February 4, 2010 | by Wayne Havrelly | kgw.com

Student safety at area colleges is in question after a Newschannel 8 investigation reveals a sudden jump in reported sexual assaults.

“I don't believe the numbers,” said Helen Hunter who analyzed campus crime statistics before picking a college 4 years ago.

“We looked at exclusive private colleges and almost all of them had 0 to 3 reported rapes,” said Hunter.

They selected Lewis and Clark College in Southwest Portland.  Her freshman year was fine, but Hunter’s college experience took a sudden turn her sophomore year when she was sexually assaulted by another student.

“He started getting really violent and started pulling my hair and choking me,” said hunter. “It was so confusing for me because I was thinking I went over there and I started kissing him.  It was O.K. until it wasn’t.”

Before the attack, Hunter thought rape could only happen from a stranger.  She descended into an emotional darkness filled with guilt and shame that she's still fighting to overcome.

Stories like Hunter’s happen far more often at colleges than most would ever believe possible.

A recent report by the U.S. Department of Justice estimates one out of 4 college women are victims of rape or attempted rape by the time they graduate.

“It's happening everywhere and college campuses are the perfect place for it to happen where it can be disguised as social activity,” said Emily Tressel with the Mid-Valley Women’s Crisis Service in Salem.        

Newschannel 8 combed through 3 years of crime reports from 8 local campuses looking at trends in sex crimes.  Those reports combine rape and other sex assaults into a category called forcible sex offenses.  

The two biggest increases happened at the state’s largest universities.  The University of Oregon went from just 3 reported forcible sex offenses in the 07-08 school year, to 8 last school year.

Oregon State University had the highest number of sexual assaults at 16 in the past school year, up from 8 the year before.

“I would not say it's a bad thing,” said OSU Public Safety Director Jack Rogers. “In fact, I would call it a success story.”

“Why is it a good thing that the number of sexual assaults reported more than doubled,” asked Havrelly.

“I think that's a brilliant differentiation that you just made of reporting, not necessarily a higher increase of sexual assaults occurring, but we've seen an increase in reporting, said Carrie Giese the sexual violence prevention coordinator for Oregon State University.

   That increase in reporting does not appear to be happening at private colleges in the area.   All consistently report between 0 and 3 rapes over the past 3 school years, just like when Helen Hunter checked the statistics 4 years ago.

“I think my biggest struggle was not knowing what to do because there's such an incredible lack of dialog when it comes to sexual assault,” said Hunter.

Hunter eventually reported the assault to the College, but not to police.  Her perpetrator was suspended, but he returned to school and graduated with no record.   After she went public, she heard from 4 other women who claimed they were also attacked by the same man in the exact same way.  None reported the attacks. 

“I should have gone to the police because he needs to be held responsible for his actions,” said Hunter.

But experts say, on college campuses few sexual assault victims ever feel comfortable enough to report crimes to schools let alone police.

“OSU recognized under reporting is a huge problem so we've initiated many efforts to really look at that and understand what can we do to better help survivors,” said Linda Anderson a psychologist at OSU.

Security experts at Oregon State University and the University of Oregon say the fact that the number of reported sex assaults are up does not disturb them.   They say it means they’ve done a much better job of getting the word out that students can feel comfortable in reporting those terrible crimes.

Helen Hunter agrees, and is encouraged by the spike in sexual assault reports at Oregon's two largest universities.         

Hunter says people are finally starting to talk about the problem.  “Talking about it and starting a dialog about rape on college campuses helps me sleep at night,” said Hunter.

For Immediate Release: February 3, 2010

Salem, OR - The debate over earned time, the law that allows prisoners to earn reduced sentencing for "good time" behavior while being incarcerated, is heating up.  Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee started hearing testimony on ways to fix what many in law enforcement, such as the Attorney General, the District Attorneys, the Oregon State Sheriffs Association, and the Police Chiefs consider to be a disastrous public policy.  In a recent case, registered sex offender and burglar Demetrius Payton, who received early release under this policy, was arrested on new charges of burglary and unlawful sexual penetration. Click here to read more.

February 2, 2010, Updated February 3, 2010 | By Melica Johnson KATU News and KATU.com Staff | KATU.com

SALEM, Ore. - Victims of crimes begged state lawmakers Tuesday in emotional testimony to repeal a controversial law that allows some prisoners to get out of prison early.

    * Listen to Public Hearing on Senate Bill 1007

The law allows convicted criminals, some of whom are killers and rapists, to request reduced sentences. Many lawmakers said the law was enacted to help save money.

Crime victims, however, told legislators that the early release law has brought them back to the horrors and the memories they have tried to escape.

Heather Struznik described how she survived an attack by a serial, sadistic rapist in 2007 who beat her for 45 minutes and told her he was going to kill her. But she said she had to relive the event when she received a letter in the mail from the state that told her that her attacker, James Worley, was eligible for “early release” under Oregon’s new “earned time” law.

“(I) opened it and just dropped to my knees,” she said. “I felt like it did the day I had to go to trial for this.”

