Apparently a few states are reacting to some high profile incidents in which convicted sex offenders were found driving ice cream trucks. In one case a man named Eduardo Grau ended up molesting a 9-year-old girl while using his ice cream truck as a rolling child lure. To prevent such crimes in the future people are attempting to use common sense and keep pedophiles and rapists from working in what is essentially a child service industry. The A.C.L.U. is not on-board:
Efforts to keep predators out of ice cream trucks gained momentum in 2004, when Eduardo Grau of Troy, N.Y., 56, was arrested after police said he offered rides in his ice cream truck to children and abused a 9-year-old girl.
The case spurred the 2005 New York state law. Grau eventually pleaded guilty to first-degree sexual abuse in 2006, according to District Attorney Patricia DeAngelis. Since then, cities including San Antonio and Tucson have passed similar measures. New York appears to have the only statewide restriction, said Sarah Hammond of the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Florida Assistant State Attorney Harmon Massey prosecuted a 2005 case involving the driver of an ice cream truck who was eventually convicted of battery against a teenager.
Massey said Florida should consider an ice cream vendor law. “Can you think of a better kid magnet, if you were a sex offender?”
Amanda Burnham of Perris, Calif., said that for a sex offender, “there are a bazillion things you could do for a living that don’t involve children. It just seems like a very, very odd choice.”
Burnham learned last summer that a man who drove an ice cream truck down her street is a registered sex offender. She and her neighbors put notices “on every single house” to warn residents, she said. The effort helped inspire the proposal in San Bernardino County.
Such laws can go too far, said Jennifer Ring, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the Dakotas.
“If you’re throwing everyone in the same bucket, you’re really restricting these people who have paid their debt to society to go on and be productive citizens,” Ring said.
Is anyone really surprised by this?
h/t Crime Scene KC.
I agree that the ACLU is against the very ideals that protect families, communities, and decent citizens, especially with their defense of registered sex offenders. That is why we need a constitutional amendment to ban sex offenders.
It is time we seriously consider building sex offender colonies throughout the western United States and Alaska.
It is obvious. Nobody wants sex offenders to live in their neighborhoods, or even their cities. I’m a parent, and I would fight tooth and nail to prevent sex offenders from living anywhere that children may live, even if their victims were people they knew. It means NOTHING to me; what means EVERYTHING to me is they committed an atrocious crime against children. That’s enough for me.
Unfortunately, these sex offenders have rights. If they are not in prison, they will probably get the ACLU to sue the city and we will have to spend thousands of dollars defending the restrictions.
The ONLY thing, therefore, is to create an amendment to the US Constitution, creating sex offender colonies to restrict where these convicted sex offenders live in the first place. How to do this?
The first thing that needs to be done is to create an outline of such an amendment. I looked at the process for how an amendment is created. Here is the process:
Under Article V, there are two ways to propose amendments to the Constitution and two ways to ratify them.
To propose an amendment
1. Two-thirds of both houses of Congress vote to propose an amendment, or
2. Two-thirds of the state legislatures ask Congress to call a national convention to propose amendments.
To ratify an amendment
1. Three-fourths of the state legislatures approve it, or
2. Ratifying conventions in three-fourths of the states approve it.
I would submit that the state legislature route would probably be more effective, but the congressional method can be tried first. It can effectively be used as a litmus test for voting, i.e., if someone doesn’t want to vote for proposing the amendment in congress, their 2008 opponent can have a field day in saying that the incumbent protects sex offenders at the expense of children’s safety, etc.
Such an amendment would solve many problems. First of all, the registry would not exist in its current form. Parents don’t have to worry where the sex offenders live, as they all would, by law, have to live in the colony. This also eliminates the need for GPS, as the sex offenders would be restricted to the colony in the first place. No worries about convicted child molesters stalking your children’s school or favorite park, or trolling on the Internet.
Next, registrants would constitutionally have to be subjected to non-court ordered search of their premises within the zone. In addition, all their mail and phone calls would constitutionally be authorized to be monitored for illicit activities. Internet usage would also be strictly regulated, with all file storage for every computer actually done at the server-level. In addition, emails would be assigned by the administration, no Instant messaging or accessing MySpace or other children sites allowed, and all keystrokes and sites visited will be recorded 100%. All costs for such usage would be borne out by the offender, incidentally.
All registrants would be required to work, with their paychecks being handled by the administrators. Deductions for medical, rent, all services, and everything else would be done automatically, and any credit the registrant have be used for discretionary income ONLY from the colony store. Also, EVERY registrant will be required to go through treatment appropriate to his crime, and be certified as cured; otherwise, he can be subject to a felony charge and returned to prison.
Now, please keep in mind one thing: The sex offender colony is NOT…repeat…NOT a replacement for tough, appropriately long, non-paroleable sentencing guidelines in the first place! THAT IS PARAMOUNT. The colony would exist because society cannot handle the large amounts of offenders in their neighborhoods, with the inherent terror parents have with the knowledge that offenders are around their children. Therefore, the colony is SPECIFICALLY for offenders to spend their entire registration periods in a constitutionally-approved manner, eliminating the need for registries as they exist now.
Keep in mind, many offenders also are able to leave the registry for certain crimes after a specified amount of time has passed. Therefore, once a registrant’s time period has expired, he can petition the administration to be relieved of the duty to register and live in the SORERA zone. A panel of professionals, law enforcement individuals, and the offender’s victim representatives, will go over the request. If they feel the offender is ready to join society, then he can leave the zone and live anywhere he wants, although he will have to permanently register with law enforcement wherever he goes for the rest of his life. Bear in mind, also, that any registrant who has to register for life will NEVER get the opportunity to leave the zone. Only the most benign of the registrants will ever be allowed to leave.
