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| Ruling May Lead to New Hearings for Some Missouri Sex Offenders |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 05/17/2002 |
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The Missouri high court ruled that jurors got flawed instructions when deciding whether to keep two sex offenders in custody after they served their sentences, a decision that could mean new hearings for about two dozen others. The cases involved in Tuesday's 6-1 ruling appeared to be the first affected by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in January in a Kansas case. Fourteen other states also have statutes similar to Missouri's. In Missouri, convicted sex offenders may be detained beyond their prison terms if a jury determines in a separate trial that a mental abnormality makes them ''more likely than not'' to commit sexually violent acts upon release. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling allows such extended detentions only with proof of a mental illness causing ''serious difficulty in controlling behavior.'' That specific phrase was not used in jury instructions during the Missouri sex predator hearings for Eddie Thomas and Desi Edwards in 2000, their lawyers argued. Similar instructions were used for most of the 26 sex offenders kept in jail after their regular prison terms, the attorney general's office said. ''Nobody's going to walk directly based of this decision,'' spokesman Scott Holste said, but ''we will retry them to try to have them in commitment.'' Other states with similar statutes are Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Dakota, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. The attorneys general in Alabama, Delaware, Maryland, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania also told the nation's high court that their states could be affected. |
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