SEX OFFENDERS UNDETECTED BEFORE 1994

A flaw? A flaw? I'd say this is MORE than a flaw. We claim to have the best justice system in the world, and we let sick, evil and dangerous people like this out into society without a care in the world? He reoffends again and they let him go after a little over a year?


This is a time where Representatives and Senators need to begin initiatives and change these lazy archaic laws and make a National Sex Offender Registry on a Federal level. Each state does not report their offenders to other states. The Federal Government will have tabs on these scum.

TAKE ACTION NOW AMERICA!!!

Experts cite flaw in sex offender laws

Minnesota didn’t consider sex offender

a high risk to reoffend, so he wasn’t registered.

(Source)--Alieghya Clark had no way of knowing the man she went to church with — the man accused of raping and killing her — had sexually attacked someone years ago. Roger Ratliff’s own wife said she knew little about what happened in the mid-1980s. The state of Kansas had no record of the conviction. And no public registry across the nation carried Ratliff’s photo or name.

That’s because Minnesota, where he committed the sexual assault, didn’t consider him a high risk to reoffend, and that meant he wasn’t required to be on the public list. And when he moved to Kansas, he didn’t have to register because the crime occurred before the 1994 public registry law went into effect.

“For people to find out about old convictions, it’s almost impossible,” said Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison. “Should she have known he was a sex offender? It would have been next to impossible for her to have known that.” That’s why authorities point to Clark’s case as yet another example of a flawed sex offender registry system.

Though Ratliff is an offender, there was no legal way to alert the public. It’s a flaw, authorities say, that allows some offenders to protect their past and go undetected.

Ratliff’s sister, Janelle Thomas, said she often thinks about Clark. “She trusted him,” Thomas said. “And why wouldn’t she? This is someone she went to church with.”


Prosecutors say that Ratliff raped and then killed the 21-year-old Olathe woman in late May. The two attended College Church of the Nazarene, and Ratliff and his family lived around the corner from Clark. Ratliff was charged with capital murder and rape after investigators found Clark’s remains in a wooded area in Miami County last month.


The Olathe man’s criminal history goes back to Benton County, Minn., in 1986, when he was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman he knew. Instead of going to prison, Ratliff was given 20 years’ probation. But he violated that probation less than a decade later and went to prison for 16 months, said Shari Burt, a spokeswoman with the Minnesota Department of Corrections.


Ratliff left prison the last day of 1996 and was put on supervised release, which he violated four months later and went back to prison until March 1998, according to Minnesota records. He soon came to Kansas. And because Minnesota didn’t classify him as a Level 3 offender — reserved for those considered likely to reoffend — his name, face and crime weren’t available to the public.


Ratliff met his future wife, Karen, at Olathe’s College Church of the Nazarene. They married in early 1999. John Oster, a minister with College Church, said he and others at the church weren’t aware of Ratliff’s criminal past. “Obviously, since he didn’t have to register, we wouldn’t know,” said Oster.


What worries some national crime experts is the stock many people put in state registries. Most registries only publicize offenders who committed their crimes after the mid-1990s, when states across the nation began implementing offender registration. Missouri is one state where the law was retroactive and for more than a decade went back as far as 1979 for sex crimes.

But in a June 30 ruling, the Missouri Supreme Court said that offenders convicted before the law went into effect in 1995 no longer have to register. That equates to thousands of offenders.

Criminologist James Alan Fox said there are several reasons registries give a false sense of security. Old convictions are among them. “You can’t presume because you know where registered sex offenders are that you are safe and sound,” said Fox, a professor in criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston. “Good old fashioned common sense, what you do with whom, will do you more good,” Fox said, “than knowing where all the registered sex offenders are in your neighborhood.”