Arizona has a registry problem
A patchwork policy for sex offenders … Strange bedfellows … And on the internet, nobody knows you’re the county attorney.
There are more than 12,000 registered sex offenders on Arizona’s registry.
But how easily you find out about them depends on the county you live in.
If you’re in Mohave County, for example, the Sheriff’s Office created a county-specific database with granular details on nearby sex offenders.
In Maricopa County, your best bet is to find out for yourself on the statewide database.
Each Arizona county creates its own sex offender-related policies, like community notifications, compliance checks and rehabilitation, which means those policies vary widely throughout the state.
That’s the problem that Arizona’s new Sex Offender Management Board was created last year to fix.
The 26-member board met for its first-ever session last month to go over basics like Robert’s Rules and how long people can speak during public comments. They did manage one big item, though: naming a board chair.
While she currently runs her own consulting firm, Beth Goulden worked in Maricopa County’s Adult Probation Department for 24 years, mainly overseeing the supervision of sex offenders on probation. Last year, she helped pass the bill that created the board she now chairs.
Goulden said most sex offenders aren’t sentenced to life in prison; the vast majority are put on probation and supervised within the community to ensure they comply with court-ordered conditions.
Arizona lets each county run its own probation department instead of using one statewide system.
“There are no consistent statewide standards for how we supervise and treat sex offenders,” Goulden told us. “I saw this as a major issue in my career supervising and managing sex offenders. Some smaller counties may not even have treatment providers.”
At a conference several years ago, Goulden learned that Colorado has a Sex Offender Management Board that develops statewide guidelines, so she took the idea to Republican Sen. Shawnna Bolick, who sponsored a bill creating the board last year.
Senate Bill 1630 gives various entities — the Department of Public Safety, State Department of Corrections, the state Supreme Court, etc. — the ability to appoint people to Arizona’s new board, and tasks those members with developing and revising standard procedures to evaluate adult sex offenders.
More than a year after the law passed, the board will begin meeting monthly, and its next session is set for next Monday.
So we spoke to Goulden this week about the biggest problems she thinks they need to tackle first.
The list
Whether or not someone ends up on Arizona’s sex offender registry list often depends on the skill of their attorney.
Last year, when testifying for the board-creation bill, Goulden told lawmakers one of the last cases she worked on in Maricopa County involved a 17-year-old who raped a 12-year-old at gunpoint. He didn’t have to register as a sex offender.
“We’re seeing a lot of 17-year-olds who are committing serious, violent offenses. But the law says if you’re 17 and younger, you can petition to get off the registry,” Goulden explained to the lawmakers.
Goulden told us she’s seen cases get pled down so that even sexually motivated crimes aren’t charged as such, and perpetrators aren’t required to join the sex offender registry. Meanwhile, “You can be 18 in our state and have sex with a 14-year-old and have to register. That’s like a senior and a freshman,” she said.
But what counts as a crime severe enough to land someone on the sex-offender registry isn’t always clear-cut — the line between moral judgment and legal definition often feels arbitrary.
For example, there’s a long list of boxes someone has to check to get removed from Arizona’s list after completing probation, like being 22 or younger at the time of the offense, and having only one victim who was at least 15. Those parameters vary from state to state.
The way law enforcement determines how dangerous a sex offender is also varies across states. And it also feels morally arbitrary.
After an offender is released or sentenced to probation in Arizona, the agency that has custody of the individual places offenders in a tier one, two or three level of severity, with level three being the highest risk to the public.
Arizona law enforcement agencies rely on a 19-factor checklist to assess how likely a sex offender is to reoffend. The score determines their risk level, although agencies can change it if new information comes up.
Some of the criteria are striking: five points if the victim was a stranger, zero if the victim was a family member; three points for a male victim, none for a female one.
Those distinctions come from research linking certain victim characteristics to higher reoffense rates — studies suggest offenders with male victims are more likely to reoffend.
But the science of sex offenders is far from settled.
For example, there’s no widely accepted tool for assessing female sex offenders, even though 281 women appear on Arizona’s registry.
