Lessons learned from the Jessie Lunsford case

Don Gaetz and John Cavenaugh
04/29/05

Senator Nancy Argenziano has had some tough trips home in recent weeks.

The central Florida legislator's district includes the family, friends, and neighbors of Jessie Lunsford, one of three children in as many weeks who have been stalked, brutalized, raped and killed by repeat sex offenders.

Restive crowds of Senator Argenziano's constituents, meeting with her on weekend breaks from her duties in Tallahassee, want to know why laws and judges and parole boards failed to protect Jessie and other victims of similar horrific murders. They want to know why the system not only failed but seemed to be set up to fail.

Argenziano and some others in the Florida Legislature are now working overtime to plug the holes that Jessie's murderer and others like him keep sliming through.

The recent molestation-murder cases that have sickened and angered Floridians and all Americans raise two public policy issues:

1. Should the most heinous of pedophilic criminals be let out of prison so soon or even at all?

2. If they are released, should they have the right to blend back into society - their whereabouts tracked only on paper and then only if agencies and bureaucrats find it convenient to exchange information with each other?

The answer the Florida Legislature is coming to, better late than never, is "No."

As the father of a daughter - and as a public official charged with the safety and welfare of students - I say throw away the key on the victimizers of little children.

Mine isn't just an emotional reaction, although I admit to being horrified by the macabre details of Jessie's protracted suffering and that of other girls in Florida, California, and elsewhere. Decades of hard experience and repeated psychological studies make the compelling argument that these creeps will try to do it again as soon as they can. They have no more chance to be "cured" than rattlesnakes have of being housepets.

But parole boards let them out anyway.

Our laws ought to draw a draconian distinction between the rapists of children and almost every other offense against civilized society. It should go harder on them, a lot harder. And the criminal justice system shouldn't go squishy when serial perverts claim to be rehabilitated and repentant.

Raise my taxes - or better yet lease out the Department of Education building for commercial offices - and use the money to build the cells and pay the guards to keep child molesters locked away.

And, if, God forbid, one does every see daylight, then clamp a global tracking mechanism on him like the man in the iron mask for the rest of his sorry life. The technology is available. Ask Martha Stewart.

Either longer sentences or electronic tracking could have saved innocent lives in our own state and elsewhere in recent days. Of course, there are many other cases of molestation that didn't end in murder which may have been preventable, as well.

For years in my community we parents pleaded for a lower speed limit and a lighted crosswalk on one of the county's busiest thoroughfares next to a high school. A state legislator, now mercifully out of office, piped back, "Nobody's died yet." Soon after two students were injured and another was killed going home from school. Of course, then the politicians roused themselves and the always obvious remedy was finally applied.

Thankfully, the Legislature is now fixing the problem of paroling and then losing track of sexual predators. Senator Argenziano will have something solid to deliver to the folks on her next trip back home.

Still, a question hangs heavy in the air: what other areas of judicial discretion should be looked at from the victim's point of view, but this time before legislators are shocked into action after the fact.

Don Gaetz 

Don Gaetz is Superintendent of Schools in Okaloosa County and a regular Gulf 1
columnist. His co-author for this column is Dr. John Cavanaugh, President of
the University of West Florida.

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