GPS monitoring bill for McNeil Island residents signed by governor

The room looked undisturbed. A gold watch, pill bottles, a backpack and a toothbrush had all been left behind, tidily arranged in the small Tukwila apartment. The man’s clothes had been neatly put away. Only a missing pair of shoes, a gray T-shirt and a state-issued cellphone indicated that Damion Blevins was gone.

Blevins had recently been granted conditional release from McNeil Island where he had been civilly committed following his incarceration for a sexually violent offense. Now he cut off the court-ordered GPS monitor from his ankle and boarded a train to Portland.

The monitor is designed to notify officials immediately if it’s removed so they can quickly respond. But corrections officers missed the alert from Blevins’ monitor, documents obtained by The Seattle Times through public records requests show. It was three days before he was caught.

On Friday, Gov. Bob Ferguson signed legislation, HB1457, that tightens how state agencies use the technology already employed to monitor civilly committed people in the community.

“This bill makes an important change … it makes [GPS monitoring] a requirement and requires it to track sexually violent predators in real time,” Ferguson said as he prepared to sign the bill in Olympia. “It’s very good for public safety — really appreciate the hard work in a bipartisan fashion to get this done.”

“In a nutshell, this bill mandates the top of the top-level monitoring,” Rep. Dan Griffey, R-Allyn, the bill’s sponsor, said in an interview this week. It is unclear whether the new law would have helped prevent Blevins’ escape.

Judges already require people on conditional release from the Special Commitment Center on McNeil Island to wear GPS monitors in order to live in the community. The technology must be worn continuously to track where people go and can notify a Department of Corrections officer if the wearer removes the device or goes somewhere they shouldn’t.

For people civilly detained, following a conviction or charge for a sexually violent crime, conditional release is intended to be a step down from the 24-hour secure surveillance of an institution and a path toward returning to the community.

Washington’s sexual civil commitment law allows the state to indefinitely detain someone after their criminal sentence. A court or jury must determine a person meets the criteria of a “sexually violent predator” if they are found 50% or more likely to reoffend in a predatory manner if not confined in a secure setting, based on past conviction on charges of sexual violence and underlying psychiatric conditions.

The devices create a layer of surveillance but are not a guarantee, experts say.

Washington’s devices can be programmed to demarcate specific “inclusion zones” for the wearer, creating a 300- to 600-foot radius around someone’s home address, and other “exclusion” areas for certain places like schools. They can also be programmed to alert a corrections officer if the person goes into places they shouldn’t. A spokesperson for the Department of Corrections could not say how often this is done.

Griffey said the new law requires the state to always use zone notifications and employ anti-tampering notifications “to the extent feasible.”

The law also outlines a GPS notification option that crime survivors can opt-in to receive, which would alert them if someone who had harmed them or a family member was nearby.

Blevins had been on the lam for nearly a full day when the state discovered he was missing. His device was working as intended and issued an alert when he removed it. But the state only learned he was gone when a polygraph examiner called the following day to say Blevins had not shown up for a scheduled test. Such tests are conducted periodically to check whether people are compliant with their release conditions.

Only then did a corrections officer check the GPS log and see the device had been cut.

“Between the two of us, we could not identify one single sign of his escape being planned,” corrections officers wrote over email in early October, two days after Blevins cut off the monitor.

The Department of Corrections said it is investigating any oversight lapses or misconduct that allowed the state to miss the electronic notification. The agency said the lapse was not the result of any issues with the GPS technology, and it has not made any policy or protocol changes as a result of the incident.

For nearly two decades, Washington has electronically monitored people convicted of sex crimes as a form of community supervision. But electronic monitoring has not prevented people who wear the devices from violating court orders or committing new crimes, according to violation records obtained from the Department of Corrections and the Department of Social and Health Services, the agency that runs the Special Commitment Center and its community housing program. And for years, state corrections officers have told DSHS and courts that the technology is imperfect.

Legal experts and criminal justice advocates have long said the technology can provide a false sense of security and infringe on civil liberties, and can also function as an expansion of mass incarceration.

“In every instance there are variables. DOC cannot definitively quantify and/or predict to what extent the GPS will provide safety to the community,” a corrections officer told the King County Superior Court in 2022. “It will provide general knowledge of (the resident’s) whereabouts as long as the hardware is properly cared for and maintained.”

From 2016 through 2024, people on conditional release from the Special Commitment Center violated court conditions 881 times, including failing to comply with GPS monitoring, Department of Corrections records show.

State corrections officers have told courts that because the technology relies on satellites, there are gaps in accuracy, such as indicating someone is home when they are not, feeding the state false reports of violations and failing to work when someone is inside a building or tunnel — or losing signal entirely.

