The War on Pervs: Catching Criminals or Laying Traps?The war on pervs: Catching criminals or laying traps?
By Jessica Heslam/ Special Report
Sunday, May 7, 2006
Updated: 11:43 AM EST
A growing number of untrained civilians across the country are waging a war on cyber sex predators - posing as kids on the Internet to catch criminals stalking chat rooms for underaged sex partners.
As the number of online vigilantes increase and boast of sweeping arrests of potential perverts, critics say it’s a dangerous movement that could land innocent people behind bars. Even journalists have jumped the bust-a-perv bandwagon, a phenomenon ethicists say crosses the line.
“We may get a whole raft of people who are entrapped into committing crimes that they otherwise wouldn’t normally do,” said Boston attorney Harvey Silverglate, who specializes in criminal defense and civil liberties.
“It could end up getting people convicted of crimes who should not be,” he said. “That is a real danger.”
The activists say they are taking a page from law enforcement, which has devoted federal, state and local authorities and large amounts of federal money to the anti-pervert cyber-sleuthing. With so many people, mostly men, trolling the Internet for naive children, activists see themselves as part of a much-needed national vigilante movement.
But law enforcement officials worry about untrained civilians taking the law into their own hands, and even botching formal police investigations.
“Do they serve a purpose? I think the answer is clearly they do,” said James Burrell, an FBI supervisory special agent who oversees federal computer crimes investigations for the Boston area. “But from a law enforcement perspective the issue we deal with is that entrapment is used by some of these groups, which is not conducive to admissibility in a case or prosecution.”
It can also go horribly wrong. Canadian Stephen Marshall killed two registered sex offenders in Maine last month before shooting himself in Boston. Marshall, 20, tracked them down using Maine’s online sex-offender registry.
One of the biggest civilian efforts online is Perverted-Justice.com, a nationwide watchdog group of volunteers who pose as youngsters in Web chat rooms to catch possible sex predators.
Here’s how it works: The volunteer creates a profile on Yahoo.com or MySpace.com of a boy or girl between 10 and 15 years old. Then the volunteer goes into a regional chat room and waits. When a possible predator seeks them out, an online chat between the volunteer and the lascivious target ensues.
Xavier Von Erck, who founded the Oregon-based Web group three years ago, said they’ve helped convict 54 Internet sex predators nationwide since June 2004. Their “training” is done in-house, with volunteers ranging from college students to stay-at-home mothers, Von Erck said.
In 2003, Boston police civilian dispatcher Dennis Isbart was caught soliciting sex from a Perverted-Justice volunteer posing as a 14-year-old boy. Isbart pleaded guilty to enticement of a minor.
Bolstering the group’s profile is its unusual partnership with law enforcement and NBC’s “Dateline,” producer of a gotcha series called “To Catch a Predator.” The latest series will air this month - during sweeps.
Perverted-Justice volunteers posed as underaged kids online and arranged to meet sex predators at a house in Ohio that “Dateline” had rented. In some cases, a 19-year-old actress who looked 13 appeared on a Webcam.
When the suspected sex predator walked in the house - and many did - a camera crew and “Dateline” correspondent Chris Hansen were waiting. Some men bolted while others stayed and talked on camera. When they exited the house, police nabbed them - all on camera.
If it weren’t compelling television, “Dateline” wouldn’t run the series, said Emerson College professor Jeff Seglin, who writes the New York Times Syndicate’s column “The Right Thing.”
“ ‘Dateline has an issue of crossing the line from being a watchdog to being a participant because they’re actively involved in helping to find these people,” he said.
Hansen, the “Dateline” correspondent, defended the series, saying Perverted-Justice acts as the “Chinese wall” between his show and law enforcement.
“What we’ve done here is to be enterprising in the way that we cover what is a very new and innovative crime,” Hansen said. “We had to be just as innovative as the predators are.”
Opponents argue that most people don’t understand the difference between laying a trap and entrapment. Entrapment is when a reluctant person is pressured into breaking the law.
“This is not an area in which people untrained in law enforcement should go out and act as vigilantes,” Silverglate said. “Citizens do a public service when they solve crime - but not when they create it.”
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=138243