Rapist Sent to Mental Institution After Prison Seeks Release

Two years ago, convicted rapist Ronald Steven Herrera became one of the state’s first parolees to fight a controversial new law that allows authorities to hold dangerous sexual predators in mental hospitals after their release from prison.

Herrera lost that battle, but is now back before a Ventura County jury in hopes that this time he will win his freedom.

Today, lawyers are scheduled to give opening statements in Herrera’s second hearing to gain his release. In the coming days, mental health experts and psychiatrists who have treated the 53-year-old former Santa Paula man are expected to testify in Judge James P. Cloninger’s courtroom.

The issue before the jury in this unusual proceeding--only about half a dozen such cases have been tried since Herrera’s 1996 commitment hearing--is whether he fits the criteria of a violent sexual predator.

Under the law, sexual predators are defined as those criminals with mental health disorders and repeated sexual assault convictions who are likely to commit similar crimes in the future.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Maeve Fox has described Herrera as a “model of the type of person the Legislature was thinking of when they enacted the law.”

In 1971, Herrera was convicted of raping a woman and her 15-year-old daughter during a home-invasion robbery in Ventura. During that incident, Herrera and a second suspect terrorized three families vacationing at a beach cottage, and held them captive.

But less than a week after he was found guilty, Herrera and three other inmates at the old Oxnard jail escaped after luring two deputies into a cell and confronting them with makeshift knives.

Herrera fled to Virginia, where he was later convicted of a series of armed robberies and the attempted murder of a police officer. He served 13 years of a 50-year sentence before returning to Ventura County.

In 1986, he was arrested on a traffic violation in Ventura. Authorities realized he had never served time for the prior rape conviction, and Herrera was sent to prison for eight years and eight months.

In March 1996, Herrera was scheduled for release. But before he was able to walk away a free man, Ventura County authorities ordered him held under the then 3-month-old Sexually Violent Predator Act.

The law says sexual predators can be committed for two-year stints at mental hospitals for treatment after a judge or jury has found they meet the state criteria.

The law was hotly contested at the time of Herrera’s first commitment hearing, with judges in counties across the state issuing conflicting court rulings about its constitutionality.

Defense attorneys have decried it as a thinly disguised form of punishment that is intended not to treat convicted criminals but to keep them behind bars long after their sentences have ended.

But those legal issues were rendered moot last year when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Kansas sexual predator law similar to California’s.

Now, Herrera’s best hope is to persuade a jury that he is cured and no longer poses a risk to the public.

During jury selection Tuesday, Deputy Public Defender William Markov asked prospective jurors if they could give his client a fair trial.

“Justice for all?” Markov said. “What do you think about that?” Several prospective jurors said they could not fairly consider Herrera’s petition for release, given his criminal history and the nature of his crimes. As they spoke, Herrera stared at the front of the courtroom, twitching in his chair and rarely making eye contact with anyone.

It was a marked change from the 1996 hearing in which he represented himself and casually questioned prospective jurors for his own trial.

If at the end of this hearing the jury finds Herrera’s mental condition has not changed sufficiently that he no longer poses a threat, he would be returned to Atascadero State Hospital for another two-year term.