STATESTAT UPDATE:
Protecting Marylanders from Sex Offenders

March, 2010

 

Our highest priority in the State of Maryland – and the most sacred priority of government at every level – is the public’s safety.  I’m Governor Martin O’Malley and today I want to talk with you about some of the things that we’re doing in Maryland to protect our children from predators, as well as some of the things we can do together to make our children safer.

In the past three years, working with law enforcement in every part of our State, together as One Maryland we’ve driven violent crime down to its lowest levels since 1987, including the steepest three-year reduction in homicides since the 1970s and a 46% reduction in juvenile homicides over the same period of time. 

But in our State, where we’re united by our belief in the dignity of every individual and our belief that there is no such thing as a spare Marylander, the loss of even one more innocent life is unacceptable.

Our Administration has set the big goal of reducing violent crime against women and children 25% by 2012 and in 2007, I signed Jessica’s law to take violent sex offenders off our streets.  Working together with partners throughout our State, we have a number of initiatives underway designed to protect our children from sex offenders.  These include the use of emerging technologies like clinical polygraph examinations, computer monitoring, and GPS tracking, which we’re currently using to track 231 sex offenders.  And, because we’ve worked together to close the backlog we inherited of 24,000 unanalyzed and 15,000 uncollected DNA samples, we’ve been able to use DNA evidence to arrest 106 sex offenders. 

But we can and must do even more to protect our children.  This session, our Administration is asking the General Assembly to pass an array of tough new reforms to protect our kids.  Specifically, we are proposing:

1. To require the most serious sex offenders to be monitored by law enforcement for the rest of their lives – thus aligning Maryland with 24 other states which currently have some sort of lifetime supervision law on the books.
2. To align Maryland’s sex offender laws with federal notification and registration standards for sex offenders, both because it’s the right thing to do, and so we continue to qualify for federal Byrne grants, while ensuring that Maryland does not become a safe haven for offenders seeking less stringent registration requirements.  
3. To classify persons convicted of child pornography and indecent exposure to minors as sex offenders, and require that they register as such. 
4. To require more employees at facilities that care for or supervise children to undergo criminal background checks; and
5. To reform the Maryland Sexual Offender Advisory Board so that its members will be required to have relevant experience and expertise, and so that the Board’s charge will be targeted and focused on important priorities like developing risk-assessment criteria for the supervision of offenders. 

We can pass these important reforms, but we can’t do it alone.  I hope that you will call or write your Senator and Delegate and ask them to support this important legislation this session.  And I encourage you to visit our Crime Control and Prevention website to learn more: “goccp.maryland.gov”.  Working together we can protect, strengthen, and defend our hardworking families.  Thank you.