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CNN Sunday Morning

Interview With Laura Ahearn

Aired January 12, 2003 - 09:33   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: More than six years after its passage, a law to shield children from sex offenders appears to have some serious problems. Megan's law was named for Megan Kanka, a girl raped and killed by a neighbor, who was later unmasked as a convicted child molester. The law requires states to register sex offenders and allows them to publish a list of them. But the law and the reality are a bit different as we see in this report from Sacramento, California, Jason Howe of KOVR.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JASON HOWE, KOVR CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): With three kids and a daycare center, Jennifer Medina knows Megan's law better than most.

JENNIFER MEDINA, MOTHER: It's just not safe to let them just run out and play because you don't know who your next door neighbor is or not. And I have looked on the Megan's law before, and the police files.

HOWE: That might not give such a clear picture. More than 33,000 sex offenders, enough to fill a small city, have apparently fallen through the cracks in California.

SGT. JUSTIN RISLEY, SACRAMENTO POLICE: Could be a combination of things, could be people that actually have died, it could be people that have not registered because they were not aware of the new law, which changed in 1997, which requires sexual offenders to register every year at their birthday.

HOWE: Or it could simply be a problem of resources. Sex offenders have to register themselves on release from prison. But State Attorney General Bill Lockyer has admitted local agencies don't always have the staff to track them down if they don't. For example, in the city of Sacramento, police have identified 25 high risk sex offenders, the most violent category. They are all accounted for. But they also identified 1,600 serious sex offenders, convicted of rapes and child molestations; 300 of them are nowhere to be found.

RISLEY: Some of those may be deceased, some of which may have left the state, in fact.

HOWE: Those who haven't fall into the jurisdiction of just one officer, Detective Terry Chew (ph).

DETECTIVE TERRY CHEW: You can go through each heading. HOWE: The sex offenders database lists neighborhoods, but not an exact address, and you have to access it in person at your local police station. It's not available on the Internet.

CHEW: The department is concerned about, the reason being is because sometimes people may get in and try to tamper with the system on the Internet.

HOWE: So local agencies do the best they can with what they have. As do parents.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN: That report from KOVR in Sacramento.

California's attorney general doesn't mince words about the state's system for tracking sex offenders. He calls it "woefully inadequate." More than 33,000 are missing from the Megan's law database. Joining us now from New York to talk about this is Laura Ahearn, she is the executive director for Parents of Megan's Law. Good to have you with us.

LAURA AHEARN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, PARENTS OF MEGAN'S LAW: Good morning.

O'BRIEN: This is a problem that seems endemic to Megan's law. A lot of people say the way to solve it is to federalize this law. Do you agree?

AHEARN: Actually, the problem that we're having across the nation is that as we heard earlier, Megan's law, along with the Jacob Ritling (ph) Act required all 50 states to put in place registration and release of information systems. And it was an unfunded mandate. So now we're seeing the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) problems with registration.

O'BRIEN: I see. The key thing here is unfunded, then, right?

AHEARN: Exactly. Unfunded mandate.

O'BRIEN: It's incumbent upon the states to come up with the money to pay for these things. States are hard pressed. California has got a $35 billion deficit it's dealing with, just to name one. How do you go about funding these programs?

AHEARN: Well, all 50 states were strongly encouraged to put into place these laws. If they didn't, they would lose federal crime fighting funding. So states are getting federal crime fighting funding, and really what they should be doing is putting that money toward registration, and, also, toward enforcement. In California, they're just not enforcing the law. We have somewhere around 42 percent or 44 percent of them missing. But that's also a function of law enforcement not sending out officers to track down these guys and to ensure that they're registering. These are people now that are across our nation. We don't know where they are.

O'BRIEN: All right. But let's talk about how much this is going to cost. Just using California as an example, one of the estimates I saw was roughly 15 to $20 million to properly fund Megan's law, to have staffers and monitor these people, make sure they don't slip through the cracks.

That's a lot of money. And when you consider $15 to $20 million, I'm sure law enforcement will come up with a lot of other ways to spend it.

AHEARN: Exactly. I certainly would rather have law enforcement searching out and hunting down an active rapist who is wanted than looking for a sex offender who has failed to register.

