Thursday, January 26, 2012

New APAI Facebook Page

The Executive Committee of the APAI voted last week to make our APAI facebook page public!  You can now find our page at www.facebook.com/apaintl.

Check it out and let APAI know you are there!

Friday, January 20, 2012

National Parole Resource Center Announces Training Opportunity

The National Parole Resource Center (NPRC) announces a new training opportunity to be offered immediately prior to the APAI Annual Training Conference. To learn more visit the APAI website at http://www.apaintl.org/conference/ or NPRC webite at http://nationalparoleresourcecenter.org/

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Sheriff slams prison overhaul

Gov. Deval Patrick wants to build two to three assisted-living centers with bars for golden-ager inmates to serve their time in comfort, as part of an ambitious overhaul of the state’s prison system due to be released today, the Herald has learned.

The 400-page Corrections Master Plan obtained by the Herald, though years in the making, was only shown to sheriffs for the first time yesterday by the Division of Capital Asset Management and the Executive Office of Public Safety. It drew immediate criticism.  Read more...

Mo. Supreme Court chief calls for sentencing fixes

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Missouri's chief justice urged lawmakers Wednesday to make changes to the state's probation and parole systems to potentially save the state millions of dollars.

Chief Justice Richard Teitelman urged lawmakers in his annual State of the Judiciary address to pass measures to reduce the number of people in prison for probation and parole violations.

"I support your efforts to help make sentencing practices more cost-effective, helping Missouri to become ... both tough and smart on crime," Teitelman said, addressing a joint session of the state House and Senate.  Read more...



Lawmakers consider site for elderly offenders

Iowa may have to establish a special nursing home for elderly sex offenders and other criminals, according to a handful of local lawmakers.

''These individuals should not be turned loose,'' state Rep. Helen Miller, D-Fort Dodge, said Saturday morning. ''We will have to have a facility where these individuals will be contained.''

Miller and other legislators addressed the issue during an Eggs and Issues forum in Fort Dodge held months after a registered sex offender living at the Pomeroy Care Center in Pomeroy reportedly sexually assaulted another resident of the facility.  Read more...

Pardon restrictions mulled - Ex-governor: Proposals take away incentive for inmates to change

Leslie Carlton Smith wants to coach his 6-year-old son's soccer team, chaperone him at Boy Scouts events and take him hunting.

But until former Gov. Haley Barbour pardoned Smith, 46, last week, the Biloxi man could not be the dad he wanted to be because of a felony conviction from his teens.

"It's hard to tell a 6-year-old why I can't do some of things his friend's dads can," Smith said Monday. "It's a little embarrassing for me."  Read more...

Brown case highlights reluctance to parole longtime offenders

Eroy Brown, whose acquittal on murder charges involving the deaths of a prison warden and a farm manager in the 1980s shook the Lone Star corrections system to its roots, is coming up for parole again.

Brown is serving 90 years as a habitual criminal for robbing a Waco convenience store of $12 and some candy bars. The graying, almost 60-year-old is serving time in a South Carolina prison because a federal judge thought his safety could not be guaranteed in a Texas lockup. If he's granted parole, he would be sent to a pre-release program in California. Read more...

Jails don’t keep people out of jail

Collectively, we have nearly 10 decades of experience in the area of corrections and conditional release. There are many issues we have disagreed over, but we are united in our concerns with the direction of the Harper government’s “tough on crime” agenda.


In a country that prides itself on fairness, compassion and the pursuit of equality, why do we accept the idea that community safety will be enhanced through increased incarceration?  Read more...

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Victim Search Procedures - Promising Practices from Florida - by Daphne Asbell, Victim Services Supervisor

Victims Search Procedures- Promising Practices
by Daphne Asbell, Victim Services Supervisor
Florida Parole Commission

We are constantly trying to locate victims on old cases in which complete information was not captured originally. We also have quite a few murder cases where the next of kin are now deceased. Our agency has implemented a promising practice by using resources such as obtaining death certificates, obituaries, and news articles to identify survivors and search for them using Florida drivers license information, court records, the internet, Accurint (a commercial database) and various public search engines. This practice has been very successful in locating victims who were unaware of the offenders’ status, but very interested in being informed and having input

In some cases, we have been contacted by family members of victims, particularly murder victims who have called to find out what ever happened to the offender who changed their life so dramatically many years before by taking the life of their loved one. It’s so very upsetting to have to tell them that the offender was paroled and to realize that they were never contacted to allow them to have a voice in the process or to know what was going on, because we didn’t know they existed. Because of this we try to exhaust every avenue to ensure that victims are located and allowed to participate in the process.

