Virtually every state in the country has enacted special measures against sex offenders. Washington is no exception.

A few states — namely Georgia and Iowa — have established the most stringent laws, creating de facto banishment for communities for some offenders.

How? By requiring offenders to live hundreds, sometimes thousands of feet from school bus stops. It makes living in a community almost impossible.

One story by the Washington Post ran as our “editor’s choice” on the Kitsap Sun’s front page a few weeks back. I also wrote a story looking at Washington’s current and new sex offender laws.

Kitsap County Prosecutor Russ Hauge told me that Washington’s laws are some of the toughest in the country, primarily due to “determinant plus” sentencing. That sentencing re-evaluates offenders at the end of their prison terms and examines whether they should be released or civil confined indefinitely.

That’s a fate that may be awaiting Kevin Coe (pictured from his 1981 trial), the so-called “South Hill rapist” from Spokane. Though he’s served a 25-year sentence, the state’s attorney general’s office is attempting to keep Coe confined at McNeil Island, where about 236 other sex predators are being held past their criminal sentences.

Though numerous new sex offender laws have been passed in Washington in the past year (see a list of them here), one that has caused some confusion of late is the creation of “community protection zones.”

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Here’s a great story from our archives that I wanted to share with you. This comes courtesy of my local news editor, Ann Strosnider, and is from the Bremerton Sun in 1931, in the days of prohibition.

“Who knows when grape juice is wine? Kitsap experts fail to agree. A jury of five women and seven men, after deliberating about three hours last night, acquitted Marcus Shauhun, Bremerton shoemaker, of possessing liquor.
Shauhun insisted it was simply juice made from pressed grapes. But the witnesses and jurors couldn’t agree on the potency of the 39 gallons of beverage seized at Marcus’ home by sheriff’s deputies. Sheriff Blankenship testified that a half glass of the alleged wine was enough to give him that sensation commonly engendered by intoxicants.
Prosecutor James W. Bryan declared that after he drank a small portion he “could feel it coursing through his veins.”
One of the woman jurors, however, said she felt no effects whatever after an
entire glassful. Defense Attorney Ray Greenwood was permitted to taste the beverage and said it was all right, but added, “I don’t care much for wine, anyway.”
Failure of Kitsap officials to have an analysis made at the time of the seizure greatly weakened the state’s case.”

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