I’ve known Joyce Foster for many years and have no doubt her heart is in the right place. Yet I often disagree with her on public policy — and rarely more so than during the current furor over how the state should provide treatment to sex offenders.
“The only thing I did wrong was lying to Kirk,” she told me Wednesday during an emotional talk, referring to The Denver Post’s Kirk Mitchell.
We’ll get to that fib in a moment. In fact, however, the first huge mistake that Foster, a Democratic state senator from Denver, made was to adopt the views of her brother-in-law, Julian Newman, regarding a treatment program known as Teaching Humane Existence Program, or THE.
Newman, a doctor and therapist himself — as well as a sex offender — didn’t like the program. And apparently the program wasn’t crazy about him, since his failure to comply with its terms was one reason why, according to Foster, he was shipped back to Wisconsin, where his conviction for fourth-degree sexual assault had occurred.
Foster considered Newman a credible source, and inserted an amendment into a bill giving sex offenders three options for treatment under some circumstances. In the past, treatment would simply be assigned.
Newman, however, is far from credible. He is a thoroughgoing lowlife who ought to have been locked up for a long time rather been whining into his sister-in-law’s ear.
As Foster admits, she lied at first about whether her brother-in-law had gone through the program. After coming clean, however, she also minimized Newman’s sins on KHOW’s Caplis and Silverman show Tuesday, asserting that “years ago (Newman) had sex with an adult patient . . . . It was not forced sex.”
Well, now. As Julie Hayden of Fox31 later reported, court documents in Wisconsin indicate that Newman extorted sex for medical prescriptions with several patients — and that a jail inmate was awarded nearly $60,000 in a lawsuit over his behavior.
Had Foster been caught in another lie? No, she insists, she had no idea that there might be more to Newman’s past and hadn’t even confronted him by the time I called. Nor did she seem particularly eager to do so, given her image of him, for example, as “a loving husband.”
Newman seems like a very bad man, I told her. “I don’t know him like that,” she replied. I’m sure of it. But at some point even a loyal relative needs to come to terms with the family predator, however disillusioning it might be.
Foster touts herself as a defender of social outcasts, and no one fits that image more than sex offenders. “I’m the only elected leader who has ever stood up for this population,” she says, taking their complaints about treatment seriously, for example. “I became their voice. I heard horror stories from these people.”
There’s nothing wrong with listening to sex offenders. I’ve seen a few of the e-mails she received regarding THE and its executive director, Greig Veeder, and it’s clear Newman isn’t alone in his hostility. But judging treatment requires all sorts of considerations — including the opinion of proponents.
“For the right offender,” one prosecutor told me, “(Veeder’s) the right treatment guy — the manipulative, predatory, denial at all costs, progressively getting worse kind of offender.”
Gov. Bill Ritter ought to veto the sex-offender management bill that is on his desk — and not even mainly because of Foster’s amendment. On a grander scale, it also strips from the law the proposition that there is “no known cure” for sex offenders.
Maybe the law’s language could be improved. Maybe a few offenders who wind up under lifetime supervision aren’t actually incorrigible. But opponents of the change understandably fear that removing “no known cure” is the first step by critics of lifetime supervision toward undermining the entire concept.
Ritter’s commission on sentencing reform came up with well-considered proposals. After he vetoes House Bill 1364, he should set up another panel, from a range of viewpoints, to look at these sex-offender issues, too.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
