Tough sex-offender bills go to full Senate

BOISE – Long mandatory minimum sentences for repeat sex offenders won unanimous support from a Senate committee Friday.

“I think it’s time we quit pussy-footing around with known offenders,” said Sen. Mike Jorgenson, R-Hayden Lake.

Jorgenson and other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent the full Senate SB 1301, a proposal from Attorney General Lawrence Wasden to set mandatory minimum sentences of 15 years for any registered sex offender who reoffends, and life for violent predators who reoffend.

“Mandatory minimum of 15 years means 15 years, and a mandatory minimum life sentence means life,” Deputy Attorney General Bill von Tagen told the committee. “So if a violent sexual predator commits another sex offense, as a result of this they will be spending the rest of their life in a penitentiary.”

Recidivism rates for repeat sex offenders vary from 5 to 15 percent, depending on the study, and are higher for violent sexual predators, von Tagen said. “The Idaho experience with violent sexual predators is higher than that,” he said.

Here in Idaho, four of the 32 designated violent sexual predators have already reoffended in Idaho or in other states, and none has been out of prison longer than eight years because the VSP classification didn’t exist until 1998, von Tagen said.

“This is an individual who just doesn’t get it,” von Tagen said. “To quote from a movie: What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

Sen. Kate Kelly, D-Boise, asked if the bill was proposed out of a lack of trust for judges.

“Is what you’re saying … we don’t trust their judgment so the Legislature should be setting the standard?” Kelly said.

Von Tagen said the severity of repeat sex offenses makes legislation necessary.

“(The) Legislature prescribes punishments for crimes all the time,” von Tagen said.

Sen. Hal Bunderson, R-Meridian, asked von Tagen if he saw any more loopholes in Idaho sex offender laws.

Von Tagen said it’s impossible to enact laws that stop every criminal.

“If that were true we’d probably have a perfect society by now,” he said.

The committee also unanimously approved SB 1304, also from the attorney general, which makes it more difficult for sex offenders to be removed from the state registry.