Keeping sex offenders off the streets.

• Author: Gordon, Dianna

It's a parent's worst nightmare: a convicted pedophile wandering the neighborhood. To ensure greater safety, policymakers have taken action against sexual predators.

An historic decision last year by the U.S. Supreme Court puts convicted sexual predators back in lock-up, even after their prison terms are served. In Kansas vs. Hendricks, the Court decided 5-4 to uphold a 1994 state law allowing dangerous sexual predators to be confined in a mental institution after their prison sentences are completed.

Although eight other states - Arizona, California, Illinois, Minnesota, North Dakota, New Jersey, Washington and Wisconsin - have similar laws and Delaware and Missouri have pre-filed bills along the same lines, 45 states and territories filed briefs supporting the Kansas law, which was modeled on a statute enacted by Washington state in 1990.

That didn't surprise Representative Mike O'Neal, former chairman of the Kansas House Judiciary Committee and one of the principal authors of the law, who said most states would have an "intense interest" in the Court decision. He was right. Forty-one bills were introduced as of January, according to NCSL's Health Policy Tracking Service.

O'Neal was "relieved" by the Supreme Court decision, but added that he had been sure when he sponsored the law that "we'd done the right things" to keep repeat offenders off the streets within the realm of the Constitution.

"The problem of sexual predators has very few solutions," he said, "but we do need to assure our public that we are going to do something to protect them."

The Kansas law says that sexual offenders who have completed their prison terms can be involuntarily committed for an indefinite period of time if they suffer from a "mental abnormality or personality disorder" and are likely to commit sex crimes again.

"It actually arose from a gruesome case in my own district," O'Neal said. "A man, a pedophile, who was convicted wrote letters to a local prosecutor, telling him that once he got out he would re-commit.

"The prosecutor was absolutely appalled, telling me that we had young kids out there, that he knew the man would molest another child, and that his hands were tied until there was another victim. We couldn't act until another child was hurt."

Another factor was the rape and murder of a college co-ed by a convicted sexual offender who had been released from prison.

PAINSTAKING PROCESS

O'Neal said that it was a painstaking process to craft the law...