While a Department of Corrections spokesperson said the devices are capable of real-time notification, violation reports show Washington often uses the monitoring technology passively, going back after an incident to determine what happened.

In a high-density neighborhood, “DOC would not receive any notification of (a person’s) departure from his residence within the established inclusion zone unless he was spotted by someone who knew him and reported it to DOC, which would be highly unlikely,” a corrections officer told the King County Superior Court in 2021 in a housing inspection for a potential resident from McNeil Island.

In the days after Blevins cut off his GPS monitor, and during a multistate search, corrections officials retraced his steps from the morning of his escape.

On Sept. 30, Blevins visited a Department of Social and Health Services building and a gas station, stopped by a UPS store where he had applied for a job, and went to a shopping area in South Seattle’s industrial district. He then returned to his supervised apartment complex in Tukwila, known as the Journey Project, and signed out under the auspices of a meeting with the Department of Corrections.

But Blevins had no such meeting scheduled. Instead, he boarded a bus to downtown Seattle, called a woman identified in his phone as “wifey” and bought an Amtrak ticket, ultimately intending to reach California, state emails show. He cut off his GPS monitor and left it behind at the train station that evening.

Before he was arrested by the U.S. Marshals Service on Oct. 3, cellphone and bank records show Blevins made several payments to “wifey” via CashApp and visited a strip club.

Blevins has a history of assaulting women and served 20 months in prison before being committed in 2019 to the Special Commitment Center on McNeil Island. He pleaded guilty to a felony charge for “sexually violent predator escape” and is now serving his sentence at the Washington Corrections Center in Mason County.

“Some disturbing messages are on that phone going back to August 2024,” a state corrections employee wrote via email after reviewing Blevins’ phone records, according to documents obtained by The Seattle Times through public records requests. “It is clear (he) was engaging in sexually explicit conversations and behavior for several weeks prior to his escape. It is clear this content was never seen by the supervising staff.”

Blevins had been living in the community for less than three months when he absconded.

In dozens of reports written by state corrections officers assigned to inspect placements for residents allowed to leave the Special Commitment Center, inspectors consistently reiterated the limits of the GPS technology. One of the companies with which Washington contracts, 3M, maintains their devices are 90% accurate within 30 feet if used correctly, but this does not account for failing batteries, various weather conditions or indoor environments that can interfere with the satellite signal, according to state inspection reports.

A lack of real-time monitoring, however, is well within state law. The “monitoring agency” is required to notify the supervising authority within 24 hours if a person violates the conditions of their release or absconds.

Griffey said defense lawyers support the real-time monitoring encouraged by his bill. It could show their clients are complying with court orders, proving “someone is living up to their conditions of release and increase the community’s sense of safety,” he said.

From 2005 through 2021, the number of people placed under GPS supervision nationwide increased more than fivefold to 250,000, according to a report by the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform. This includes both people in the criminal legal system and those being monitored by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the institute found.”

DSHS has spent over $1 million on electronic monitoring technology since 2016 for civilly committed individuals who have been granted conditional releases into homes across the state.

While the agency pays for this monitoring, it deferred questions about the technology to the Department of Corrections.

In Washington, the length of monitoring for sex offenses can range from 30 days to the remainder of one’s lifetime. For people who are civilly committed as “sexually violent predators,” the technology is used during conditional release. When a person is ultimately granted release, the state no longer tracks where they go or what they do, a Seattle Times investigation found last year.

More than 13,000 people are in community custody and supervised by the Department of Corrections, but just 210 — less than 2% — are under GPS monitoring, the agency said. Civilly committed people represent about a quarter of that small percentage.

Policymakers have long raised concerns about the limitations of the technology.

Electronic monitoring alone does not improve public protection, California’s Office of the Inspector General wrote in 2009, a year after the state began using the technology. It “provided ‘a false sense of security,’ ” the report found.

The year after the technology was implemented in Washington, a man with a history of sex crimes was wearing a GPS monitor when he killed a 13-year-old in Vancouver, Wash., in 2009.

Meanwhile, legal advocates argue the technology can have serious consequences for the people who are being tracked. Each false negative or small technical problem can lead to an array of penalties and violations that can cause someone to lose their housing placement or lead to new criminal charges.

For individuals with disabilities or mental health issues, understanding and properly maintaining the technology can be especially punitive, the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in a 2022 report, saying the lack of necessary accommodations can leave “people with disabilities set up to fail and at high risk of incarceration for violations.”

Electronic monitoring, the group said, “fails to demonstrably protect public safety, prevent flight, or advance rehabilitation, while causing immense harm to those under surveillance, at a significant financial toll.”