Photo Index of Convicted Child Molesters Unveiled

Holding aloft a thick white binder that he said held the names of “the worst of the worst,” state Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren on Friday unveiled a photo directory of 912 people deemed to be California’s most serious convicted child molesters.

Part of a growing--and controversial--movement to give the public more access to information about sex offenders, the directory will be available for examination within the next week at police and sheriff’s stations statewide.

“Now, parents can go down to their local law enforcement agency and see for themselves whether a suspicious individual--one they might not even know the name of--is a convicted, high-risk child molester,” said Lungren, who unveiled the directory at an Altadena news conference. “These are the people most likely . . . to victimize children again.”

The index, broken down county by county, contains mug shots of individuals selected from the 37,000 convicted child molesters who live in California. Listed with their photographs are their names, the ZIP code in which they live, a physical description, their birth date and the child-related crimes for which they have been convicted.

The directory provoked passionate responses pro and con, with critics complaining that it amounted to a scarlet letter that would do little or nothing to reduce the problem of child molestation.

Supporters hailed the publication.

“I think it’s fantastic,” said Jayne Murphy Shapiro, founder and president of Kids Safe, a Southern California nonprofit group working to strengthen laws against child molesters.

Calling the directory “a preventive measure,” she said it would allow parents to keep their children away from the “danger signs” in their communities.

Kathy Sher, on the other hand, condemned the measure as “sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“To take these people and let the world know who they are is to say we believe so strongly that you are not going to be rehabilitated that we’re going to make it impossible to be rehabilitated,” said Sher, legislative advocate for California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, a group of criminal defense lawyers. “That person every day has to live with that stigma and that makes it very difficult to move on with your life and leave your past behind you.”

Ferol Mennen, associate professor of social work at USC, views the directory as more of a diversion from the real issues of child molestation than any sort of a solution.

“It is not necessarily going to help the terrible problem of child molestation because it focuses on a very small group of perpetrators,” said Mennen, who researches the effects of sexual abuse on children and has worked with victims of such abuse. “It diverts our concern from the problem of kids who get molested by people they know and trust.”

The directory marks the implementation of the second phase of a 1994 law, sponsored by Lungren, that created a hotline the public can call to identify convicted child molesters. Previously, the public could check criminal court records to determine a person’s arrest and conviction history, but law enforcement agencies would not otherwise release the information.

With last year’s establishment of the hotline, someone curious about the background of a prospective child-care worker or baseball coach, for example, can provide the name of a person and some other identifying information--such as their Social Security number or an exact physical description--and learn if they are among the 37,000 convicted child molesters.

So far, Lungren said, there have been 3,300 calls to the hotline resulting in 300 identifications.

In using the directory, members of the public do not have to have a specific person in mind. They simply need to provide police with “an articulable reason,” such as child protection, to look at the photo index.

They can look up a particular ZIP code in their county book and find the photos, descriptions and offenses of serious sex offenders living in their community.

In the case of one Los Angeles County offender, they would learn that the 150-pound man had been convicted three times of oral copulation with a minor and convicted five times of sodomy with a child under the age of 14.

Another man living in the county was convicted three times of sodomy with a child under 14 and four times of lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14.

Those in the directory were chosen according to criteria that included multiple offenses, the most recent of which occurred within the last five years.

Dismissing criticisms that the directory would promote vigilantism, Lungren said: “I think we ought to trust the law-abiding citizens of California to utilize this information properly.”

Members of the public can use the information to determine if someone should have contact with their children. But they cannot deny the person a job unrelated to children. Photocopying or electronic reproduction of the directory is also illegal.