In Florida, state attorneys offices are required by law to supply victim contact information to the Florida Department of Corrections. In some cases the information was not transmitted. In these cases, we can go back to the state attorneys office to see if they are able to retrieve the information from the court file.

Many of our murder cases in Florida are serving a Life sentence with a 25 year minimum mandatory. The persons listed as next of kin may not be around when the offender becomes eligible for a parole hearing 25 years later. In many cases, the person to be notified is the adult victim’s elderly parent(s), who are often deceased. If you go back to the court file, this may be the only person listed.

At this point, we start with the media. Using the Florida State Library or local libraries, we search for an obituary or articles that list family members. Obituaries are full of helpful information about the family including names and cities where they resided. Sometimes all you can find is a funeral notice. Funeral homes are sometimes helpful, but lately it seems that many of the older funeral homes have been bought out by big corporations who have purged the older records. Another good source of information is news articles about the crime itself. News articles may include reactions of family members and give their names. Sometimes it’s just a tiny bit of information that could cause you to dig further and be successful.

In one case, for example, the next of kin from the court file was the victim’s widow who is now deceased 25 years later. There was no obituary to be found, but there was a news article that told that the victim, a service station attendant slain in a robbery, had two young daughters and a son at the time of his death. Their names were not listed, but knowing that they existed caused us to find the date of death of the widow and we were able to go back to the library to locate her obituary listing the children’s names.

Another good resource is a death certificate which we obtain for five dollars from Vital Statistics. The death certificate lists the parent information of the victim (if known). If the parent information is not known, it’s a good indication that next of kin may not have been located as in the case of a transient or a drug trafficker who came from South America and became a casualty. Another important item on the death certificate may be the informant. On the vast majority of death certificates I’ve seen, this person is a family member and you should always try to locate them. In some rare instances where kin were not located, the informant was a member of the medical examiners office staff.

I also pay special attention to place of birth on the death certificate and to the information at the bottom regarding where the victim was buried. If the body was transported out of state for burial, you may be able to contact a local library in that municipality to get an obituary. Frequently, the cemetery is listed on the death certificate. You may also be able to contact the cemetery to see who the family contact is for the plot or to see who is also buried in the family plot. A few cemeteries are charted by historical societies and have lists online of the inscriptions from all of their headstones.

In Florida, sadly many murder victims are elderly persons who retired to reside in warmer climes. In a fairly typical case you can’t find an obituary, and you get a death certificate only to see that the victim, George Heinz was born in 1917 and the informant was his brother, Gerald. A similar search for Gerald determined that he was born in 1914 and died the year after the murder. The only other significant information on George’s death certificate was the names of the parents, who are undoubtedly deceased, and the fact that the victim was born in the state of Pennsylvania. In this case, I asked the Florida State Library to check the 1920 and 1930 census data. They can search by name and state and having the names of four members of the family is a real plus in narrowing down the result to the right folks. The search might reveal that Gerald Heinz Sr. and his wife Susie lived in Reading in 1920 with their sons Gerald Jr. who was 6 and George who was 3. The 1930 census might reveal that they now have another son named Samuel now 9 and two daughters named Sharon and Ruth who were 8 and 6 respectively in addition to George and Gerald.

Once you have names of family members and approximate ages, you can use a search engine like Accurint (which is available through LexisNexis) to locate potential family members. A search engine like this has the capability to show possible relatives or associates and this is a very valuable tool.

One of our capital felony crimes in Florida that carries a Life sentence with a 25 year minimum mandatory is sex battery on a child. Since the age of the child victim is an important factor in the crime, their dates of birth are often well documented. What’s difficult is when the name of the victim is changed by the mother, often because the father was the perpetrator of the crime. A search engine like Accurint has the capability to search by first name and date of birth and possibly find a hit on the victim you are searching for.

In some of these cases, we see that the victim was very traumatized and I would rather contact the parent initially, even though the victim is now grown. Even if the parent has a common name like Smith, you can cross reference this person as a relative of the person you suspect to be the victim.