But we have to have both. And I think what's happened in California, they have allowed this to go on for so long that now they have that backlog and it's going to cost that much.

But I think there are creative ways across the nation. In Texas, they did semiannual sweeps, using current law enforcement, using the staff they had. In New York, some of the law enforcement agencies are sending out individual officers every time they suspect than that an offender isn't where they said they were going to be.

I mean, the most serious problem is we have sex offenders doing their own registration themselves and then law enforcement not following up.

O'BRIEN: Imagine that. These guys are not on the honor system, huh?

AHEARN: These are child molesters and rapists, and...

O'BRIEN: Yes, imagine that.

AHEARN: ...rapists. Yes, and even if we take the lowest statistics, people have said 10 percent of offenders nationwide are not registering. There's about 450,000 convicted sex offenders across our nation. We have to do something about this. We have to put money towards this, because now, 450,000, that's 45,000 sex offenders running around.

O'BRIEN: Let me ask you this before we run out of time, Laura. Where is it working, if in any place, and why?

AHEARN: I think it is working in states that have jurisdictions that are actually putting the staff toward going out and hunting down these offenders that are failing to register. But Megan's law itself is not just registering offenders. It's releasing information. It's ensuring that they're followed up on. It's civil commitment laws for those offenders who are predatory, keeping them confined to treatment facilities.

I would say there is no one state that has the best version of sex offender registration and notification, but we have in California people paying $10 to call for information that should be free, where in most states, that's not nonexistent. It's free.

O'BRIEN: Before you get away then, should it be federalized? I asked you that at the outset.

AHEARN: Well, it is a federal law. What needs to happen is, you know, we're calling upon President Bush now to put into place stringent financial consequences to the states that fail to track these guys down.

In California, as in every other state, they are required to notify the FBI every time they can't locate a sex offender. My guess is they have not made 33,000 phone calls to the FBI. So yes, I would agree, we need to have federal intervention immediately, and consequences to those states that fail to track down offenders.

O'BRIEN: Laura Ahearn, with the Parents for Megan's Law, thanks for being with us on CNN SUNDAY MORNING.

AHEARN: Thank you.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com







Aired January 12, 2003 - 09:33   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: More than six years after its passage, a law to shield children from sex offenders appears to have some serious problems. Megan's law was named for Megan Kanka, a girl raped and killed by a neighbor, who was later unmasked as a convicted child molester. The law requires states to register sex offenders and allows them to publish a list of them. But the law and the reality are a bit different as we see in this report from Sacramento, California, Jason Howe of KOVR.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JASON HOWE, KOVR CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): With three kids and a daycare center, Jennifer Medina knows Megan's law better than most.

JENNIFER MEDINA, MOTHER: It's just not safe to let them just run out and play because you don't know who your next door neighbor is or not. And I have looked on the Megan's law before, and the police files.

HOWE: That might not give such a clear picture. More than 33,000 sex offenders, enough to fill a small city, have apparently fallen through the cracks in California.

SGT. JUSTIN RISLEY, SACRAMENTO POLICE: Could be a combination of things, could be people that actually have died, it could be people that have not registered because they were not aware of the new law, which changed in 1997, which requires sexual offenders to register every year at their birthday.

HOWE: Or it could simply be a problem of resources. Sex offenders have to register themselves on release from prison. But State Attorney General Bill Lockyer has admitted local agencies don't always have the staff to track them down if they don't. For example, in the city of Sacramento, police have identified 25 high risk sex offenders, the most violent category. They are all accounted for. But they also identified 1,600 serious sex offenders, convicted of rapes and child molestations; 300 of them are nowhere to be found.

RISLEY: Some of those may be deceased, some of which may have left the state, in fact.

HOWE: Those who haven't fall into the jurisdiction of just one officer, Detective Terry Chew (ph).

DETECTIVE TERRY CHEW: You can go through each heading. HOWE: The sex offenders database lists neighborhoods, but not an exact address, and you have to access it in person at your local police station. It's not available on the Internet.

CHEW: The department is concerned about, the reason being is because sometimes people may get in and try to tamper with the system on the Internet.

HOWE: So local agencies do the best they can with what they have. As do parents.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN: That report from KOVR in Sacramento.

