Bill would toughen sex-offender laws

State lawmakers proposed a sweeping overhaul of Massachusetts sex offender laws yesterday, unveiling legislation that would dramatically increase the number of convicted offenders identified online, stiffen penalties for those who fail to register, and ratchet up the monitoring of those on parole.

The bill, offered by Representative James E. Vallee and backed by several dozen lawmakers from both parties, would increase by four times the number of sex offenders whose names, photos, and addresses are posted online.

The measure was proposed amid heightened public concern about sex offenders possibly committing new crimes.

''You can't open the newspaper on almost a daily basis without seeing that a child or a woman is being victimized, and often it's by a former sex offender," said Vallee, a Franklin Democrat and a former chairman of the state's Joint Committee on Criminal Justice.

Flanked by relatives of several victims, Vallee outlined some of the 80 or so other provisions, some of which could end up part of a law that the Legislature votes on this fall.

All sex offenders currently must register with authorities in the communities in which they live and work.

Some are subject to lifetime parole when they're released from prison. Critics say too many serious offenders flout registration rules, making it difficult to track their whereabouts.

The legislation would give the state much greater ability to track the offenders from the day they're released. Among other provisions, it would mandate lifetime parole for the most dangerous offenders who do not register and create an intensive parole program.

The bill also provides for unannounced visits, electronic monitoring, drug testing, and polygraph testing, among other features.

Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, representing the vacationing Governor Mitt Romney yesterday at the news conference, said that the administration endorses the ''zero-tolerance" approach of the bill, but also said she expects it to draw opposition from privacy advocates. Efforts to put information about the most serious sex offenders online in 2003 ended up before the Supreme Judicial Court, which ruled a year ago that the benefits to public safety outweighed concerns about civil liberties and privacy.

''We may be able to pass the law, but we're going to be in the courts immediately," Healey said in an interview, adding that she wished data about all sex offenders was online. ''Once you have committed this kind of crime, you forfeit your right to privacy."

The state classifies sex offenders using three labels. Level 3 offenders are deemed to pose a high risk of further offenses; Level 2 offenders are reported to have a moderate risk; and Level 1 offenders are associated to a small risk.

Names and photographs of the state's 1,459 Level 3 offenders are posted online. The bill would expand the Internet database to include the identities and photographs of 5,029 Level 2 offenders.

That would mean that 73 percent of all offenders would be identfiable online. (Detailed information about the state's 2,408 Level 1 offenders would continue to be unavailable on the Web.)

Ann Lambert, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said she had not read the bill, but added that an expansion of the online registry is likely to provoke a legal challenge.

''The SJC opinion from a year ago signed off on the constitutionality of Internet posting for Level 3 people," she said. ''There's nothing in the opinion that says, 'By the way, throw them all up there, it will be OK by us.' "

Legislators enacted the sex offender registry law in 1996 for Massachusetts, the last state to have done so. The law, like those of other states, was modeled after New Jersey's ''Megan's Law," created after the murder in 1994 of Megan Kanka, 7, by a neighbor who was a convicted child molester.

The initial statute required anyone convicted of a sex offense since Aug. 11, 1981, to register in police department jurisdictions where they lived and worked. In recent years, much wrangling has concerned efforts to disseminate the information about the most dangerous sex offenders online.

Most states put the identities of all former sex offenders in registries online, said Charles Onley, an associate with the Center for Sex Offender Management, a project of the US Department of Justice.

What's driving a desire to put this information online, Onley said, is people's fear that strangers in their midst might be dangerous sex offenders. In fact, Onley said, most sex offenses are committed by people who know their victims. Sixty percent of sexual assaults on boys, and 80 percent of those on girls, are committed by someone who knows the child or the child's family, according to a 1998 study cited by the center.

A report by the center in 2000 also found that, contrary to perception, most convicted sex offenders do not offend again and that the rate of reported sexual assault has decreased slightly in recent years.

Several relatives of victims of sex crimes, however, said at the news conference yesterday that Massachusetts has delayed overseeing former sex offenders.

Annette Presti, mother and grandmother of victims allegedly killed by a convicted sex offender last year, pleaded for action; another mother filed the names of the victims, Joanne, 34, and Alyssa, 12, of Woburn.

''Lots of bureaucracy in the State House. We need to get a change," the State House News Service quoted Presti as saying.

State Representative Eugene L. O'Flaherty, cochairman of the Joint Committee on the Judiciary, defended the lawmakers' records. In the past two years or so, he said, the Legislature, among other actions, has approved tracking offenders with global positioning devices and has made it easier for judges to commit sex offenders behind bars in civil cases, after their criminal prison sentences have been completed.

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.