State uses sex predator law

OLYMPIA – For someone who’s barely 21 years old, James D. Mosely has quite a criminal past.

At 14, according to court records, the Rosalia High School student was sent to juvenile rehabilitation after a video tape showed him molesting a 10-year-old girl on a school bus.

Less than a year later, he was sentenced to an additional four years in custody for raping two local boys, one of them dozens of times. He’d threatened to kill them or their families if they told anyone.

Under questioning, Mosely eventually admitted to eight other sexual assaults on children, most of them younger than 10, and with animals. In rehabilitation, he has assaulted staffers and other youths. Three years ago, he enrolled in a “relapse prevention” program for juvenile sex offenders. He was expelled after three weeks.

Now he’s slated for release.

In an unusual move for someone so young, the state attorney general’s office will go to court this fall to try to have Mosely declared a sexually violent predator. If a Whitman County jury or judge agrees, Mosely will be carted off for an indefinite stay in the state’s high-security Special Commitment Center alongside the prison on McNeil Island. Mosely’s lawyer was unavailable for comment.

For reasons that are unclear, the number of state attempts to civilly commit sex predators has risen to a record high. Attorney General Rob McKenna’s Sexually Violent Predator Unit tried to commit 24 sex offenders last year – a 25 percent increase over 2004. The unit won commitment orders against 19 of the men – also a record high for the controversial program, begun in 1990. The numbers don’t include commitments in King County, which is unique among Washington’s 39 counties because it handles such cases itself.

So far this year, the attorney general’s unit has filed 13 more cases, putting it on track to match last year’s total.

“We’re going to have another banner year,” said Todd Bowers, one of the six attorneys in the unit. “I hope it’s temporary, but we’re committed to doing these cases no matter how many come down the pike.”

The constitutionality of the indefinite sentences has repeatedly passed court muster, so long as the sex offenders can eventually work their way back into society through treatment.

But some critics say the system remains grossly unfair. People can be held months past their prison release date as they await a trial on civil commitment. Under the law, they’re in custody indefinitely for a future crime they might commit. And 16 years into the program, very few sex predators have actually won release.

“We have a myth,” said Spokane defense attorney Timothy Trageser. “It looks like there’s a happy ending, a way out, that people can work their way back into the community and re-integrate. But that’s not happening.”

Local pending cases include:

“ Donald T. Townsend, 32, who at age 14 was put on probation and ordered to have treatment for sexually abusing a 7-year-old girl in Oregon. In 2000, Townsend was convicted of second-degree attempted rape of a child after chatting sexually on the Internet with a fictitious 13-year-old girl. The girl turned out to be a Spokane police detective. Townsend was arrested when he showed up at a hotel room to meet the girl. He also allegedly told investigators that he sexually abused a 9-year-old girl he was baby-sitting in 1991.

“ Ronald R. Timm, 55, who pleaded guilty in 1989 to first-degree statutory rape on a plea bargain for raping two girls, ages 5 and 6. In 1997, he pleaded guilty to first-degree child rape for an incident with a 4-year-old girl. According to the state sex-predator unit, Timm also told investigators that he’d had sexual contact with about two dozen other children, most girls ages 3 to 7.

“ Soon, the unit will decide whether to seek commitment for Frederick “Kevin” Coe, convicted in 1981 of being Spokane’s notorious South Hill Rapist and now serving the last months of his 25-year prison term at the state penitentiary at Walla Walla.

Trageser, who represents both Townsend and Timm, said that part of the problem with the program is the apparently arbitrary nature of who gets branded a sex predator. Each year, about 800 sex offenders are released from prisons and jails. And although state law defines predators as people with a mental abnormality who are more likely than not to reoffend, Trageser said those decisions are often based on scanty psychological evidence.

“It’s a scary, scary thing, watching a state’s expert testify that your client meets the definition of an SVP (sexually violent predator),” he said. “It’s scary to see how the reports are twisted, and the evidence is polished to fit what they want it to say.”

For example, he said, the fact that a rapist turns on a light might be seen as evidence of particular deviance. If the crime’s committed in the dark, that might be viewed as particularly heinous. And these are people, he notes, who have already served their sentences.

“And when people say ‘lock ‘em up and throw away the key,’ I say it’s absurd to have a system where we can do that based on something someone might do,” he said. “We don’t have a crystal ball.”

Civil commitments will likely decrease at the end of the decade, as recent tougher penalties for sex offenders take effect. Since 2001, violent sex crimes fall under a new sentencing scheme. Most offenders now get a fixed prison term, after which they’re allowed to petition for release. If the state End of Sentence Review Committee thinks the person remains a threat, he can be kept in prison for the rest of his life.

“It was a sea-change in the system,” said Bowers.

But even as more sex offenders can remain behind bars for longer, civil commitments will likely continue for “recent overt acts.” That’s the term for cases in which a person is believed to present an imminent public threat – such as one offender recently caught leaving sexually explicit notes at playgrounds.

“That piece of our caseload has grown,” said Bowers. “People are much more acutely aware of the sex offenders that are in their midst.”