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A misleading TV ad from a pro-Donald Trump super PAC claims that, as the attorney general of California, Vice President Kamala Harris “ignored” a state law and “allowed convicted sex offenders to live near schools and parks.” That’s a distortion of what happened.
In fact, Harris defended the law in court until the Supreme Court of California ruled that the law’s residency restrictions for certain registered sex offenders had been unconstitutionally enforced in San Diego County. Harris’ office later advised the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that blanket application of the law also could be found unconstitutional in other counties.
State corrections officials then revised their policy to implement the law on a case-by-case basis, primarily focusing on enforcement against high-risk sex offenders and individuals whose crimes involved young children.
But the MAGA Inc. ad could give the false impression that there was no enforcement.
The ad portraying Harris as soft on crime was released on Oct. 9, and the super PAC has spent more than $19 million to run it thousands of times in at least five electoral swing states, according to AdImpact, which tracks political advertising.
The ad’s narrator says: “After a little girl was raped and buried alive, laws were passed to keep sex offenders away from children. Kamala ignored Jessica’s Law and allowed convicted sex offenders to live near schools and parks. Kamala Harris has always put criminals first.”
The ad refers to the Sexual Predator Punishment and Control Act, otherwise known as Jessica’s Law, or Proposition 83, which about 70% of California voters approved in November 2006. The law was named after Jessica Lunsford, a 9-year-old girl who was kidnapped, raped and killed by a convicted sex offender in 2005.
Among other restrictions, the law said that registered sex offenders could not “reside within 2000 feet of any public or private school, or park where children regularly gather.”
To support its claims about Harris, the attack ad cites Newsweek. Although not clear to viewers, the ad is referring to an Aug. 7 opinion piece by a conservative activist that said: “Indeed, when Harris was the attorney general of California she stopped the enforcement of ‘Jessica’s Law,’ which imposed stricter penalties and restrictions on sex offenders. Initially, as district attorney, she supported the law. However, when it suited her political agenda, she instructed parole officers to disregard its restrictions on where sex offenders could live, allowing them to live near children.”
But that summary is misleading. It omits the fact that Harris’ position on how to enforce the law changed after the state Supreme Court affirmed lower court decisions siding with four plaintiffs who argued that complying with the law’s residency prohibition left them homeless. Prior to that ruling in March 2015, Harris had defended the law in court, as the Attorney General’s Office represented state corrections officials in the case.
As the Associated Press reported at the time:
AP, March 2, 2015: The ruling, which upheld an appeals court decision, came in a case brought by four registered sex offenders in San Diego County.
A San Diego County judge ruled in 2011 that the law violated the three men and one woman’s right to intrastate travel, to establish a home and maintain their privacy and was not specifically tailored to each of their circumstances.
The lower court found sex offenders were effectively banned from about 97 percent of the multifamily rental housing units in San Diego County. At least some of the remaining housing was also not available to them for reasons including low vacancy rates, high prices and the unwillingness of some landlords to rent to sex offenders, according to the court.
The court ordered the state Department of Corrections to stop applying the residency restriction as a blanket provision against all paroled registered sex offenders who were under supervision in San Diego County.
A state appeals court upheld the decision, prompting the state Attorney General’s Office to appeal to the State Supreme Court.
After the Supreme Court of California unanimously ruled that blanket enforcement of the law’s restrictions violated the rights of the parolees in San Diego County, the state corrections department said it would change how it applied the law, as advised by Harris’ office in a confidential legal opinion.
“While the court’s ruling is specific to San Diego County, its rationale is not,” Luis Patino, then the spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement, according to the Los Angeles Times. He added, “After reviewing the court’s analysis, the state attorney general’s office advised CDCR that applying the blanket mandatory residency restrictions of Jessica’s Law would be found to be unconstitutional in every county.”
Although some critics disagreed with the attorney general’s interpretation of the court’s opinion, a legal expert told us that Harris and the CDCR were practically forced to change course.
“The problems that the parolees in San Diego faced were the same in other parts of the state, and challenges were being made everywhere,” Bruce Zucker, an attorney and professor of criminology and justice studies at California State University, Northridge, said in an email. “California courts generally sided with parolees at all levels — trial courts and courts of appeal, as well as the Supreme Court.”
Zucker said that Harris did not ignore the state law, as the ad claimed.
“The AG’s office defended the law at all costs — literally and figuratively,” he told us. “The law was written and enforced in a nonsensical and draconian way, but the AG’s office under Harris wouldn’t back down. The Supreme Court finally ruled that it had to be enforced in a more practical way, which meant case-by-case analyses of each offender’s situation.”
On March 26, 2015, the Los Angeles Times reported that a memo issued by the CDCR said that parole officers would continue to broadly enforce the law’s residency restrictions for high-risk sex offenders and those whose crimes involved children under the age of 14. “Otherwise, officials will assess each parolee based on factors relating to their individual cases, the agency said,” according to the Times.
An AP report added that Patino said the enforcement policy would be “tailored to people who need it the most,” meaning that “some people who are not pedophiles … will probably be removed from the restriction.”
Later that year, in December, the AP reported that a policy change led to “more than 4,200 of the state’s 5,900 offenders no longer qualify[ing] for the residency restrictions, according to data compiled by the corrections department at the AP’s request.”
More people were excluded than originally anticipated. Even some child molesters were removed from the 2,000-foot residency restriction, the AP said, because, upon further review, corrections officials implemented a policy that “requires a direct connection between where a parolee lives and the offender’s crime or potential to reoffend.”
“The department spent months reviewing offenders’ criminal backgrounds before deciding that the ban should continue to apply to about 1,400 offenders,” the article said.
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