California's attorney general doesn't mince words about the state's system for tracking sex offenders. He calls it "woefully inadequate." More than 33,000 are missing from the Megan's law database. Joining us now from New York to talk about this is Laura Ahearn, she is the executive director for Parents of Megan's Law. Good to have you with us.

LAURA AHEARN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, PARENTS OF MEGAN'S LAW: Good morning.

O'BRIEN: This is a problem that seems endemic to Megan's law. A lot of people say the way to solve it is to federalize this law. Do you agree?

AHEARN: Actually, the problem that we're having across the nation is that as we heard earlier, Megan's law, along with the Jacob Ritling (ph) Act required all 50 states to put in place registration and release of information systems. And it was an unfunded mandate. So now we're seeing the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) problems with registration.

O'BRIEN: I see. The key thing here is unfunded, then, right?

AHEARN: Exactly. Unfunded mandate.

O'BRIEN: It's incumbent upon the states to come up with the money to pay for these things. States are hard pressed. California has got a $35 billion deficit it's dealing with, just to name one. How do you go about funding these programs?

AHEARN: Well, all 50 states were strongly encouraged to put into place these laws. If they didn't, they would lose federal crime fighting funding. So states are getting federal crime fighting funding, and really what they should be doing is putting that money toward registration, and, also, toward enforcement. In California, they're just not enforcing the law. We have somewhere around 42 percent or 44 percent of them missing. But that's also a function of law enforcement not sending out officers to track down these guys and to ensure that they're registering. These are people now that are across our nation. We don't know where they are.

O'BRIEN: All right. But let's talk about how much this is going to cost. Just using California as an example, one of the estimates I saw was roughly 15 to $20 million to properly fund Megan's law, to have staffers and monitor these people, make sure they don't slip through the cracks.

That's a lot of money. And when you consider $15 to $20 million, I'm sure law enforcement will come up with a lot of other ways to spend it.

AHEARN: Exactly. I certainly would rather have law enforcement searching out and hunting down an active rapist who is wanted than looking for a sex offender who has failed to register.

But we have to have both. And I think what's happened in California, they have allowed this to go on for so long that now they have that backlog and it's going to cost that much.

But I think there are creative ways across the nation. In Texas, they did semiannual sweeps, using current law enforcement, using the staff they had. In New York, some of the law enforcement agencies are sending out individual officers every time they suspect than that an offender isn't where they said they were going to be.

I mean, the most serious problem is we have sex offenders doing their own registration themselves and then law enforcement not following up.

O'BRIEN: Imagine that. These guys are not on the honor system, huh?

AHEARN: These are child molesters and rapists, and...

O'BRIEN: Yes, imagine that.

AHEARN: ...rapists. Yes, and even if we take the lowest statistics, people have said 10 percent of offenders nationwide are not registering. There's about 450,000 convicted sex offenders across our nation. We have to do something about this. We have to put money towards this, because now, 450,000, that's 45,000 sex offenders running around.

O'BRIEN: Let me ask you this before we run out of time, Laura. Where is it working, if in any place, and why?

AHEARN: I think it is working in states that have jurisdictions that are actually putting the staff toward going out and hunting down these offenders that are failing to register. But Megan's law itself is not just registering offenders. It's releasing information. It's ensuring that they're followed up on. It's civil commitment laws for those offenders who are predatory, keeping them confined to treatment facilities.

I would say there is no one state that has the best version of sex offender registration and notification, but we have in California people paying $10 to call for information that should be free, where in most states, that's not nonexistent. It's free.

O'BRIEN: Before you get away then, should it be federalized? I asked you that at the outset.

AHEARN: Well, it is a federal law. What needs to happen is, you know, we're calling upon President Bush now to put into place stringent financial consequences to the states that fail to track these guys down.

In California, as in every other state, they are required to notify the FBI every time they can't locate a sex offender. My guess is they have not made 33,000 phone calls to the FBI. So yes, I would agree, we need to have federal intervention immediately, and consequences to those states that fail to track down offenders.

O'BRIEN: Laura Ahearn, with the Parents for Megan's Law, thanks for being with us on CNN SUNDAY MORNING.

AHEARN: Thank you.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com