Pierce County: Glitch delays sex offender e-mail alert system

A glitch has delayed Pierce County’s connection to a statewide datebase that sends e-mail alerts to people who want to be notified when a registered sex offender moves next door.

Registered sex offender system adds e-mail alert

Pierce County residents can start signing up this week if they want to be notified when a registered sex offender moves into their neighborhood, near their child’s day care or favorite park or close to their work place.

Offender Watch, a computer system that sends out e-mail alerts to those who sign up, is expected to be up and running Monday in Pierce County. Work to connect the county to the statewide database was scheduled to be completed over the weekend.

Pierce is the 36th of 39 counties in Washington to be connected to the statewide alert program, which is operated by the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. Clark, Snohomish and Yakima counties are not yet hooked up, but are in the process.

E-mail will alert state residents when sex offenders move nearby

Washington residents will soon be notified by e-mail if they want to know when a sex offender moves into their neighborhood. As part of an overhaul of the statewide sex offender registry, the state is setting up a system that features real-time updates for newly registered offenders and lets residents sign up to be notified if an offender moves nearby.

Meanwhile, Pierce County will be getting $437,000 of the $5 million the Legislature is giving to local authorities to verify that sex offenders really are living where they say they are when they register with local sheriff’s departments.

The changes to the registry and the address verification program were among recommendations made late last year by Gov. Chris Gregoire’s task force on sex offenders. The task force was created after the kidnapping and killing of 12-year-old Zina Linnik in Tacoma last July by a sex offender.

Critics decry sex offender ads

A new round of attack ads in the governor’s race drew an angry response Thursday from a group of prosecutors, firefighters and former law enforcement officers.

The group, led by Pierce County deputy prosecutor Mark Lindquist, said during a news conference at Gov. Chris Gregoire’s campaign headquarters in Seattle that ads funded by the Republican Governors Association attacking the governor for “losing track” of 1,300 sex offenders are misleading and should be pulled.

In one ad, a woman who describes herself not only as a mom but also “head of surveillance for Cindy” says she’s on “constant lookout” since discovering that 1,300 sex offenders went missing on Gregoire’s watch. A young girl on a bicycle is cautioned not to go too near the street, and a man walking a dog looks over at a group of children gathered around an ice cream truck.

’07 laws might have saved Zina

Zina Linnik’s accused killer might still have been in prison last Fourth of July had the laws on books today been in effect in 1990, when Terapon Adhahn sexually assaulted a family member, a state task force has concluded.

Instead, Adhahn was sentenced to only two months in jail and five years of sex offender treatment for his 1990 conviction for incest. And now he is charged with kidnapping and murder for allegedly abducting the 12-year-old Tacoma girl from an alley behind her home on the holiday night.

“It is quite possible that if he committed the same crime in 2007, he would have been given a sentence of five years in prison,” said Kitsap County Prosecutor Russ Hauge, chairman of a special task force created by Gov. Chris Gregoire. “And he would have had to prove to the indeterminate sentencing review board that he wouldn’t commit any more crimes and should be released.”