Mental Wards Seen as Drastic Confinement for Repeat Rapists : Punishment: More states are resorting to harsh measures when prison terms and psychiatric treatment fail sexual psychopaths.

Phillip Blodgett, on furlough from a prison term for rape, sat in a supermarket parking lot for hours, trying to talk himself out of raping again.

Then he sexually assaulted a woman putting groceries into her car.

Less than six weeks later, he raped again--this time, a 16-year-old girl he met on a street.

Authorities sent Blodgett to prison after he pleaded guilty to the two attacks. Then they took another, more controversial step: They locked him in a state mental hospital, quite possibly for the rest of his life.

In Minnesota and a handful of other states, such measures are being used as a drastic answer to an intractable problem--what to do with people whose urges to commit violent sex crimes haven’t been curbed by prison terms or cured by psychiatric treatment.

The so-called “psychopathic commitments” are being challenged in the courts by civil libertarians who argue that repeat sex offenders are being locked up as much for what they might do as for what they’ve actually done.

“Can you really predict what a person is going to do?” asked Ed Koren, attorney with the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

But some experts see few alternatives.

“Nobody has got any illusions we’re going to talk them out of their sexual sadism,” said Dr. William Erickson, medical director of the Minnesota Security Hospital, where Blodgett is confined.

“I don’t think anybody really believes in their heart that these people are treatable. They’re sending them here to be locked up.”

Blodgett and 46 other repeat sex offenders are confined to the hospital under a 1939 law that allows civil commitment of sex offenders deemed dangerous, indifferent to consequences and not amenable to treatment. This differs from declaring someone mentally ill and dangerous; despite the depraved nature of their crimes, hospital staff say 95% of those with “psychopathic personalities” are sane.

Several states passed similar laws after Minnesota’s was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1940. Most since have been repealed, Erickson said, but a few still are on the books. A little-used 1948 District of Columbia law allows sexual psychopaths to be committed to a psychiatric hospital, and laws in Colorado and Illinois allow committing sexually dangerous people to prisons. Illinois now has 68 people committed, according to the state corrections department.

In 1990, Washington enacted a “sexual predator” law amid public outrage over such notorious repeat offenders as Westley Dodd, who was hanged earlier this year for the murders of three boys. Washington has committed 12 men to prison, said Jeanne Tweten, an assistant attorney general in Seattle.

Minnesota’s “psychopathic personality” law was used occasionally since 1939, but it was dusted off after a number of savage rapes and murders by repeat offenders. In 1991, for instance, a college student was assaulted and murdered in St. Cloud by a twice-convicted sex offender who had been released from a rape sentence just four days before.

“What really made some of us very, very nervous was testimony that people in prison would tell inmates and prison staff, ‘When I get out, I’m going to do it again.’ And there was nothing that could be done,” said Sen. Allan Spear, chairman of the state Senate Crime Prevention Committee.

Minnesota’s law originally was aimed at people arrested for minor sex offenses and considered likely to be harmed by time in prison, according to Erickson. Commitment to a hospital was considered kinder than jail. In 1941, for example, men were committed for window-peeping, exposing themselves, masturbating and bestiality.

But by the early 1990s, men were committed for repeated rapes, repeated child molesting, and rape and murder. All those now committed in Minnesota are men, Erickson said, although a 27-year-old woman now faces commitment for molesting young boys.

The offenders live in a locked unit at the Minnesota Security Hospital in St. Peter, a college town of 9,400, behind a double chain-link fence fortified with razor wire. Some are locked alone behind thick steel doors at night, where they sleep on pallets atop concrete slabs.

Among those now committed in Minnesota:

* Richard Enebak, who committed at least 37 sexual assaults between 1955 and 1969, many on young girls. In one rape, a 16-year-old girl suffered internal injuries, severe cuts and broken vertebrae that left her paralyzed.

* David Anthony Thomas, who committed four rapes--killing the last victim in a Minneapolis parking ramp--within four weeks of being paroled from prison in May, 1988. He had been in and out of prison since 1980, when he was convicted in connection with more than a dozen rapes.

* Charles Stone, a pedophile who has admitted molesting as many as 200 young girls.

* Donald Martenies, who savagely raped a 7-year-old girl, then sewed up her wounds without anesthesia.

Blodgett was convicted of raping a former girlfriend in 1985. He also pleaded guilty to assaulting the woman in the supermarket parking lot and raping the teen-ager in 1987. According to court records, he said he hates women, and psychologists say he is very likely to commit another offense.

Nonetheless, Blodgett is challenging the “psychopathic commitment” law before the Minnesota Supreme Court, in a case scheduled for arguments Monday.

The Minnesota ACLU branch, in a brief supporting Blodgett’s challenge, argues that the law violates due process and is unconstitutional because commitments are not based on mental illness.

“They’re being tried without a jury for acts which they may or may not commit,” said William Roath, executive director of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union.

Washington’s “sexual predator” law also faces a court challenge. The case was argued more than a year ago but the state Supreme Court has not ruled.

Some say the move to commit repeat offenders is driven by a disenchantment with treatment for sex offenders.

“I think what we had was this great enthusiasm about being able to treat all kinds of people. Now we’re really disillusioned that it didn’t work,” said Janet Warren, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia who has researched sexually sadistic criminals.

In fact, Massachusetts repealed its commitment law in 1990, partly out of concern that dangerous people were declared “treated” and then released, according to the Massachusetts attorney general’s office.

People committed as sexual psychopaths in Minnesota can be released if a three-member panel decides that they no longer pose a threat. Over the last decade, three men have been fully discharged and eight were provisionally released. As far as the state knows, none has committed new offenses.