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Sex offenders see stringent parenting rules relaxed in Colorado, prompting debate over child safety

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Colorado’s sex offenders have long maintained the state treats 
them as pariahs, closely monitoring where they live, what they 
look at, who they talk to and what they discuss. One claimed in 
federal court filings that he was warned against keeping a 
crucifix because it displayed partial nudity. Another, convicted 
of groping a woman, said he had to write down his thoughts every 
time he saw a school bus.

The idea was to protect children, but the resulting system that 
cut off offenders from their own families has now been struck 
down in federal court. That leaves Colorado to create a new sex-
offender treatment and management system that defense lawyers 
say is long overdue but prosecutors worry will put children at 
risk.

Supporters of the changes point to lives disrupted by what they 
call an outdated and overreaching system. David Zayatz, 39, said 
Colorado authorities threatened to separate him from his family 
after he was arrested in Florida on a parole violation in 2015. 
An indecent-exposure charge when he was 15 years old — for 
“mooning some people,” Zayatz said, although an official account 
was not available because he was a juvenile — put him on 
Colorado’s radar as a sex offender.

Police in Florida had stopped Zayatz for a traffic offense and 
discovered he absconded from parole in Colorado 16 years earlier 
after serving prison time for burglary. When Zayatz was returned 
to Colorado, he learned he was classified as an “unadjudicated 
sex offender” because of the old exposure charge. Based on a 
psychosexual evaluation, authorities determined Zayatz could 
continue living with his common-law wife and daughter after he 
reparoled back to Florida.

“I mooned someone when I was 15. How many kids do stupid stuff 
like that every day? And here I am turning 40 years old and 
still dealing with it,” Zayatz said.

Critics argue that Colorado has for too long treated a broad 
cross section of parolees and probationers, whose offenses range 
from statutory rape to armed sexual assault or pedophilia, as 
posing the same risks to children when in reality they differ 
greatly. Those separated from their children include a 35-year-
old man who sent sexually explicit e-mails to fellow college 
students and a man who as a 15-year-old had unlawful sexual 
contact with a 14-year-old girl.

“There has been a historical mythology that there is this one 
thing called a sex offender, and a lot of hysteria has been 
around a certain imagined stranger-profile predator,” said 
Laurie Kepros, director of sexual litigation for the state 
public defender. “The real cases are sometimes very immature 
people doing things that are technically in violation of statute 
but aren’t even necessarily abnormal behaviors.

“For example, if you have someone slow mentally, and they are 
engaging with someone that’s their developmental peer but that 
person is four years and one day younger and under the age of 
15, if they have consensual sexual contact, they are committing 
a lifetime felony in Colorado.”

The cases typically aren’t so black and white, however, and 
critics worry about what can happen when dangerous offenders 
slip through the cracks.

Jaacob Van Winkle killed a woman he was living with and her son 
and daughter in Cañon City in 2014, and sexually assaulted her 
other daughter. He had been convicted in 2004 in Indiana of 
child molestation and other sex crimes involving girls as young 
as 5 and 7.

Authorities were not monitoring Van Winkle because he did not 
register as a sex offender when he moved to Colorado. But he is 
the kind of individual prosecutors are most worried about as the 
state’s sex-offender management system undergoes fundamental 
changes.

“What used to be very reliably in place is now ever changing and 
in day-to-day flux,” said Caryn Datz, chief trial deputy in the 
sex assault unit of the Boulder district attorney’s office. 
“That imposes its own challenges on any system. And we, as 
prosecutors, see the other anecdotes. We worry about the risk. 
We don’t want additional victims.”

Ruling drives changes

Driving much of the change is a December 2014 ruling from a 
three-judge panel for the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the 
Tenth Circuit, which included U.S. Supreme Court nominee Neil 
Gorsuch.

The panel ruled that the constitutional rights of an Oklahoma 
man being released from prison for possession of child 
pornography were violated when a judge required him to get 
approval from the probation department before having contact 
with his youngest daughter.

The judge failed to make specific findings as to why restricting 
contact with the daughter was warranted, the panel ruled. There 
was no evidence the man had “abused or sexually molested 
children,” and he had “had a positive relationship with four of 
his five children,” the panel found.

Over the past year, state parole and probation rules have 
changed to bring contact standards between sex offenders and 
their children in line with the ruling. The Sex Offender 
Management Board, an arm of the Colorado Department of Public 
Safety that writes the rules for sex-offender treatment, 
followed suit last month. The 25-member board last year relaxed 
standards to allow treatment providers, private companies that 
guide sex-offenders’ therapy, to treat those in contact with 
children.

The system used to start with the premise that offenders should 
be barred from seeing their children even when they had not been 
victimized, until offenders prove they’re safe. Probation and 
parole officials almost always barred contact. The new system 
presumes sex offenders should parent their children unless a 
judge or parole board find compelling evidence the children are 
in danger.

