TEXAS JUDGES ORDER SEXUAL PREDATORS TO GIT OUTTA THE STATE

If you dangerous sex offenders leave Texas and never return, you can live on your own

In July 2005 Lloyd Wilson was busted in Fairfax, Virginia for abducting and raping a 16-year-old girl. He was convicted of rape, abduction and producing child pornography and is serving a 30 year prison sentence.

In May 2008, Melvin Cody Whipple was busted for fondling an 11-year-old boy. He was convicted of attempted aggravated sexual abuse of a child and given a one-to-15 year prison sentence.

Ordinarily one would say there is nothing unusual here, just two turds busted and sent to prison for the sexual abuse of children. But there is far more to this than that.

In 1999 a new Texas law went into effect that allowed convicted sex offenders, who had completed their maximum prison sentences and were classified as too dangerous to live freely in society, to be locked up for the remainder of their lives if necessary in a psychiatric hospital under a civil commitment.

In 2004, according to Mike Ward and Anita Hassan of the Houston Chronicle, Wilson, 44 at the time, had just finished serving a 12-year sentence for indecency with a child in Fort Worth and aggravated sexual assault of a child in Dallas, and Whipple, 58 at the time, was completing nine years in prison for aggravated kidnapping involving sexual intent and indecency with a child in Amarillo.

Both men were to remain in custody of the state under the civil commitment law. But both Wilson and Whipple appeared before different Montgomery County judges, Wilson before District Judge Putnam Reiter and Whipple before District Judge Lee Alworth. Each man was ordered to “leave the State of Texas within 72 hours of release” from prison and “not to visit or reside in the State of Texas.”

Wilson was ordered to live in Virginia and Whipple was ordered to move to Bluff, Utah.

Neither the authorities in Virginia nor Utah were ever notified by any authorities in Texas that the two dangerous sexual predators were going to take up residence in their respective states. And to top it off, exiling Wilson and Whipple was probably illegal because of a provision in the Texas constitution that prohibits the banishment of criminals to other states.