They may butt heads in court, but on Dec. 10 a Maricopa County public defender and a Pima County prosecutor agreed on the broader points of a sensitive policy issue — how best to manage sex offenders in the community.
Paul Prato, the public defender, and Kathleen Mayer, the prosecutor, said there is a need for a formal process to allow sex offenders to alter or lower their risk assessment level or even challenge the initial level assigned to them.
“I think when we are looking at policy issues we are all trying to do the best we can,” Prato, the public defender said. “Now when we get down to the details of how we do it, I’m sure there will be disagreements that we will have to iron out because people can honestly disagree on how to do things. But I think what you see in here is an agreement we need some type of a review process.”
Mayer, the prosecutor, said: “We are both interested in public safety and accountability, and we recognize that a significant percentage of our sex offenders live in the community.”
Mayer said they want to hold offenders accountable and the community has a right to know where they are. “In the long run, we want to prevent further sex offenses — both of us want that — and how we appropriately manage our sex offenders in the population is a big piece of that,” the prosecutor said.
The two attorneys are members of a panel that is hearing updates on community notification. They were tasked, along with a third member, Dr. Tom Selby, to form a subcommittee to look into the possibility of establishing an appeals process so sex offenders’ notification level can be altered — that is, brought down or on the “flip side,” brought up — over time.
“All we are going to do is make a recommendation to the greater committee that this is something we should look at more closely,” Prato said in a phone interview.
Since the mid-1990s, Arizona has notified communities about sex offenders released from jail or on probation. The offenders’ information is entered into a statewide database, a portion of which involves risk assessment, designed to predict an offender’s risk of recidivism.
There are three types of notification: Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3, with Level 3 posing the highest risk of re-offending.
The Community Notification Guidelines Committee, comprised of lawyers and advocates, has been discussing notification laws, especially how they apply to juvenile offenders.
“From my perspective, anytime you have people being classified and that classification is affecting their liberty interests and how they perform in the community, there should be a review process because the chance for human error is there,” Prato said.
“It’s a matter of fairness,” he said.
The two lawyers also agreed to contact other states that have a similar review process and see if Arizona could learn from them and draft a model that “works best for us,” said Mayer.
Mayer said the review body could be a standing committee of five to seven people representing different disciplines. There has to be involvement from victims as well, she said. “It will be the job of that body to determine that initial assessments are done correctly and to provide a reasonable vehicle for offenders to have their notification levels altered,” she said.
What they have in mind is for the body to operate under the aegis of the Department of Public Safety, Mayer said, quickly adding that DPS has yet to be asked about it.
Initial research by Prato showed that seven states have some type of review process.
Prato suggested that in talking to some of these states, committee members should also look at any mechanism put in place to measure whether the review works.
“What we are looking for is the opportunity for the offender who is improving to be able to transition back into society because if they can’t and we leave them with no hope, then what have we accomplished?” he told Arizona Capitol Times.
If hope exists, Prato said, “hopefully they improve and they don’t re-offend.”