Struznik told lawmakers that Worley is a serial rapist - ready to murder - and that he’d already been let out too many times before.

“There’s got to be another way than allowing these people who re-offend and re-offend and re-offend another chance,” she said. “When do we get a chance? As survivors, when do we get a chance? What do we earn?”

A stepfather of a hit-and-run victim also pleaded before lawmakers to repeal the law.

Three and a half years ago Alan Tremain’s stepdaughter, Kimberly McDaniel, was struck by a car while out jogging. She was left to die on the roadside by the illegal immigrant who hit her.

The law allowed McDaniel’s killer to ask a court for an early release. He was denied, but because he was allowed to ask for early release the family said it caused them additional emotional trauma.

“I cannot believe they want us to relive our worst nightmare,” Tremain said.

Sen. Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene, who helped craft the early release law acknowledged there were some unintended consequences to the new law.

“What we’ve learned is some of the crimes we thought were going to be excluded weren’t excluded,” he said.

However, he didn’t say how lawmakers plan to fix the law, only that they are looking into making changes.

Critics disputed whether the law is saving the $6 million it is supposed to every two years. They said the law is costing the state more by running criminals back through the court system.

Prozanski said that the money is being saved based on what the Department of Corrections said in its testimony.

But Lawmakers are still waiting to hear how much courts and prosecutors are spending to hold all the early-release hearings.

February 2, 2010 | By THOMAS WATKINS | The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES -- When a gang member was released from jail soon after his arrest for selling methamphetamine, friends and associates assumed he had cut a deal with authorities and become a police informant.

They sent a warning on Twitter that went like this: We have a snitch in our midst.

Unbeknownst to them, that tweet and the traffic it generated were being closely followed by investigators, who had been tracking the San Francisco Bay Area gang for months. Officials sat back and watched as others joined the conversation and left behind incriminating information.

Law enforcement officials say gangs are making greater use of Twitter and Facebook, where they sometimes post information that helps agents identify gang associates and learn more about their organizations.
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"You find out about people you never would have known about before," said Dean Johnston with the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, which helps police investigate gangs. "You build this little tree of people."

In the case involving the suspected informant, tweets alerted investigators to three other gang members who were ultimately arrested on drug charges.

Tech-savvy gangsters have long been at home in chatrooms and on Web sites like MySpace, but they appear to be gravitating toward Twitter and Facebook, where they can make threats, boast about crimes, share intelligence on rivals and network with people across the country.

"We are seeing a lot more of it," Johnston said. "They will even go out and brag about doing shootings."

In another California case involving a different gang, much of the information gathered by investigators came from members' Facebook accounts. Authorities expect to make arrests in the coming months.

"Once you get into a Facebook group, it's relatively easy," Johnston said. "You have a rolling commentary."

And gang members sometimes turn the tables, asking contacts across their extended networks for help identifying undercover police officers.

It's hard to know exactly how many gang members are turning to Twitter and Facebook. Many police agencies are reluctant to discuss the phenomenon for fear of revealing their investigative techniques.

Capt. Walt Myer, director of the Riverside County regional gang task force, said gang activity often "mirrors general society. When any kind of new technology comes along, they are going to use it."

Tapping into tweets and status updates can be easy. Agents pose as pretty girls and send flirtatious friend requests. Confidential informants sometimes let police peer into their accounts.

Authorities can also seek help from the Web sites. Representatives from Twitter and Facebook say they regularly cooperate with police and supply information on account holders when presented with a search warrant. Neither company would discuss specifics.

Gang use of Twitter and Facebook still lags behind use of the much-older MySpace, which remains gang members' online venue of choice.

The Crips, Bloods, Florencia 13, MS-13 and other gangs have long used MySpace to display potentially incriminating photos and videos of people holding guns and making hand gestures. They also post messages about rivals.
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Last week, officials in Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, announced the arrest of 50 people in a crackdown of a Latino gang they say was engaged in drug sales and hate crimes against black residents. Prosecutors say some of the evidence was pulled from MySpace and YouTube, including rap videos taunting police with violent messages.

While some members are wising up to the police attention such postings can bring, gang information remains publicly viewable online.

Dozens of Facebook accounts are dedicated to the deadly MS-13 gang, with followers from around the globe. At one site, a video displays pictures of dead members of the rival 18th Street gang, and some users have left disrespectful comments.

The toughest part about tracking someone on Twitter is finding the alias or screen name they are posting under. And many tweets are nonsensical or pointless, so cutting through the clutter can be difficult.

"It's tricky," said Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy David Anguiano. "If you find out what they go by, you are good to go."

Anguiano tracks the online activity of graffiti vandals - the so-called tagging crews that sometimes morph into gangs. They post tweets saying they are heading out to spray paint and sometimes post links to photographs of their work.

Often, they cannot resist bragging about their handiwork, and the electronic trail they leave is frequently used as evidence.

"They talk about it too much," Anguiano said. "You want the fame so you've got to go out there and talk about it. That's when your mouth gets you in trouble."