For example, I might find three Cheryl Smiths in Florida with a date of birth of April 5, 1978, but on examination of possible relatives, only one of those had a relative named Jennifer Smith who was born in the mid-1950’s and who lived at the same address with Cheryl when this possible victim was 18-19 years of age.

Accurint also allows you to track folks by former addresses. You might have information from the court file from 1985 that has the victim’s mother, Jennifer Smith listed at 4350 Sandhill Street, Fort Myers. If you search Jennifer Smith, 4350 Sandhill Street, Fort Myers, Florida, Accurint should give you a hit for the victim showing her current address and listing all of her addresses back to that time. This tracking goes back to the early 80’s generally.

I have had cases where the information in the file is incorrect and I searched for Jennifer Smith, 4350 Sandhill Street, Fort Myers, Florida and did not get a match. In that case I expanded my search to Jennifer Smith, Fort Myers, Florida. I might retrieve more than 50 hits for a name that common in a city that size, but see a hit for a Jennifer Smith who actually resided at 4352 Sandhill Street. In many cases, it seems that whoever recorded the data got it wrong, but this person is likely the mother of the victim you are seeking.

Another resource available to searchers in law enforcement is a social security number. There is a quick online lookup that anyone can access called State Of Issue By Social Security Number Calculator. The state of issuance can be determined by the first three digits of the number. I was searching for a sexual battery victim who had been going to college in Gainesville, Florida. The file indicated that the victim had returned to her home state of Massachusetts after the trial because she was so traumatized. This young woman had a very common name but I searched for her in Massachusetts with no result. I was able to find her age in the file and produced a list of 30 possibles using an age range. I then began to check the first three digits of the social security numbers for my hits and finally found a person with the same maiden name as my victim who now lived in California, but had a Massachusetts social security number. I wrote to her and she was the victim. She said she thought if she didn’t know anything about him she would feel better, but she realized that she felt more comforted knowing the offender, a serial rapist was locked up and unlikely to be released anytime soon.

I have used the social security number in a different way to locate victims in a murder case. The victim in a 1970’s murder case was a young man named Mark who was living with a girlfriend named Susie in Florida and working as a fisherman in the Fort Myers area. He went with an acquaintance to buy some marijuana and this person killed Mark for his money and boots and dumped his body. When the death certificate was filled out, the information was supplied by the young woman who the victim had lived with for a few months and she was listed as the informant. I do not believe his family was contacted initially after his death. I got the death certificate and it said that the parents were named Donald and Rose and that the victim was born in South Dakota. I searched for a Rose with the same last name since Donald is a more common name. I found few possibilities but the folks I wrote to were not family of this victim. A year or more after this initial effort, the case was coming back for consideration so I picked up the file again and looked the death certificate over. I checked the social security number and determined that it was issued in Michigan. Once again I searched Michigan for Donald and Rose with no success. I knew the social security number had to be the key, but how?

Then I had an idea. Using Accurint I searched the contiguous social security numbers to this one and then I expanded that search to more numbers. Most of the folks I hit on were living in a relatively small town on the shores of Lake Michigan. I remembered that my own social security number was issued to me in high school and I was close to the age of the victim Mark. I went on the internet and queried the town. It was small enough that it had but one high school. I called the school and was connected to the guidance counselor who maintained the school records. I explained the story of Mark’s demise and that I was trying to locate his family. The guidance counselor told me that per their school policy they could only release Mark’s records if he authorized it. I begged her and offered to fax the death certificate to her. She took it to her Principal and he authorized her to release the information to me due to the extreme circumstances. It turned out that Mark had a brother and two sisters who were also attending that high school at the same time he was. His social security number was the same as the one on the death certificate, and his date of birth was also the same, but his parents were not named Donald and Rose. I guess that Susie had not been able to correctly remember the names of Mark’s parents or he gave her incorrect information.

Using the dates of birth and correct names I was able to locate Mark’s brother and sisters. They told me that Mark had dropped out of school before graduating and got into trouble for possession of marijuana and left the area shortly thereafter. The family moved from Michigan to another state a short time afterwards. The family eventually got word of his death but never knew the details. Both parents were now deceased but his siblings were glad to finally know what happened to Mark.



For more information contact Daphne Asbell at DaphneAsbell@fpc.state.fl.us