When the old rules were drawn up about 20 years ago, they were 
guided by research that warned sex offenders often have many 
undisclosed victims and frequently cross age and gender lines. A 
2003 study in Colorado found that the average number of victims 
admitted by offenders increased from two to 110 after a second 
polygraph. Defense lawyers point out the research was conducted 
just on hard-core offenders, and that results were skewed by one 
who reported 400 assaults.

But consultants who reviewed Colorado’s sex-offender treatment 
program for the state in 2013 found that participants reported 
they felt compelled to “fabricate problems or conspire with 
others to fake problems to fulfill program requirements.”

Re-offending is far more nuanced, according to a follow-up 
report for the state in 2014 from Central Coast Clinical and 
Forensic Psychology Services.The consultants reported that low-
risk sex offenders have less than a 2 percent chance of being re-
arrested within five years for another sex offense, a rate lower 
than those being released from prison with no sex-related 
conviction.

Central Coast said the state has overly broad restrictions on 
offenders seeing their children that can damage kids who aren’t 
in harm’s way. Colorado adhered to the idea that sex offenders 
cannot be cured and must be managed for life, the report stated, 
despite abundant research to the contrary.

Still, there is resistance to the changes.

“I understand the constitutional rights the legal system is 
putting forth here,” A. Mervyn Davies, a treatment provider and 
member of the sex-offense management board, said during a recent 
board meeting. “I get that. I also understand what it’s like 
when a kid gets molested, and we’re saying it’s OK. I think 
that’s equally as bad as when we prohibit contact between a 
parent and a child when there might not have been a problem 
there.

“This, as a treatment provider, goes against everything I stand 
by in terms of how I provide service, and I can’t support it,” 
he said.

Lifetime prohibition

The child contact prohibitions have been especially acute for 
those sentenced under Colorado’s 1988 lifetime supervision act, 
which covers sex offenses ranging from statutory rape to sex 
assault with a deadly weapon. About 2,200 of the roughly 6,600 
probationers, parolees and prisoners classified as sex offenders 
in Colorado were sentenced under the lifetime supervision act.

Once released from prison, offenders convicted under the act 
must enter a community-based lifetime-supervision program, which 
has adhered to the view they can’t be cured and are dangerous to 
children, defense lawyers say.

In 1999, Eric Petersen had just turned 22 when he volunteered to 
drive his intoxicated roommate’s 14-year-old babysitter home. He 
stopped the car near her home and kissed her on the mouth twice 
and cupped her breast over her clothing. A judge sentenced him 
to 12 years of sex supervision probation after he pleaded guilty.

He was re-arrested in 2002 for moving in with a woman who had a 
7-year-old son, which violated his supervision conditions. The 
woman was pregnant with Petersen’s daughter. He was resentenced 
under the lifetime supervision act to two years to life in 
prison. He paroled from prison in 2010 and is allowed to have 
several photos of his daughter but no contact. Petersen has 
never seen his daughter in person and is barred from talking 
about her.

He had hopes of seeing her under a safety plan his treatment 
team was developing, but that was scuttled after polygraphs 
showed he was being deceptive when asked whether he had already 
seen her or other children. He wears an ankle monitor that 
tracks his movements, which he says shows the polygraph results 
aren’t accurate.

“I have trouble taking the polygraphs,” Petersen said. “You put 
so much pressure on yourself, more than you would normally 
because there is so much to lose and so much to gain. That’s my 
daughter. That’s my child. It’s not only my moral obligation, 
but it’s my responsibility to help educate her and help mold her 
for the world. The negative I did in the past doesn’t negate the 
positive I can now do.”

State-ordered assessments show Petersen is not aroused by 
children, according to documents in a lawsuit he filed seeking 
contact with his daughter. The state has said in filings in the 
case that it must regulate offender visitation when community 
safety is at risk.

Cutting off low-risk offenders from their families can make them 
more likely to re-offend, Kepros said.

“The more we isolate and stigmatize people and remove them from 
their structures and their stability, the more we increase 
risk,” said Kepros, who stressed that judges still can bar 
offenders from their children in extreme cases, such as incest.

In Colorado, past sexual transgressions, even those never 
prosecuted, can haunt offenders years later if they have a new 
violation for a non-sex offense. State statistics show 157 
prisoners and 46 parolees classified as sex offenders in 
Colorado never were convicted of a sex offense. They make up a 
minor amount of the total sex-offender population on parole and 
probation.

Danny Daniels Sr. was ready to reunite with his wife and five 
children in 2011 after spending five years in a Colorado prison 
for shooting a neighbor in the shoulder and leg during a 
dispute. But a 1991 San Diego conviction on charges of having 
sex with a 17-year-old girl when he was 21 meant he was 
classified as a sex offender when he went to prison on the 
Colorado conviction.

Daniels was barred upon his release and parole from having any 
contact with any children, including his own, who were born well 
after what Daniels describes as an isolated, consensual 
encounter with a girl he met at a party.

Arapahoe County District Court Judge John Wheeler protested, 
threatening to find corrections officials and the Colorado 
Parole Board in contempt of court. Wheeler pointed out that the 
statutory sex charge that Daniels didn’t contest in California 
wasn’t even illegal in Colorado. But the judge had no 
jurisdiction over the corrections department or the parole 
board, and Daniels’ sex offender classification remained.

