7-19-1998 California:
Last Tuesday, in the two blocks around the scruffy rooming house where Michael Allen Patton lived alone, the police spread the word door to door in stark fliers: Mr. Patton was a paroled sex offender with a 22-year history of assaults on women and young girls, a neighbor who had served 13 years in state prison.
Five days later, Mr. Patton, a 42-year-old sign painter, was found hanging by a rope tied to a redwood tree on the edge of this placid town in the heart of Sonoma County's wine country, his discarded bicycle nearby. Back in his room, across the street from a Y.M.C.A., down the block from a middle school and close to a youth services organization, investigators found a two-paragraph suicide note on pocket notebook paper addressed to his sister, describing where his body could be found.
Mr. Patton was one of 1,600 people classified as high-risk, violent sexual offenders statewide, with his record subject to public dissemination under the provisions of California's year-old version of Megan's law. He was one of 6 such offenders singled out by the Santa Rosa Police Department last week in its first effort at public notification. And while Mr. Patton's note made no mention of the law or the disclosure, supporters and opponents of the law agreed that the chain of events spoke for itself.
''I think it's the inevitable consequence,'' said Elizabeth Schroeder, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and an authority on sex offender notification laws. Ms. Schroeder said she believed that the case was the first in the state in which a suicide followed public notice. ''It was going to happen eventually,'' she added.
Police officials here expressed regret at Mr. Patton's death, but they said that there was no indication of any vigilantism against him and that they planned no change in their notification procedures for the most serious offenders, those convicted of at least two violent crimes.
Under state law, local law agencies have wide flexibility in handling notice about such people, while a total of 64,000 offenders' names are listed on a CD-ROM that is available for public inspection in every county sheriff's office and some police departments, but not otherwise widely distributed.
''We've discussed it, but there isn't anything we could've done to prevent this as far as I can see,'' said Sgt. Ernesto Olivares, supervisor of the Santa Rosa Police Department's sex crime and family violence unit, which oversees the mandatory registration of all 242 convicted sex offenders and public notice about the high-risk ones in this city of 130,000 people.
''I don't know what we could've changed or can change,'' Sergeant Olivares said. ''The intent of the law is to keep people informed and aware of a potential threat in their neighborhood.''
He said officers had only handed out the one-page fliers -- with a color picture of the mustachioed, bespectacled Mr. Patton, who was 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighed 220 pounds -- to adults in person, and did not leave them in mailboxes or under doors where children might find them. Each flier was accompanied by a one-page cover letter explaining the provisions of the law and warning of its penalties for vigilantism, Sergeant Olivares said.
One of Mr. Patton's neighbors, Mike Lucas, a retired man on disability who lives across the street with his wife, Patti, said Mr. Patton could be seen walking in the neighborhood, unkempt -- ''like a low-life,'' as Mrs. Lucas put it. The Lucases said that the police flier had made them nervous but that they were glad to have received it.
''I'm sorry that this pain caused him to take his life,'' Mr. Lucas said. ''But I still want to know if there are violent people in my neighborhood.''
As states throughout the country rushed to pass sex-offender notification laws after the murder of Megan Kanka by a convicted offender in Hamilton Township, N.J., in 1994, civil liberties groups warned that such efforts could drive convicted offenders even further underground and make it impossible for them to find jobs or put down roots in an effort to overcome their past.
A Lakeland, Fla., man shot himself to death last year after the Polk County Sheriff's Department ran an advertisement in The Ledger, a Lakeland newspaper that is owned by The New York Times Company, identifying him under Florida's notification law as a sexual predator who had had oral sex with a 4-year-old girl.
''At some point we have to have a notion that punishment is over,'' said Ms. Shroeder of the Civil Liberties Union. ''What these public notification laws do is they essentially place a big scarlet letter on someone's chest, that for the rest of this person's life he will be publicly branded. The whole notion of rehabilitation in this country has been lost, particularly for sex offenders.''
But law-enforcement officials and legislators maintain that the high recidivism rate among sex offenders justifies efforts to keep their neighbors informed. And while disclosures of such offenders' whereabouts have often prompted harassment and protests by neighbors since the California law took effect 18 months ago, a spokesman for State Attorney General Dan Lungren says his office has yet to record a confirmed case of vigilantism.
''Attorney General Lungren has always maintained that Megan's law provides a tremendous tool to the law-abiding public, to know if there are convicted sexual criminals living among them in their community,'' said the spokesman, Rob Stutzman. ''That public good outweighs potential negatives that may exist.''
Although the law has been in force since last year, some cities like Santa Rosa, 50 miles north of San Francisco, are just getting up to speed on notifications, in part because of an effort to weed out inaccuracies and outdated information on the state registry of sex offenders. Before releasing the names of the six high-risk offenders here, Sergeant Olivares said, investigators visited each of the men and explained what was happening. He said Mr. Patton had had no particular reaction one way or the other.
The local newspaper, The Press Democrat, which is also owned by the Times Company, published Mr. Patton's name along with those of the five other high-risk offenders, in an article about the police notifications last week. The paper's managing editor, Robert L. Swofford, said it had first adopted the policy last summer, when the county sheriff's department issued its own notifications about high-risk offenders living in unincorporated areas.
''At that point we had to make the call, are we going to name these people or not, and we made the decision that it's out there,'' Mr. Swofford said, adding that the paper had tried to interview all six men last week but that only two had agreed, and Mr. Patton was not among them. ''When this one came around, we followed the same practice.''
Today the paper quoted Pattie Davenport, who worked with Mr. Patton at an unidentified sign company in nearby Petaluma, as saying: ''They knocked the rug out from under him for something he did 16 years ago. It wasn't fair. He was trying to live right.''
The authorities said Mr. Patton's criminal record included convictions dating to 1976 on charges of false imprisonment, assault with intent to commit rape, rape by force or fear, oral copulation with a child under 14 and unlawful sexual intercourse with a child under 18. He was released from the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo in 1995 after serving a 13-year sentence for a 1982 conviction. His parole was to have expired next week.
David Brown, executive director of the Sonoma County Family Y.M.C.A., which is diagonally across the street from Mr. Patton's rooming house, said that all of its programs for children took place indoors or on gated playgrounds under close supervision, and that it had not changed its practices in any way because of Mr. Patton's presence in the neighborhood.
''I don't think we had time to digest it,'' Mr. Brown said today.
In the end, Mr. Patton's death left more questions than answers.
''You can make a lot of assumptions about what he was thinking,'' Sergeant Olivares said. ''But only Mr. Patton knows, and he took that with him.'' ..more.. by TODD S. PURDUM
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