Stone Case Recharges Electric Cuffs Debate

Dr. Jack Kevorkian wore one. So did Orange County socialite Danny Hernandez. Others who have sported the device include Saudi financier Adnan Khashoggi and a former publicist for Marla Maples Trump, plus thousands of lesser-known criminal defendants across the country: petty thieves, drunk drivers, wife-beaters, juvenile delinquents.

Soon the same type of electronic surveillance bracelet is to be clamped firmly on the ankle of UC Irvine fertility doctor Sergio C. Stone to make sure he doesn’t flee the country while awaiting trial on federal insurance fraud charges. A federal magistrate ordered Stone to remain confined to his Villa Park home, with the electronic monitoring device as a condition of the physician’s $3-million bond. Stone likely will remain in jail at least until Monday while he makes financial arrangements, his lawyer said.

The Stone case marks the latest high-profile use of a controversial tool that is lauded as an inexpensive alternative to incarceration for low-risk offenders, but criticized by some as too lenient and shown in a major federal study to be useless at deterring crime.

A former Fountain Valley police officer who was outfitted with an electronic cuff after pleading guilty to embezzlement was slain last year in a confrontation with FBI agents who labeled him a serial bank robber. A Los Angeles County man wearing the device fled his home in Harbor City and shot his estranged wife dead five years ago. Other cities across the country have witnessed scattered cases where suspects were charged with sometimes violent crime while wearing the ankle bracelet.

But those headline-making failures are unusual exceptions for the system, which typically operates through a receiver attached to a phone line in the person’s home. When the person wearing the cuff strays more than 150 feet, the device sends an alert to the monitoring agency.

“It’s an absolutely wonderful procedure. It saves us as taxpayers tens and tens of thousands of dollars. And it’s a punishment,” said defense lawyer John W. Barton, who has represented at least 25 clients who have been ordered confined at home instead of being held in jail.

In Orange County’s state courts, electronic cuffs are variously used to keep first-time convicts confined in their homes and ensure that juvenile offenders stay close at hand while awaiting court hearings. A Probation Department-run house-arrest program for adult convicts was abandoned last year because of bankruptcy-driven budget cutbacks. Home-confinement sentences for adults are now supervised by private monitoring firms while county probation officials negotiate new contracts that allow private firms to monitor offenders under Probation Department oversight.

The bracelets find plenty of support among defense lawyers, probation officers and some judges. They say the device is used as a condition of probation only for people thought unlikely to pose a danger at home--first-time drunk drivers with jobs, shoplifters who have children to tend.

Letting carefully chosen low-risk offenders go home hooked to a cuff can also allow them to seek help, such as counseling for anger management or substance abuse, supporters say.

“They can be very satisfactory,” said Central Municipal Court Judge Gregory H. Lewis, who has approved use of the monitoring bracelet several times in eight years on the bench. “You’re talking about expanding control over a defendant in a probationary process.”

Jim Eslinger, a 47-year-old Anaheim janitor, is two months into home confinement for a drug offense this year. The judge agreed to let him serve the one-year jail sentence at home so that Eslinger can help his epileptic wife and care for her ailing mother.

“I just needed him here,” said Eslinger’s wife, Florence.

Eslinger said it’s hard to keep up with the $15-a-day cost of the ankle device. And the strap-on transmitter, roughly the size and shape of a computer mouse, sometimes makes it uncomfortable for sleeping. But he said the arrangement has allowed him to keep a job and drive his mother-in-law for regular doctor’s visits. Those outings are approved ahead of time and monitored by Sentencing Concepts Inc., an Anaheim company.

“It gets old sitting around here with nothing to do. I can go outside and play with the dog, I guess,” Eslinger said. His other diversion is a pet pig, named Elvis, who lazes in the backyard and sleeps nights on a living room couch.

Sentencing Concepts and the other major monitoring company operating in Orange County, Gardena-based Sentinel Monitoring Co., keep track of about 250 offenders in the county. Nationwide, 18,687 defendants and offenders were tracked last year with an electronic tether, according to a survey by the Criminal Justice Institute in South Salem, N.Y.

But detractors say home confinement amounts to no punishment at all. Some judges refuse to use the device and one key study casts doubt on whether it is the bracelet that keeps people at home.

A U.S. Department of Justice-sponsored review of the effectiveness of the devices concluded they do not save money, free up jail beds or deter crime. The three-year survey of the monitoring system’s use in Oklahoma concluded in 1990 that the devices were viable only for a narrow segment of defendants and prisoners and, even in those cases, had no meaningful effect.

“There’s a lot of hype surrounding it and a lot of potential promise, but the numbers show that potential hasn’t been realized,” said James Austin, the study’s author. “It’s not a silver bullet.”

Defendants wearing the tracking cuffs were no more likely to show up for trial court than any other offenders, the study showed. The findings also suggested there was no significant difference in the recidivism rate among those defendants or post-trial inmates wearing the device and others released without it.

“But the judges like it,” said Austin, vice president of National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Washington. “It has important symbolic value.”

