An expert does not need to explicitly say that someone is likely to engage in another violent sexual crime for that person to be placed in a controversial Virginia program that locks up sexual predators after they’ve been released from prison, the state’s highest court has ruled.
The Virginia Supreme Court ruling means that courts can place someone in the program, called Civil Commitment of Sexually Violent Predators, even if no experts testify that they’ve concluded the person is likely to commit another violent sexual act.
“It is not necessary for an expert to state with specificity that the respondent will likely engage in sexual violent acts in the future,” Senior Justice Lawrence Koontz Jr. wrote in the court’s opinion. Instead, Koontz wrote, judges should base their decisions on “the totality of the record, including but not limited to expert testimony.”
Virginia confines about 300 people in the civil commitment program in a Nottaway County facility. The program holds people who have served their sentences but been deemed to still pose too great a risk to the community to be released.
Steven DeMille pleaded guilty to rape in Fairfax County in 1989 and was placed in the civil commitment program in 2005. He challenged his indefinite detention, saying experts who testified about whether he was a sexually violent predator couldn’t say with certainty that he was likely to reoffend.
Court records say a counselor who provided sex-offender therapy to DeMille did not give an opinion about the likelihood he would reoffend. Psychologists who testified for both the prosecution and defense called his risk for committing another sexual offense “high,” but said they could not say whether he was likely to commit sexually violent acts.
Virginia law specifies that a defendant must be deemed a sexually violent predator to be eligible for civil commitment.
DeMille’s attorneys argued that if an expert “could not determine the potential for sexually violent offending, the circuit court, considering the same evidence, equally could not.”
But the state high court said it could not overturn the circuit court’s opinion based on “the record as a whole,” which supports the determination that DeMille was a sexually violent predator.
The civil commitment program is run by the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services and costs about $90,000 a year for each inmate.