A 2022 federal study of states’ assessment tools found that Arizona’s sex offender review differs from most other states — while the corrections department administers the assessments, local law enforcement makes the final call on the offender’s risk level.
Arizona’s checklist itself hasn’t been refreshed in years, but even back in 2004, more than a third of survey respondents said they struggled to complete it.
One of the survey respondents said Arizona’s risk assessment “seems to be open to the way the assessor reads into the question other than what the offender has done.” Another said there should be a way to factor in those “actively participating in sex offender treatment.”
Goulden said while the risk assessment “doesn’t make sense to a lot of people,” there’s a lot of research behind it. Still, she knows it’s a “hot topic” that the board should look into.
That risk assessment process is pretty important — it determines how people are notified about a sex offender in their community.
Law enforcement must distribute non-electronic notices with the offender’s name, picture and address for all level two and three offenders. The same process applies to level one offenders convicted of a dangerous crime against children.
But local law enforcement agencies decide whether to notify people about the remaining level one offenders.
New rules
Arizona lawmakers have started passing piecemeal reforms, but federal reviewers say the state still doesn’t meet national standards.
The 2006 Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) was meant to create one national system for how states register sex offenders and notify the public. The due date passed in 2009.
But Arizona’s lawmakers rejected implementing SORNA after finding out it came with a $2 million price tag. The state has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of federal public safety funding as a punishment.
Arizona and 31 other states still have not “substantially implemented” SORNA, or implemented enough of the rules to pass federal review, per the most recent count.
The U.S. Department of Justice published Arizona’s last “Substantial Implementation Review” in 2021, and found several areas of the SORNA implementation checklist that the state still doesn’t meet, such as:
Federal rules require lifetime sex offender registration for the kidnapping of a minor. In general, Arizona requires lifetime registration for all offenses, but has an exception limiting registration to 10 years for those charged with kidnapping a minor.
SORNA requires offenders to check in with the registering agency once a year for tier one offenders, every six months for tier two and every three months for tier three. Arizona requires annual in-person visits once a year, regardless of risk level.
Federal law requires states to update their registry website within three business days of updates to offenders’ information. Arizona’s risk assessment process delays updates, so the changes don’t hit the website within that federal three-day deadline.
Still, at least our state lawmakers are (kind of) trying.
Last year, lawmakers added certain level one offenders to the notification process and public registry. They also passed a measure requiring registered offenders who have custody of a child attending school to notify their county sheriff.
Three anonymous plaintiffs — all who claim to be level one sex offenders convicted of dangerous crimes against children — are suing to overturn the laws on claims they violate their rights to privacy and against compelled speech.
As that litigation plays out, Goulden said there are many more issues the board will discuss in its monthly meetings.
One of her priorities is “talking about how we’re supervising and treating sex offenders.” Therapy is a required part of probation for sex offenders, she said, but that therapy looks different from county to county.
For example, a sex offender in Maricopa County could be referred to a treatment center and sent for psychological testing, while an offender in Coconino County could be put on house arrest without any resources to prevent recidivism, Goulden said.
“This is such a specialized field that not a lot of people know how to address,” she said. “You have to have the proper treatment providers and probation professionals working hand in hand to make sure you’re not putting a child at risk.”
That’s a lot to take on for a board of more than 20 people — all appointed by agencies with their own priorities for how Arizona handles sex offender policies.
Still, Goulden hopes the work won’t drag on. Arizona doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel, she said; plenty of other states have already implemented reforms.
“We don’t have to start from scratch if we don’t want to. There are states we can look to for guidance and get some of these recommendations moving sooner rather than later,” she said.
It didn’t end on campus: Remember the pro-Palestine protests that caused an uproar at Arizona State University last year? Well, the fallout from the arrests of those protesters has led to some fascinating legal developments, the Republic’s Taylor Seely reports. After months of legal maneuvering, Republican Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell is asking a judge to rule she doesn’t have to answer questions under oath about whether the arrests were retaliatory. And she wants the court to go even further and rule that Arizona’s anti-SLAPP law, which protesters used to force her to testify, is unconstitutional. Not only that, she has an unlikely Democratic ally, Attorney General Kris Mayes, who has taken heat for using the anti-SLAPP law in the fake electors case.
