By
Lora J. Mackel
A six-year-old Arizona state law tried to go outside the accepted legal perimeters and lock up sex offenders in mental hospitals after their sentences were served. The Sexually Violent Persons Act allowed prosecutors to keep sex offenders indefinitely in mental hospitals if they could convince a jury that the offender had an untreatable sexual disorder.
Sex offenders commit heinous crimes. Be that as it may, they are entitled to equal treatment under the law. So as tempting as locking sex offenders up for life might be, it is not legal nor is it fair.
There is no doubt that the intention of this law had the public's best interest at heart, but it goes against the basic principles of American justice. If the legal rights of sex offenders are ignored, it sets a dangerous precedent that could utterly change the face of American justice.
American justice is based on a few basic principles. An accused has the right to a lawyer, to a fair trial, to due process, to know their accusers, to only be tried once, and to know the length of their sentences. If any of these principles are not adhered to, then justice has not been done, and the accused can take legal action.
Under the legal system, if you do the crime, you do time for it. All crimes that are prosecutable have measured punishments that can be handed out at the discretion of a judge.
What the Sexually Violent Persons Act does is admit that sex offenders are not getting proper treatment in jail, and that American justice is only for approved members of society. And that is extremely dangerous.
If the justice system does not have enough faith in its rehabilitating abilities, something is clearly wrong. If sex offenders are getting out of jail and committing more sexual offenses, then new treatments and new sentences need to be enacted. But because of the nature of this crime, the public is more interested in fantasies of punishment, and sex offenders get out of jail unchanged.
Indefinitely locking up first-time offenders, even after their sentence is complete, is ridiculous. If we start prosecuting and holding beyond their sentence, all criminals should be locked up indefinitely because of the potential for repeat offense.
Thankfully, an Arizona Court of Appeals saw how this law and legal justice are not compatible. The law is still up for review in the Arizona Supreme Court and could possibly stay in the books.
Locking up sexual offenders indefinitely also weakens the legal system to attacks being made by a majority. What if we decided all murderers were so dangerous they did not deserve fair trials? What if we decided that we should cut off people's hands for robbery instead of jailing them? What if we went back to old-fashioned hangings in the public square? Why not torture of suspects? If these ideas sound extreme, it is because they are, just as the Sexually Violent Persons Act is too extreme to exist in our legal system.
Without its ground rules, the American legal system would be very weak. It is only an adherent to its expressed principles that allows the system to run as smoothly as it does. Take those principles away, as the Sexually Violent Persons Acts does, and the law descends into chaos.
