JUSTICES HEAR ARGUMENTS ON SEXUAL PREDATOR LAW.Byline: The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times With the national debate over how to protect children from sexual predators The term sexual predator is used pejoratively to describe a person seen as obtaining or trying to obtain sexual contact with another person in a metaphorically predatory manner. clearly in the justices' minds, the Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday on whether the Constitution permits a state to keep a sexual offender who is dangerous but not mentally ill confined con·fine v. con·fined, con·fin·ing, con·fines v.tr. 1. To keep within bounds; restrict: Please confine your remarks to the issues at hand. See Synonyms at limit. in a mental hospital after the expiration of a criminal sentence. The case was an appeal from the state of Kansas, where a 1994 law permitting such confinement con·fine·ment n. 1. The act of restricting or the state of being restricted in movement. 2. Lying-in. confinement , the Sexually Violent Predator Some U.S. states have laws which give a special status for criminals designated as sexually violent predators, which allows these offenders to be held in state run in-custody mental institutions after their sentence is complete if they are considered to be a risk to the public. Act, was declared unconstitutional earlier this year by the State Supreme Court. The justices have granted a temporary stay of that ruling. That relieves the state, at least until the Supreme Court decides the case, of the obligation to release Leroy Hendricks, 62, a self-described pedophile pedophile Forensic psychiatry A person with pedophilia; there are an estimated 500,000 pedophiles in the world. See Child prostitution, Megan's law, Pedophilia. who has spent much of his adult life in prison for sex crimes against children, and some other prisoners. Hendricks, who testified at a state court hearing that the only way he could guarantee that he would not commit more crimes was to die, most recently spent 10 years in prison for molesting a child. The state then sent him to a high-security mental hospital after a jury found that he met the two requirements of the Sexually Violent Predator Act: that his criminal behavior was due to a ``mental abnormality Noun 1. mental abnormality - any abnormality of mental function organic brain syndrome - mental abnormality resulting from disturbance of the structure or function of the brain or personality disorder'' and that he was likely to repeat his offenses. The case is being closely watched, not only in the states with similar laws - Arizona, California, Minnesota, Washington and Wisconsin, which enacted the first such law in 1990 - but in numerous other states that are considering the same approach. New York, New Jersey and 35 other states filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the justices to uphold the law. It was evident from the arguments that while the justices have considerable sympathy for the state's goal, they are troubled by the law's open-ended rationale. ``This is kind of a new category of confinement,'' Justice Sandra Day O'Connor Sandra Day O'Connor (born March 26 1930) is an American jurist who served as the first female Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. She was considered a strict constructionist. said to Carla J. Stovall, the Kansas attorney general. Justice O'Connor asked whether the same approach could be applied in the future to ``lock up any violent offender'' who suffered not from mental illness but from a ``mental aberration of some sort,'' and who was likely to commit further crimes. Stovall replied that ``so long as we have a medical justification for commitment and we show future dangerousness,'' such a law would be valid. |
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