it up, and the governor recognized that.”
State Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Merced, backed the bill that will establish a comprehensive placement policy for the predators.
“This new law is a good first step in addressing a statewide policy for dealing with sexually violent predators,” he said in a statement. “We need to make sure that the game of ‘Hide the Predator’ ceases.”
The only people the bill will affect are those released conditionally, which means they are involved in a community treatment phase where they are closely supervised, and who have gone through the hospital’s entire five-phase treatment program, according to Lynda Frost, spokesperson for the Department of Mental Health.
The program was started in 1996 and since then three patients have been released – DeVries, Verse and convicted rapist Patrick Ghilotti.
DeVries lives in Soledad but was from Santa Clara County, Verse is staying in San Jose but is from Contra Costa County, and Ghilotti resides in Solano County, Frost said.
Whether the law will be retroactive and move those predators around is unclear, but it will cut down on the chaotic atmosphere of trying to find a place to put them, she said.
“It’s very time consuming, it’s very expensive… it just hasn’t been an easy and smooth process,” Frost said.
Salinas also conceded the bill is “up in the air” concerning the sexually violent predators out now, but there are patients up for release in the coming months that the bill will address, he said.
“In the future, it won’t happen,” he said. “Now a judge can look at the law that defines where they go.”
The bill also requires the Department of Mental Health take into consideration the concerns of the victim and the victim’s family when placing a predator back in the community, Salinas said.
Sexually violent predator Lance Purcell was recently recommitted to the program at Atascadero after a jury of San Benito County residents decided he was not ready to be released back into the community.
Purcell is in the third stage of the treatment’s five-phase program, and with the new law in place if he were to be conditionally released he would not be released into San Benito County because he last lived in Santa Cruz County, according to his attorney.
There are 668 sexually violent predators committed to the program, but only 20 percent of patients choose to participate in the treatment program that could get them conditionally released, Frost said.
Under the program, predators are closely monitored for one or two years by tracking devices, strict curfews, not being allowed to go certain places in the community and other restrictive measures.
The other 80 percent who choose not to participate have the opportunity to be unconditionally released without the strict supervision if a district attorney decides not to have them recommitted, or a jury decides they are rehabilitated, Frost said.
Of the couple dozen or so patients who are in the third or fourth stages of the treatment program, and who could potentially be released soon, none are from San Benito County, Frost said.
