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Thursday, August 17, 2000
Sex offender notification cards in the mail
Legislature approved sending name, address and photo, but discourage vigilantism
By Jim Vertuno
Associated Press
AUSTIN - Released sex offenders who are deemed a high risk to repeat their crimes will have their name, age, photograph and address mailed to neighbors starting this week.
Post cards with the information will be mailed to neighbors within a three-block radius in cities and subdivisions and within a one-mile radius in rural areas.
The cards also will include the nature of the crime.
The post cards will supplement other notification methods already required by law, such as posting the information on the Internet.
The mailings will affect only those convicted since Jan. 1.
The first mailing will involve about 30 offenders and 16,000 postcards, which should reach mailboxes today, Department of Public Safety officials said.
The mailings were approved by the Texas Legislature in the 1999 session.
"We're doing this in order to inform parents that there is a high-risk offender who may pose a danger to their children," said state Rep. Ray Allen, R-Grand Prairie, who sponsored the measure in the House.
Offenders are deemed "high risk" by the courts or the state prison system if they are considered to pose serious danger to the community or likely to continue engaging in criminal sexual conduct.
The first group of offenders subject to the mailouts all received probation for their crimes, which ranged from sexual assault to indecent exposure, said DPS spokesman Tom Vinger.
Critics have warned public distribution of such information could prompt vigilantism.
Officials warned against people seeking frontier justice against offenders living in their neighborhoods.
In 1999, a mentally retarded Vietnamese man in Dallas was severely beaten after he was mistaken for a sex offender.
Randy Ray Baker, 32, was sentenced in July to 48 years in prison for the beating.
Thinh Pham, 27, had lived in an Oak Cliff home for mentally retarded people where a convicted pedophile had lived.
Police say Pham was attacked because Baker believed he was a pedophile, which he is not.
The pedophile no longer lived at the address.
"These post cards are not an invitation to violence or illegal activity," said DPS Director Col. Thomas A. Davis Jr.
"The average person will be unsettled when they first receive these," Vinger said.
"But any criminal activity will not be tolerated, whether people think it's for a good cause or not."
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