YNOT – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled the Constitution permits the U.S. Justice Department to imprison “sexually dangerous” inmates beyond their court-imposed sentences.The 7-2 decision overturned a June 2009 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. In its opinion, the Fourth Circuit said Congress overstepped its bounds in authorizing the indefinite detention of sexual predators.
“The federal government, as custodian of its prisoners, has the constitutional power to act in order to protect nearby (and other) communities from the danger such prisoners may pose,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the majority opinion.
The case grew out of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, a portion of which authorizes federal authorities to hold the perpetrators of some sex crimes indefinitely. The practice is called civil confinement. Since 2006, federal authorities have imposed civil confinements upon approximately 100 inmates who have been certified “sexually dangerous” by the justice system.
Previously, most sex crimes were matters for adjudication by state courts. Twenty states have allowed civil confinement for sex crimes since at least 1997. The passage of the Walsh Act, however, made child pornography a federal crime and, according to members of Congress, put an important tool in the hands of law enforcement: the ability to remove sexually dangerous individuals from society despite sentencing guidelines and confinement policies that vary widely from state to state.
In 2008, four of the 100 convicts currently held indefinitely challenged the federal law, not on the constitutionality of the law itself, but on the grounds Congress had no authority to enact a law that seizes power from the states. One of the challengers, a 67-year-old former Lakin, Kan., grade-school counselor named Graydon Comstock, claimed his constitutional guarantees to due process were violated when he was detained. After serving three years’ state time for two convictions of aggravated indecent liberties with a child, he was transferred to federal prison to serve a 37-month sentence pursuant to pleading guilty to child-pornography possession. Six days before his scheduled release, the U.S. Attorney General certified Comstock as a potential re-offender and ordered the man civilly confined.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia broke with the majority in the Supreme Court ruling. In his opinion for the minority, Thomas indicated the “common good” clauses of the Constitution do not provide enough rationale for the Walsh Act’s challenged provisions.
Nothing in the Constitution “expressly delegates to Congress the power to enact a civil commitment regime for sexually dangerous persons,” Thomas noted.