Daniels became homeless. His parole was revoked for failing to 
comply with his mandated treatment, which required him to admit 
he was a sex offender. He has since completed his prison 
sentence and his parole, and now lives in Mississippi with his 
wife.

“I didn’t care about being homeless,” Daniels said. “I cared 
about my kids. Not being able to talk to them, it really caused 
a strain on our family. And when I did come back into the house, 
I didn’t know my kids anymore. They’d grown up.”

Exemption efforts fruitless

In the past, sex offenders had to pass an assessment or show 
progress in treatment before they were allowed to see their 
children. Parole and probation officials don’t keep track of how 
often offenders were allowed to have contact with their 
children, but many offenders say efforts to get an exception 
usually were fruitless.

They say they usually had to take years of polygraph exams, 
divulge their sexual history, express contrition and pass other 
hurdles before they had any hope of seeing their own children. 
Offenders could be required to submit to plethysmograph testing, 
in which sensors are attached to their penis, in an effort to 
find out whether they were aroused by deviant imagery and 
sounds. Such testing was excoriated last year by Senior U.S. 
District Judge John Kane as unsound science and an extreme 
deprivation of liberty that requires participants to submit to 
“mind intrusive examinations.”

When offenders are deemed to be of lower risk, that hasn’t 
always helped. In 2011, a treatment provider wrote in a 
parenting evaluation that a man convicted of possessing child 
pornography likely should live at home with his wife and four 
daughters, age 7 to 11. He had pleaded guilty to attempted 
sexual exploitation after 220 images of child pornography were 
found on his computers and hard drive. Probation officials 
overruled the recommendation and ordered the man, who as a child 
had been sexually abused by an uncle, to move out of the family 
home, court records show.

The Denver Post spoke to the 43-year-old Centennial man, who 
asked that he be identified only by his first name, Richard, to 
protect his family. The forced separation was so debilitating 
that he tried to kill himself in a “psychotic break from 
reality,” slashing his abdomen with a kitchen knife.

A probation officer warned him that he should take down his 
crucifix of Jesus because it showed semi-nudity, Richard said.

“The whole time in treatment we never addressed my pornography 
issues,” Richard said. “They kept saying, ‘We need to work on 
your anger issues. Why are you so angry at the program?’ Of 
course I was angry. They kept asking if I wanted to molest my 
girls when that horrified me, and I had no intention of ever 
doing that.”

After being caught for shoplifting cat litter and conducting 
internet searches on sites for preteen models in 2011, he agreed 
to a two-year prison sentence. He paroled to Mississippi, where 
his wife and children were allowed to visit him, he said. He has 
finished his parole and moved back in with his family in 
Centennial, and has resurrected a successful consulting business.

The prohibitions in Colorado have been so strict that, 
“astonishingly,” a pregnant offender would be in violation if 
she gave birth without approval from a treatment team, noted 
U.S. District Court Judge William Martinez in one ruling last 
year.

“They couldn’t even have photographs,” said Alison Ruttenberg, a 
lawyer who has filed federal lawsuits on behalf of sex 
offenders. “They couldn’t even have a smart cellphone of any 
kind. I had one client whose therapist told him, ‘Your children 
are dead to you. Just think of them as dead because you are 
never going to see them again.’ ”

How treatment providers respond to the new rules could have 
implications. They are private companies and can’t be forced to 
treat someone they don’t want to. If an offender who is having 
contact with his child gets kicked out of treatment, he risks 
getting sent to prison.

Kevin Callies, a 62-year-old Vietnam veteran convicted in 2010 
of misdemeanor sexual contact, found that a discussion with a 
stepdaughter about her pregnancy constituted unlawful “third 
party contact with a child,” court records show.

The Cañon City man, a delivery truck driver, was accused of 
grabbing the buttocks and breasts of an adult female grocery 
store worker while they unloaded his truck. She said the contact 
was unwanted. He contended he hugged her, and that they had 
hugged before.

After a jury found him guilty, he was sentenced to three years 
probation and required to undergo sex-offender treatment. Cañon 
City Counseling, his treatment provider, and his probation 
officer barred him from having contact with or even discussing 
his grandchildren, according to court records. He had to take 
down their photos.

After he answered a telephone call from his daughter, who sought 
his counsel over her pregnancy, he was warned that the 
discussion about her fetus put him in violation of his treatment 
standard, court records allege.

“If it wouldn’t have been for the wife I got, it would have cost 
me my life,” Callies said recently of the conditions he faced 
during his probation. “It cost me enough emotionally.”

http://www.denverpost.com/2017/03/05/sex-offenders-colorado-
rules-children/
  

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Sex offenders see stringent parenting rules relaxed in Colorado, prompting debate over child safety "Nancy Pelosi Profiteering From Politics Club" <sf.nancy@mail.house.gov> - 2017-03-09 01:02 +0100

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