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Home > Blogs > Butler County News and Issues > Archives > 2009 > September > 29 > Entry
Combs blames House Democrats for stalling nursing home sexual predator bill
Press release from State Rep. Courtney Combs, R-Hamilton:
State Representative Courtney Combs (R- Hamilton) today expressed in a letter to Speaker Armond Budish (D- Beachwood) the need to appoint a chair to the House Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee, which has been vacant since April. The previous Chairman Eugene Miller resigned to become a Cleveland city councilman.
“For almost six months, the Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee has been without a chair and I find this greatly disheartening,” Combs said in the letter. “There are currently 21 bills assigned to the committee, yet the committee has only met twice and not once since April 2nd… The result of this committee’s inaction is putting our most vulnerable citizens at risk.”
Combs introduced House Bill 98 in March to add a new provision to the sexual offender registration law to ensure that management of long-term care facilities notify residents and sponsors when a sexual offender is taken as a resident of a facility. Recently, due to an analysis by the Columbus Dispatch, the bill has received attention from Governor Ted Strickland and State Attorney General Richard Cordray, saying they would support such legislation.
“These citizens are the elderly, the mentally and physically disabled, and those who could not otherwise take care of themselves,” Combs said. “In the state of Ohio these citizens could be housed with sexual offenders just released from prison and they would never know it - leaving them exposed to unspeakable dangers.”
The lack of action from state Democratic leaders has been a major source of weakness, according to House Republicans. Only recently has the governor appointed a director for the Department of Development, after going without for nearly seven months.
Here is the story we had about the Columbus Dispatch story:
More than 100 registered sex offenders live in Ohio’s nursing homes, which aren’trequired to inform other residents of their presence because of a gap in state law, a newspaper reported Sunday.
A comparison of state records of long-term-care facilities with the state’s sex offender list shows that 110 nursing-home residents and six employees are registered sex offenders, an analysis by The Columbus Dispatch found.
A gap in state law requiring notification of anyone who lives within 1,000 feet of a sex offender does not require nursing-home owners to inform residents.
About two-thirds of the sex offenders in nursing homes are from the most serious category, including offenders who have committed rape and kidnapping a minor. The number of registered sex offenders living in Ohio nursing homes has nearly tripled since 2004, according to the Perfect Cause, an Oklahoma-based nonprofit group that has been tracking sex offenders in nursing homes for five years.
“What we’re seeing is a truly disturbing and horrifying trend,” said Wes Bledsoe, head of the Perfect Cause. “We’re seeing a system that’s getting worse instead of better. We’re seeing more assaults in facilities. Many times the assailants are never charged.”
The organization has found at least 60 murders, rapes and serious assaults in nursing homes across the country by residents who are sex offenders. An 18-year-old mentally retarded woman was raped in a Cincinnati nursing home early in the morning of Aug. 21, 2005, by Rickey Smith, a registered sex offender living in the home.
Smith was convicted, served two years in prison, and now lives in a Cincinnati group home.
“I think he should have been chemically castrated,” said the woman’s father, Ray McDaniel, of Fairfield. He has become an advocate for stronger notification proposals at both the state and national levels.
Beverley Laubert, Ohio’s long-term care ombudsman, urged state lawmakers in an annual report releasedlast week to approve legislation that would close the gap for sex offender notification in nursing homes.
“Nursing-home residents have the right to be notified just like anyone else,” Laubert said.
But the administrator at the Ohio nursing home with by far the biggest concentration of sex offenders disagrees.
“We don’t notify, nor do we segregate,” said Paul Andrews of Carlton Manor in Washington Court House, where a convicted murderer and seven convicted rapists are among the 26 offenders living there. “All these people have paid their debt to society.”
Carlton Manor differs from the usual nursing home because it mixes in elements of a correctional facility, Andrews said. Security restrictions, full-time psychologists, social workers and a behavioral-care nurse protect the residents, he said.
Pete VanRunkle, executive director of the Ohio Health Care Association, said he is concerned about the lack of notification but also feels requiring nursing homes to notify residents would put them in a difficult position.
“There’s no provision in the law that says you can kick a person out for being a sex offender,” VanRunkle said.
The Buckeye State Sheriffs Association supports changing the law to require nursing home operators to notify residents and, in cases when residents have health problems such as Alzheimer’s disease, their families as well.
Bills have already been introduced in the Ohio House and Senate, and lawmakers are expected to take them up this fall.
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