Posted on 02/25/2013 6:12:12 PM PST by massmike
The state’s most dangerous sex predators ran up a $1.2 million taxpayer-funded legal tab last year by quietly using an obscure provision in state law that lets them hire public defenders to go behind closed doors and argue to keep their identities and whereabouts secret, a Herald review found.
Since 2003, when the state ordered the most dangerous, or Level 3, sex offenders be posted on a public website, convicts have flooded the Committee for Public Counsel Services with requests for lower, laxer classification. Since then, the public defenders’ office has had to shell out skyrocketing sums for lawyers to take those cases before the Sex Offenders Registry Board.
Last year alone, the bill to represent indigent convicts cost taxpayers $1,228,065. That’s up a hundredfold from $11,293 in 2002.
“These sex offenders have already been criminally convicted in court. Now we’re handing them taxpayer-funded lawyers so they can attack our laws? It’s ludicrous,” said Laurie Myers, a longtime advocate for tougher laws for the state’s roughly 11,100 sex offenders.
What’s more, the legal tab could rise even higher under a bill filed recently by state Rep. Brian Mannal. The Barnstable Democrat wants the registry board to contact all sex offenders requesting reclassification or removal from the online registry and inform them of their right to a hearing and a free, taxpayer-funded lawyer if they’re deemed indigent.
Meanwhile, state Rep. Brad Jones (R-North Reading) has filed a bill to get taxpayers off the hook for paying convicted sex offenders’ legal fees.
“After you’ve been convicted and the taxpayer has paid for your incarceration, now we’re going to have the taxpayer pay to say you’re not at risk of re-offending?” Jones said. “I think that’s an unjustifiable expense and it’s something that’s ballooned exponentially.”
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonherald.com ...
Yet another word that needs to be deleted from common useage by pols, government officials and the media.
Culling becomes a necessity when law runs amok.
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