February 02, 2010 | By The Oregonian Editorial Board | OregonLive.com

A law that boosts earned time for inmates is seriously flawed, but tough choices loom and Oregon must keep looking for prison savings

The easy out for the Legislature is to abandon its effort to save a few million tax dollars a year by increasing earned time for nonviolent offenders in Oregon's prison system.

After all, apparently there's enough money in the corrections budget to get through this biennium even if lawmakers reverse course on the law they passed increasing earned time for nonviolent offenders from 20 percent to 30 percent of prison sentences.

But if legislators retreat from this modest prison cost savings measure now, they will all but surrender on the larger question of whether Oregon ever will be able to find savings in corrections policies, even as the state faces a structural deficit in 2011-13 that could force sweeping cuts in education and other services.

Let us say right up front that House Bill 3508, the law passed last year increasing earned time, was seriously flawed. The law was meant to trim the sentences of nonviolent offenders, but it wound up offering the possibility of early freedom to hundreds of inmates with violent criminal histories.

Lawmakers mistakenly left more than a dozen serious crimes off their list of offenses that disqualified inmates from reduced sentences, such as assault on police officers, hit and run driving and certain arsons or robberies.

Too, the legislation allowed violent criminals -- even murderers and rapists -- to demand court hearings and seek reductions in sentences for less serious crimes they were convicted of in connection with their violent felonies. In nearly all cases, judges properly denied the requests, but the hearings required victims and family members of victims to relive their worst nightmares.

Tuesday, a Senate committee heard gut-wrenching testimony from the fathers of two young women who were murdered and from a woman who survived a brutal assault. All three had to attend hearings demanded by violent criminals who should never be eligible for early release from prison, under any circumstances. These victims and their families have paid dearly for the mistakes in the law.

That damage has been done. Repeal of the earned time law now will not help those families. All but a few hundred of the 4,800 retroactive cases have been heard and judges have either approved or denied the earned time.

The issue now is determining the proper corrections policies going forward. In our view, that means fixing what's wrong with the law increasing earned time and ensuring that it cannot be exploited, in any way, by violent criminals.

In testimony Tuesday, former Lane County District Attorney Doug Harcleroad and Steve Doell, the leading advocate for crime victims in Oregon, urged repeal of the law and a return to the 20 percent earned time that the state has permitted since 1999.

We might agree with them if state government and schools were not facing a looming structural deficit of perhaps several billion dollars in the next few years. But they are. And a state that already spends more on corrections than it does on higher education should not decide, now or ever, that its prison sentencing policies are sacrosanct, untouchable even when the state is approaching a financial crisis.

The earned time provision in the law sunsets in 2013. It is not a radical policy -- it shaves, on average, about 55 days of prison time for each inmate. Every single inmate who earns this time is coming out of Oregon prisons anyway, and soon.

Oregon criminal justice experts already are studying the effects of the additional earned time. Research in a few other states has suggested that earned time can save money and possibly slightly reduce criminal recidivism at the same time.

Three years from now, when the law expires, Oregon will know much more about earned time, what it saves, what it costs and how it affects public safety. Given what lies ahead in this state, this small change in corrections policy is well worth doing, and doing right.

Crime — Victims are granted the right to restitution by the Oregon constitution, but other factors getting in the way

February 2, 2010 | By: Laurent Bonczijk | NewbergGraphic.com

A recent audit by the Secretary of State showed that a large portion of victims eligible for financial restitution had not received any.

The Oregon constitution grants crime victims a right to prompt restitution in the case of several crimes such as theft, burglary or assault.

Auditors from the Oregon Judicial Department reviewed 210 cases in which victims were legally entitled to restitution in four counties. In slightly more than 50 percent of the cases victims were not entitled to restitution because they either hadn’t suffered an economic loss or had been compensated otherwise. (For example items that may have been stolen from the victim were returned in the same condition they were prior to the crime).

In 99 cases, however, auditors found that no restitution had been ordered even though the victims were eligible. In about 33 percent of the cases victims hadn’t provided the information necessary to receive restitution, while in the other two-thirds of the cases district attorneys had failed to take all step necessary for victims to receive restitution; the DAs forgot to send victims the proper paperwork or to call them to find out if they needed help with restitution.

District attorneys defended themselves by saying they didn’t have the necessary resources to investigate economic losses to each and every victim. Auditors recommended that district attorneys set restitution rates and follow up on them.

In addition to being a right guaranteed in the constitution, restitution was taken up by the 2003 Legislature, which directed district attorneys to investigate and present to court evidence of economic losses by victims of crimes.
 

Click here to listen to the interview.

For Immediate Release: February 1, 2010
 

Salem, Oregon - Today, the Oregon Anti-Crime Alliance announced its "Catch and Release Spotlight" program by releasing its first statewide radio ad highlighting the recent release and rearrest of Demetrius Payton, a convicted sex offender.

"The purpose of this program is to expose the danger of the early release legislation passed by the Oregon Legislature in 2009," said Tara Lawrence, executive director and general counsel for the Oregon Anti-Crime Alliance, "when the Oregon Legislature voted to let violent criminals out of jail early, they voted to let predators like Demetrius Payton loose to prey on honest citizens." Click here to read more.