Megan's Law Murder

Well! The inevitable finally happened.

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/breaking_news/12572181.htm

"Wash. man says he killed child rapists

BELLINGHAM, Wash. - A man turned himself in to authorities in the killing of two convicted child rapists, saying he picked the victims from a sheriff's Web site, police said. ..."

This is going to be an interesting story to follow.

Crimes against sex offenders

Found it:

"Some crimes against sex offenders have been reported, usually through individual newspaper articles. A quick Lexis-Nexis database search of news outlets brought up the following five cases:

Convicted sex offender Joseph Gallardo was being released from prison in 1993 and planned to move to a house in Snohomish County. Someone set fire to the house before he could move in.

Robert Tunley, a Level III sex offender, was beaten and shot six times in Yonkers, N.Y., in 2004. The shooter, Joshua Torres, thought Tunley had molested his 2-year-old daughter.

In one of the most famous cases, Ellie Nessler killed a man on trial for molesting her son and four other boys in California. Nessler was walking to the witness stand to testify against Daniel Driver in 1993 when she pulled out a gun and shot him.

Two men killed James Edward Hammett, who was convicted of sexual abuse and molestation, in 2002 at his Alabama home. Jerry Wayne Payton Jr. and Oliver Andrew Brown shot Hammett five times.

In 1995, two men in New Jersey broke into a house looking for sex offender Michael W. Groff, and mistakenly beat up the wrong man. Kenneth J. Kerekes Sr. and his son Kenneth Jr. attacked truck driver Thomas Vicari by mistake."

Interesting that the beatings in my previous post did not turn up. Neither did a number of house burnings that were in fact in the news.

Out of Florida

As in, "likely to be run out" for writing such a piece. Read it

here.

The hate crime that isn't

Very interesting. The Seattle Times ran an article

here about the murder of two registered sex offenders, no doubt facilitated by the publication on the net of their crimes and addresses that says in part:

"The case does not qualify for federal hate-crime prosecution because the law does not appear to cover sex offenders"

Wow. A crime clearly motivated by hate that isn't a hate crime. George Orwell was prescient.

But the article goes further:

"That information has led some to take the law into their own hands. In 1993, Joseph Gallardo planned to move into his family's home in Lynnwood after serving about three years for the statutory rape of a 10-year-old girl. The home was burned after neighbors heard of Gallardo's plan."

I read about that one in Time, I think. The house was burned down just before he got out of prison. This is "taking the law into their own hands"? Looks more like lawlessness to me.

From an
LA Times article: ''Asmundson, the mayor, said friends in Bellingham had told him, "Too bad they didn't get the third one."''

Not to worry. In that same article it says the police received a letter saying that this is only the beginning.

Finally: "In researching a 2005 book on notification laws, he found dozens of assaults and harassment against sex offenders. Eisses and Vasquez, he said, may be the first deaths." I wonder how many of those were ever prosecuted?

Another Seattle Times article reports (for some other sex offender, I think),
"He's concerned about it, because he's gotten beat up a few times" for being a Level 3 offender."

Somewhere I saw an article on this issue...