Justice Department says predator law covers non-violent offenders

WASHINGTON – The Justice Department is asking federal courts to let it cast a wider net in its effort to indefinitely lock up accused sexual predators, urging judges to detain men who have never been convicted of sexual assaults.

By law, the government can detain sex offenders after their prison sentences end if it can prove that they have a serious mental illness and have molested children or committed other "sexually violent" crimes. In court filings, government lawyers have argued that the law also applies to men who have been convicted of crimes that did not result in physical harm, including threatening phone calls and exhibitionism. If courts agree, those men could remain in federal prison until psychologists say they are safe to set free.

Critics fear the government's interpretation would give Justice Department lawyers and prison psychologists too much power to decide who should be kept in custody. "This is the government exercising its most awesome power based on very, very vaguely worded standards," said Eric Janus, a law professor who has studied civil commitment laws.

That system is already under scrutiny. A USA TODAY investigation in March found that the department's effort to lock up accused predators has been beset by long delays and questionable medical determinations that kept dozens of men incarcerated for as long as five years even though they did not meet the requirements for detention.

Next month, Justice Department lawyers will ask an appeals court in Richmond, Va., to find that a man who made obscene telephone calls in which he threatened to rape and murder random women fits the definition of someone who committed "sexually violent" conduct.

Government lawyers have also asked a federal judge in North Carolina to find that a man who exposed himself to children in a supermarket met the law's definition of "child molestation."

In another case last month, the department convinced a federal judge that alcohol dependence and drug abuse are illnesses serious enough to justify civil commitment.

Few of the 20 states that have their own civil commitment systems expressly allow detention for such "hands-off" crimes.

The Justice Department declined to comment. The department's prison psychologists objected to such a broad interpretation, in part because of fears that "it would result in reviewing people who didn't need to be certified," said Anthony Jimenez, the former head of the civil commitment system.