He Served 18 Months for a Sex Offense. He’s Re-Imprisoned Anyway, Possibly for Life.
Under Florida law, imprisonment does not depend only on proven guilt of a crime. It can also result from the possibility of a future crime. The imprisonment can be up to life. The offender has few avenues of appeal. The case is not even public. The documents on which it is based are sealed from public view.
A jury of three men and three women took all of 20 minutes to agree with Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark, declaring Walsh a violent sexual predator and condemning him to DCF’s prison, indefinitely.
Walsh was not being re-imprisoned for a new offense, or even for the severity of any single past offence, because there is no such severity that would even qualify him as a sexual predator under criminal law. He was being kept in DCF’s prison, where he’s been for the past four years, out of fear that he may re-offend.
The state does not consider it punishment: it was a civil trial. But the state’s burden of proof was, as a result, far lower than in a criminal trial. The state did not have to prove anything beyond reasonable doubt.
Assistant State Attorney Melissa “Going After a Child” Clark.
Is FL the only state whose child welfare agency (DCF) has the power to imprison?
I will never understand how civil commitment beyond a criminal punishment is constitutional.
I have a friend who just recently made his EOS only to find that one single interview shortly before his release the “shrink” recommended he go to Arcadia and so he’s there now. He’d done 15 years already and so far as I can tell is about as reformed as any man can be. I doubt his (out of state) family knows anything at all and I’ve lost contact with him now.
This is the path that our justice system has to set in place so that political activists can be falsely convicted of sex offenses so there is no dissent from the policies of those in power.