State Attorney General John Suthers is pushing legislation that would make it easier to arrest Internet sexual predators before they actually meet their prey.
Suthers’ goal, he said, is to come up with a statute that allows police to arrest suspects once they start trying to lure a child to a physical meeting. Under current law, they can be charged only after such a meeting happens, he said.
Lawmakers Thursday postponed action on the proposal he is backing, House Bill 1011, after the American Civil Liberties Union raised concerns that people other than pedophiles also could be charged. But Suthers and the ACLU agreed to work together to find compromise language to address the concerns.
Other states have similar laws on the books, leaving Colorado “a little behind the times, in terms of dealing with the Internet dangers to children,” Suthers told the House Judiciary Committee. “We really need to get in line, lest we become a haven, of sorts.”
Pedophiles pursuing kids in chat rooms and with instant messaging know they can stymie investigators in Colorado by claiming they want to meet for nonsexual reasons, law enforcement officials told the committee.
“They may talk about sex, but then they state, for the first meeting, we’re just going ‘to meet,”‘ said Mike Harris, an investigator with the Jefferson County district attorney’s office who investigates pedophiles by posing as a young girl online. “When they withdraw that sexual intent, I have nothing. I have no crime.”
Harris said he spent more than two months communicating with a man last year before the man explicitly discussed meeting for sex, he said. After the suspect was arrested, investigators examining his computer saw he had contacted 20 actual children during the time he was communicating with Harris.
“If I had had other tools, I could have intervened,” he said.
Though not disagreeing with the intent of HB 1011, the ACLU is troubled by who else could be prosecuted, said Bill Mohrman of ACLU Colorado.
As written, it could allow for the prosecution of friends, relatives and others trying to arrange meetings with children with no ill intent, he said.
“There’s a relatively simple solution, which is to add an intent to engage in sexual exploitation” to the bill, he said.
After Thursday’s hearing, Mohrman, Suthers and his staffers and the bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Bob McCluskey of Fort Collins, discussed ways to address the concerns of both law enforcement and civil libertarians.
McCluskey said he was confident a compromise would be worked out.
“It gives us an opportunity to get together and improve the bill to everyone’s satisfaction,” he said.
Staff writer Jim Hughes can be reached at 303-820-1244 or jhughes@denverpost.com.