We haven’t won a $3 million raid settlement yet, but we hope to someday. In the meantime, your financial support keeps the Agenda raid-worthy.
Free electors: Mayes implied that she may stop her prosecution against the so-called “fake electors” who submitted votes falsely claiming that President Donald Trump won the state in 2020, Jessica Boehm and Jeremy Duda write for Axios Phoenix. Mayes was also wishy-washy when 12News’ Brahm Resnik asked if she planned to continue pursuing the case.
“The one thing I do know for sure … is that I am so proud of the prosecutors and the investigators in the Attorney General’s Office, and I’m proud of the work we did on this case,” Mayes told Resnik. “I certainly don’t want to give it up. It is certainly not something that I want to do.”
Swear it’s true this time: Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva was sworn into office yesterday after waiting seven weeks. Democrats are hopeful that with Grijalva, they will be able to release more “Epstein files.” Yesterday, House Democrats released emails written by Jeffrey Epstein that claimed Trump spent hours at Epstein’s house with one of his victims, per the New York Times. The emails went on to accuse Trump of knowing more about the abuse than he has claimed. Meanwhile, Republican Representative Lauren Boebert was summoned to the White House to discuss her role in signing the petition aimed at forcing a vote on a bill demanding the Justice Department release all of its investigative files on Epstein, per the Times.
Connecting the dots: A big donation to Gov. Katie Hobbs’ inauguration put the Department of Child Safety in an uncomfortable position when the donor, Sunshine Residential Homes, gave the state an ultimatum, the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger reports. The company, which runs group homes, said it wanted more money from the state and would take its business elsewhere if state officials didn’t agree. Records obtained by the Republic show Sunshine Residential used its ties to Hobbs to pressure state officials, who upped the company’s pay by 30%.
Now what?: The deadline for the states that use Colorado River water to reach an agreement on divvying up that water came and went this week, per the New York Times. Hobbs and Republican legislative leaders called on the Trump administration to come up with a plan that would protect Arizona’s water rights, the Republic’s Brandon Loomis reports. The seven states that use the river don’t appear to be close to reaching an agreement, and that’s leaving the 30 tribes that also use the river wondering what comes next, KJZZ’s Gabriel Pietrorazio reports.
In other, other news
The measles outbreak along the Arizona-Utah border is the second-largest in the nation, with more than 180 positive cases (Zach Buchanan / Phoenix New Times) … SNAP benefits are still in limbo after the Supreme Court paused a lower court’s order that the Trump administration authorize a full month of benefits (Jacob Fischler / AZMirror) … And Arizona officials have been flooded with requests to memorialize Charlie Kirk including renaming a freeway and erecting a statue in his honor (Shawn Raymundo / Arizona Republic).
Attorney General Kris Mayes is wading into a Twitter fight between a Phoenix attorney and Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell’s fiancé, per the New Times’ Stephen Lemons.
Attorney Vladimir Gagic and Mitchell’s fiancé Paul Stout have been blasting each other on Twitter for months. It got so bad that a protective order limits what Gagic can tweet about Stout.
Now, Mayes is investigating whether Gagic violated that order and continued to harass Stout. She’s asking Twitter to turn over reams of information about Gagic’s account.
Lemons summed up the spat with these words:
“According to the public record of the case, however, the ‘harassment’ at issue would seem to barely fit the term,” Lemons writes. “It involves no direct contact between Stout and Gagic, nor any real threat of violence. Mostly, it was a pissing match between two grown men.”
Talk about skewed priorities, the state legislature won’t provide $2 million to implement SORNA thereby loosing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of federal public safety funding that could protect Arizona citizens. However, they don’t bat an eye to excessively funding ESAs for rich families while kicking others to the curb who really need programs that Medicaid & AHCCCS provide to special needs families - referring to yesterday’s story about Micha.
Calling on the Chump Administration to allocate water rights is the kiss of death. They can't decide what to order on pizza or whether to slap tariffs on China.