The devices don’t save money because the people wearing them likely would otherwise be released anyway, Austin said.

Indeed, an Orange County Sheriff’s Department spokesman said the electronic monitoring devices have no real effect on his agency’s dearth of jail space. The recent controversial proposal by Sheriff Brad Gates to convert a minimum security camp near Irvine and Lake Forest into a full-fledged jail reflects the jail system’s lack of beds for hard-core offenders, according to Lt. Ron Wilkerson.

“Our shortage of beds isn’t for the type of [minimum security] inmates who would be wearing the monitors,” Wilkerson said. Even those who favor use of the devices acknowledge the limitations. To be effective, home confinement should be coupled with counseling or other help, and is never the right prescription for dangerous offenders, said Daniel Verwiel, chief executive officer at Sentencing Concepts, one of three companies negotiating with the county to monitor offenders electronically.

“No one should convince themselves that electronic monitoring is a panacea. It’s not,” Verwiel said. “If you put a violent criminal on electronic monitoring, it’s a big mistake.”

Court systems vary in their use of the bracelets. In Orange County’s state courts, monitored house arrest is most often used in sentencing as an alternative to jail. Some judges have used the bracelets to keep spousal-abuse defendants away from victims. Currently, about 50 juvenile defendants with the ankle bracelet can attend school while awaiting court hearings, said deputy probation officer Chuck Sisco.

“They’ve gotten used to going where they want, when they want,” Sisco said. “Now they have to stay home. They have to listen to their parents.”

Federal courts regularly use the bracelets as part of bail, almost always in white-collar crime cases.

“We’re really high on it,” said H. Dean Steward, chief federal public defender in Orange County. “This is really another fine tool for the release of the defendant to get him back in the community.”

State parole officials have demanded that some high-profile convicts wear the bracelet upon release. Gov. Pete Wilson ordered paroled serial rapist Melvin Carter to be outfitted with a monitoring device last year. And Charles Rothenberg, imprisoned after setting his son on fire in a Buena Park motel in 1983, had to wear one after his 1990 release.

Bracelets also have found their place in the jet set.

Hernandez, a high-living Orange County socialite, was at home with an electronic bracelet after his 1993 conviction in connection with the disappearance of $8 million from a precious metals company. But he later was stripped of that luxury and sent to prison to await sentencing when he fell $440 behind in payments for the cost of the system.

Khashoggi, the Saudi financier and international arms dealer, had to wear a bracelet as a condition of bail after being charged with helping former Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos in a real estate fraud. Chuck Jones, once a spokesman for Marla Maples Trump, was monitored electronically after his conviction for burglarizing her home of shoes and underwear.

But most times, those detained at home are anything but the well-heeled.

The $12 to $16 daily fee for the device spelled the downfall for a Ventura County home-arrest pilot program in 1994 because many convicts opted to stay in jail instead of paying. And in Cook County, Ill., home of the largest electronic monitoring home arrest program, the cuffs are used exclusively for people who cannot pay bail.

“For us, it’s indigent defendants,” said Bill Cunningham, spokesman for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. “If we have someone who can’t come up with bail, we put the cuff on them and send them home. It’s an issue of jail space.”

On any given day or night, half a dozen computer technicians at the Cook County sheriff’s headquarters are monitoring the whereabouts of more than 1,500 defendants, Cunningham said.

But the Chicago area also has seen some of the highest-profile failures of the electronic monitoring system.

A Chicago fireman who was the brother of longtime Philadelphia 76ers star Maurice Cheeks was murdered in 1991 by a gang that included a convict wearing his leg monitor. An 11-year-old baby sitter in suburban Lake County was murdered after a convicted burglar removed his bracelet. Since 1990, two other murders were allegedly committed by Chicago-area convicts who were supposed to be at home.

Cunningham said those lapses were rare, if tragic, breakdowns. “It’s not foolproof--nothing is--but it works for us,” he said.

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High-Tech Shackle

Criminal justice officials are split on the effectiveness of electronic monitoring devices used to track people under house arrest. Different versions of the device all use a strap-on sensor to alert a monitoring agency via telephone lines that the wearer is straying from home.

Cuff: Transmitter the size of a computer mouse is strapped to an ankle with an adjustable band and a loop resembling thick telephone cord. Worn 24 hours a day, through showers and sleep. Belt version is available for female offenders who wear dresses. Cuff is removed when house arrest is terminated.

Relay Box: Stationary relay box about the size of a stereo component is rigged to home phone lines. It receives constant pulse signal from cuff. If the wearer travels more than 150 feet or the cuff is tampered with, the relay box transmits an alert to the central computer.

Monitoring Station: If the cuffed person leaves home, a computer here receives an alert. A machine or operator calls the home to verify the absence and then notifies authorities if the monitored person is indeed gone. Some house arrestees are allowed to leave home for school or work--their schedule is loaded into the monitoring station’s central computer to prevent false alarms.

Sources: Sentinel Monitoring Corp, Sentencing Concepts Inc.

Researched by GEOFF BOUCHER and KEN ELLINGWOOD / Los Angeles Times