State High Court Upholds Sexual Predator Law

The California Supreme Court unanimously upheld a state law Thursday that allows sexual predators who have served their sentences to be locked up indefinitely in mental institutions.

The law applies to sex offenders with two or more victims. If two state mental health experts find the offender to be “mentally disordered,” prosecutors can ask for a hearing on whether the offender should be committed to a mental institution. A unanimous jury verdict is required.

Once committed, the offender must be examined by mental health experts annually and a court must decide every two years whether he or she should remain committed.

Christopher Hubbart, a native of Pasadena who has been linked to about 30 rapes, most of them in Southern California, was the first offender to be committed under the sexual predator law. Since then, 150 others have been incarcerated using the law’s procedures.

Hubbart, who was known as the “pillowcase rapist,” challenged the statute, saying it violated his constitutional rights because, among various arguments, he was being punished twice for the same offense and incarcerated for a longer period than the law called for when he was convicted. Hubbart had been scheduled for release in January 1996 but has remained in a Santa Clara County jail pending court reviews of his challenges.

In an opinion written by Justice Marvin R. Baxter, the court rejected those challenges.

“Despite the ominous name, the Sexually Violent Predators Act operates in a familiar manner when considered in light of other involuntary commitment procedures in this state and across the nation,” Baxter wrote.

Opponents of the law had argued that its procedures were looser than those of other commitment statutes. Other laws that allow for involuntary confinement require proof that a person exhibits a present danger to society. Usually there must be evidence of a dangerous act within the two weeks before the commitment. The sexual predator law only requires that the individual be found likely to commit another sex crime.

Two trial judges previously found the law unconstitutional, but state appellate courts had upheld it. Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar wrote separately Thursday to warn prosecutors not to overreach when applying the law, but agreed that Hubbart’s challenges should be rejected.

Hubbart “is exactly the kind of person this [California] law was designed for,” said state Deputy Atty. Gen. Bruce Slavin.

The ruling “now convincingly and conclusively reaffirms that the state can protect the public by confining and treating the small group of sex offenders who, due to a mental disorder, pose a risk of continuing to commit sexually violent offenses,” Slavin said.

The son of a social worker and a retired journalist who became a jazz musician, Hubbart was sent to Atascadero State Hospital in 1973 as a mentally disordered sex offender. His pattern was to break into homes occupied by single women in the early morning hours, bind their hands, place a pillowcase or other cloth over their heads and force sex on them.

On the day of his release from the hospital in 1979, Hubbart committed another rape and was again incarcerated. He was last convicted in Santa Clara County for grabbing the breast of a female jogger. He was sentenced to five years in prison for that offense.

After a parole release in 1993, he failed a psychiatric evaluation and returned to prison after two months.

Hubbart served that sentence and his parole behind bars. But the sexual predator law took effect two weeks before his scheduled release, allowing the state to confine him longer.

State mental health experts have disagreed over the years about Hubbart’s mental state. But the Supreme Court cited two state mental health experts who diagnosed him as having paraphilia, or “recurrent and intense sexual fantasies and behaviors involving the humiliation and forcible sexual penetration of persons against their will.”

The experts decided that Hubbart was likely to commit more violent sexual offenses if he were released.

The state law, Baxter wrote, is similar to a Kansas statute upheld in 1997 by the U.S. Supreme Court. Both are “based on the premise that [sexually violent predators] suffer from clinically diagnosable mental disorders which require psychiatric care and treatment, and which are not a proper basis for commitment under other mental health schemes.”

The law, he added, is intended to establish a “nonpunitive, civil commitment scheme covering persons who are to be viewed ‘not as criminals, but as sick persons.’ ”

Rowan K. Klein, Hubbart’s attorney, said he will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review his client’s case. He said the California law differs enough from the Kansas law to warrant further review.

“I am very disappointed because this is a very broadly drafted law,” Klein said.