07-14-2005, 09:51 AM
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Site Moderator
Guru
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Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Minnesota
Age: 40
Posts: 16,172
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Here I am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rebellion";p="
$15K is ridiculous, he should have to put up well into six figures to even have a sniff of release.
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The Star Tribune did a story on this aspect of the case. Registration is required, so here's the key parts of the article:
Quote:
In retrospect, it's easy to conclude that the $15,000 bail set
for Joseph E. Duncan III in a Minnesota courtroom last April was
too low to protect the public.
The Fargo man, a convicted rapist, was arrested July 2 in Idaho, where he is charged with kidnapping an 8-year-old girl and suspected of raping her and killing her family.
The case has many people questioning how Becker County authorities could have released Duncan on bail after he was charged in March with molesting a 6-year-old boy in Detroit Lakes, Minn., last July.
The answers aren't very comforting.
Even in the age of computers, experts say, judges and attorneys often have incomplete information about defendants when bail is set. And when it comes to getting information about defendants' records from other states - as was the case with Duncan - the problems multiply.
Even when they have detailed, up-to-date information in front of them, it's extremely hard for court officials to predict the future actions of a convicted criminal, said psychiatrist Carl Malmquist, who for years prepared defendant evaluations for Hennepin County judges.
The truth, he said, is that at most bail hearings, "the kind of data needed to assess a person to make those predictions is usually not available."
(snip)
Judge Thomas Schroeder and attorneys in the Becker County case knew that Duncan had served a lengthy prison sentence in Washington state for a sex crime years ago and that he was a registered sex offender.
But they weighed that against the fact that he was a dean's list student at North Dakota State University, held a steady job and had a clean record since leaving prison in 2000.
Yet, there was no mention in Schroeder's courtroom that Duncan had been classified as a Level 3 sex offender, considered the most likely to reoffend. Becker County Attorney Joe Evans said his office also did not know before making its bail recommendation last spring that Duncan was sent to prison in Washington state in 1982 because he failed sex offender treatment. That suggests Duncan was not dealing with the problems that led to his violent acts.
Evans said he was unaware of the details of Duncan's crime: that he raped and tortured a 14-year-old boy at gunpoint when he was just 16.
Just the same, Evans said, knowing that information probably would not have made any difference. (Schroeder referred all questions to the state court administrator's office.)
Duncan, Evans said, was charged with a crime - sexually touching a child without force -- for which the state's guidelines recommend a non-prison sentence even for someone with Duncan's record.
The county attorney also noted that his office asked for $25,000 bail and that the judge set bail at $15,000. Duncan posted $15,000 cash bail, which means that he had the money to get a much higher bail bond if the judge had set a higher amount to compel him to make his next court appearance.
And to prosecutors, Duncan appeared to have "made a successful adjustment" to life outside prison, Evans said.
(snip)
Whether they like it or not, judges and criminal lawyers are in the business of trying to predict the future dangerousness of offenders. The public expects it of them.
But experts say, and some prosecutors agree, that no one is very good at doing that part of the job. Studies indicate that judges, lawyers, psychologists and psychiatrists aren't very good at predicting an individual offender's odds of reoffending, Feld said.
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Lots of things are clear in hindsight. And I think a growing body of evidence makes it clear that sex offenders are at high risk of relapse and should be treated very carefully.
But in the end, bail and sentencing decisions are made by weighing the facts in front of you and consulting sentencing guidelines. Unless we want to remove human judgment from the mix, all we can do is make sure the guidelines are as specific as possible, and that judges have as much information at their disposal as possible.
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Man up.
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