So there you have it. With a constitutional amendment, we can control where they live, where they work, and how they communicate, with confidence that they won’t have a “relapse” when our own children are in striking distance.
All interested people are encouraged to write to me at SORETRA@aim.com to further this just cause.
This is the most asinine satire I’ve ever read.
Look Sex Offender registries work. When I worked in non-profits I had to be fingerprinted in most of them to ensure I wasn’t a child molester. They checked me out with the local cops. It worked because programs that did so had a much lower rate of incidents than those that did not.
Sex Offender registries aren’t about punishment (and there is a good argument to be made for passing laws that keep people from tormenting people on them) but are about parents and businesses that work with children being able to ensure pedophiles and rapists aren’t able to insinuate themselves into positions of trust.
A single mother dating can use the registry to ensure the man she’s dating at least doesn’t have a history of abusing children, why is that a bad thing?
We don’t let felons own guns, we don’t let people who are members of anti-American groups like the Ku Klux Klan or Revolutionary Communist Party hold sensitive positions in government and we don’t let child molesters and rapists sneak around becoming teachers, step parents and hopefully ice cream truck drivers.
Your distopian fantasy website is rather disgusting isn’t it? It paints rapists and child molesters as victims of a fascist society but aren’t they victims of their own actions? Isn’t it they who had so little respect for the persons they victimized that they can no longer be trusted? Are you claiming it’d be better to just shrug our shoulders and allow people who’ve proven to be amoral at best to drive ice cream trucks, work with children and stalk single parent homes?
So how does one go about checking the status of ice cream truck drivers (and others who have direct contact with children) in their neighborhoods to ensure that they are not RSOs? Presumably they’d have to get the name of the driver.
Any ideas on this? It’s something I’d like to post on my site, so that parents can better protect their children.
And what is wrong with those people at the ACLU??? What about the rights of the children to remain safe? What about the rights of parents to keep their children safe? As far as I’m concerned, once a person breaks a certain law, they forfeit certain rights associated with that law. If they are convicted of child molestation or rape, they should absolutely NOT be allowed anywhere near children. Period.
And those that cry foul when the “rights” of child rapists are “violated”… I’d like to know if they’d trust those people around their own children. And if so, how would they feel if it was their child the predator raped next? You want them to be allowed to drive ice cream trucks? Let them do it for your own children.
This is one of the reasons I absolutely detest ice cream trucks.
I think the solution is for people to press companies to use the same standards child care facilities use. At any YMCA I’ve ever worked at every worker who is in the youth programs is fingerprinted and the local police have to clear them.
As for the ACLU…who knows. I once blogged about a local ACLU big wig (I forget what state) who was caught with tons of child porn. He also coincidentally filed many motions against child porn laws.
“As for the ACLU…who knows. I once blogged about a local ACLU big wig (I forget what state) who was caught with tons of child porn. He also coincidentally filed many motions against child porn laws.”
Yeah… such a coincidence. Raises many questions into their true intentions when defending these sick freaks. If I had been a lawyer for the ACLU who was told to defend one of those cases, or to help on any of those motions against child porn laws, I’d have quit. How can their lawyers know what they’re doing by filing those motions and not feel… dirty? It taints their practice for life, as far as I’m concerned, and it taints any good that the ACLU does.
I think every one on this sight is full of it, you can not tell me that none of you all have not done anything wrong, and if you do, you are lieing and I’ll tell that to your face. all sin is equal, look it up, even hate is a sin, how are you going to answer for that. don’t judge unless you want to be judged. you all need to go back and learn more before you start talking, because you live in sin every day, and you sin every day. God does not judge one from the other, they are all equal in his eyes. have you forgoten that. Because if you have ever hollerd at any one, even a kid or spanked him, you have abused that child, so you are just as bad as they are, you are no better, just a hipocirt. If any one can answer and say they have never done anything wrong or commited a sin, answer then, until then just be quit, because you are liying to your self and god. Now when i say broken a crime, think of eveyr thing to littering smoking, making a turn in your car with out sigaling, because if you do enough of these to gethter, you are a crimenal and a repat one at that. so you are worse off then the offenders. at least some of them want to change but people like you stop it. you have had seconed chanses in your lifes one time or another, everyone has. how would you like it if god didn’t give you a seconed chance, would you cry to him when he says no you need to die and leave your family behind. think about it before you speak. thats whats wrong with socioty to day, people are afraid of there selfs mo than any, i feel sorry for you all, at least the most of the offenders know they done wrong, but you all still deniy your wrongs. cry me a river.
Are you equating traffic violations and littering with raping children? What’s wrong with you?
I started researching ice cream truck molestation because there is an ice cream truck in our neighborhood right now and it is 40 degrees out and there ice cream truck doesn’t even look like a real ice cream truck, and they keep driving up the same street.
You should call the police (not 911) and let them know.
that 9 year old girl was me. I have to live with this everyday of my life. i used to have nightmares i made him mad and he was gonna come and kill me for telling. im glad that because of me they passed a law stating that they must be screened before getting a job. and now only female drivers come around my neighborhood. sadfully when this incident happend the dingaling company had the nerve to bribe me with aa buyout to not speak of what happened. instead we told him that money was not important and as you see the law was passed. i am very happy i chose to come forward. i almost didnt. i felt as though my parents were going to be mad. idont no why i just did.
Thank you for coming forward.