By Kathryn Skelton,Staff Writer
The database is open for felons back to the ’80s. But tracking them down might be a problem.

The state of Maine’s most popular Web site – the Sex Offender Registry, with more than a half-million hits a month – is putting even more sexually violent criminals online.

If they can be found.

A new law, effective yesterday, requires that people sentenced for sex crimes back to 1982 put their name and face on the Internet. The old law required registration back to 1992.

In one early estimate, the extra 10 years’ worth of crimes will add about 500 people.

But tracking down old offenders through the state’s outdated paper records will be tough.

People have died. They’ve moved. Addresses changed.

“Good luck in finding those people who lived at P.O. Box 512 in Hartford, Maine,” said attorney Walter McKee, president-elect of the Maine Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “Go ahead and try to find them and bring them in (to the registry).”

The change was tucked into one of 11 sex-offender bills reviewed by the Legislature last spring.

Nine bills died, one was held indefinitely. They proposed everything from keeping offenders out of a certain city – or out of the country – to keeping them on probation for life.

The topic’s not going away: At the end of September, the Criminal Justice Committee will come out with a proposal or two of its own for the next session.

The flurry of activity reflects community interest, said committee co-chair Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Windham.

That interest is clear on the Internet.

Maine’s Sex Offender Registry currently lists about 1,640 people. In July, the Web site got 624,222 hits.

Massachusetts, with nearly the same number of offenders online, had one-third as many visits.

“People are real interested in who’s who,” said Rep. Michael Vaughn, R-Durham. “I’m a firm believer in stigma. If they know such and such is convicted (of a sex crime) they will be watched like a hawk, they will be shunned.”

All in the numbers

Maine has had a registry for six years. People convicted of sex offenses appear on it for 10 years. People convicted of sexually violent offenses stay on for life.

The registry’s last major expansion came in 2002, when the Legislature reached back to include people sentenced since 1992.

Then, the state had to go back 10 years through its own conviction records, cull the sex offenders and contact them to get them to comply with the law. This time, it will mean going back 23 years, into a pre-computer era.

The intent of reaching back to publicize past offenders “is for the right reason, it’s just difficult to achieve,” said Ruth Lunn, a supervisor at the State Bureau of Identification.

Maine has, on paper, records of 375,000 people charged with crimes since 1937.

Since the Bureau of Identification started creating electronic rap sheets in 2002, 141,000 of those records have been entered into a computer. Entries occur when a person is charged with a new crime, or when someone such as a landlord requests a background check, Lt. Tom Kelly said.

Among those 141,000 names, Kelly said 500 people appear to have committed a sex crime in the ’70s or ’80s that would land them on the registry for life, under the new law.

More research is needed, he said, before notification letters go out requiring people to sign up and submit a photo.

There are no immediate plans to move the remaining 234,000 names from paper to computer so they may be searched for more sexually violent offenders between 1982 and 1992.

“Someone would have to physically pull every record and I don’t know if that’s the best use of time,” Lunn said. “Should we thumb and thumb and thumb?”

Two million hits in a week

Elizabeth Ward Saxl, the executive director of the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault, called the Sex Offender Registry a part of public safety, with limitations.

“The vast majority of the population that commits offenses in our community are never going to show up” there, she said, because they will never be convicted.

Victims report fewer than half of all sex crimes to police. For that reason, she said, it’s difficult to know if the crimes are happening more or less than they used to in Maine.

When the new law passed, McKee, an Augusta attorney, argued against the registry expansion on the basis that it wasn’t fair to older offenders. The reason? People couldn’t have foreseen the Internet, and they had no opportunity to plead guilty to a lesser offense to avoid qualifying for the registry.

“People back into the ’80s, this wasn’t even a concept that existed,” he said.

He also doesn’t believe the intent of the registry – that people ought to be watched because they were all likely to reoffend – has been supported by research. According to the Center for Sex Offender Management, studies have shown that recidivism rates among offenders varied from 4 to 71 percent, depending on the crime and the study.

Maine doesn’t track the number of new sex crimes committed by registered sex offenders, according to the Department of Corrections.

The names, locations and case numbers of convicted offenders in Maine have been available online since November 2003.

“It crashed within a couple of hours” of its debut, Lunn said.

Overuse. The Web site got 2 million hits the first week.

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