While sexual predators receive little public sympathy, the important principle here is that they just can't lock you up and take away liberties based on an arbitrary caprice. They have to follow rules. As seen in this report.
The state must play by the book in seeking to involuntarily commit sexually violent offenders following completion of their prison terms, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled yesterday.
The high court decided that the state had wrongly committed Ellis Lorenzo Miles, a convicted rapist from Richmond, to a special facility in Dinwiddie County, because it incorrectly scored his test to identify potentially violent sex predators.
Miles, 37, contested the civil-commitment decision of a Richmond Circuit Court judge who had been convinced that the inmate would commit other offenses after release.
Miles was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 1995 for convictions of rape in Richmond and malicious wounding in Chesterfield County. He has been confined at the special Virginia Center for Behavioral Rehabilitation since mid-August 2005.
The problem with the civil commitment?
Miles had scored three points out of a possible six on a risk-assessment test. The law specifies that an inmate must register at least four points to initiate other civil-commitment evaluations. But the Department of Corrections mistakenly determined that he had reached the required number of points based on, among other things, his age and the type of offenses.
A clinical psychologist later concluded that Miles was "sexually aggressive," and his "personality disorder appears to predispose him to commit sexually violent offenses," the Supreme Court noted.
Despite undisputed evidence of his lower score, the state argued that the score is just a procedural mechanism, rather than a requirement to proceed with the later evaluations and civil-commitment proceeding.
The seven-member high court unanimously disagreed with the state's contention and reversed the commitment order of Circuit Judge Melvin R. Hughes Jr.
"At oral argument in this case," Justice Barbara Milano Keenan wrote, "the commonwealth also conceded that it would not have initiated proceedings against Miles if he had not received a score of four" on the test called the Rapid Risk Assessment for Sex Offender Recidivism (RRASOR).
"By these concessions, the commonwealth effectively refutes its own argument that the [test score provision] is purely a procedural screening guideline and lacks any substantive effect because but for Miles' erroneous RRASOR score, the commonwealth would not have taken further action against Miles," the justice explained.
The law is the law, the court suggested, and not subject to the state's spin on it.
"We observe that the commonwealth's position is also without merit," Keenan said, "because it effectively asks us to hold that the commonwealth's own errors should redound to Miles' detriment."
J. Tucker Martin, the chief spokesman for the attorney general's office, said no decision has been made yet about releasing Miles.
"We are reviewing the opinion and considering all the options," he said.
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