If you or someone you know needs resources or support related to sexual violence, contact the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault’s 24/7 hotline at 800-871-7741.
Lindsey Daggett was 15 years old when she confided in a family member that she had been sexually abused. The man who had molested her for nine years was her mother’s boyfriend.
Daggett of Calais is now 28, and she has experienced something most survivors of sex crimes do not: seeing her abuser convicted. But when the perpetrator, James A. Martell, now 71, was released from prison, she felt a sense of injustice sweep over her again. She watched him resume living in and running a Baileyville trailer park with families even though probation conditions prohibited him from having contact with children.
“It’s common sense. Why would you have a sex offender own a trailer park with kids?” Daggett said. “It’s all about opportunity and power, and they gave him both.”
So Daggett has been pushing for a state law that would establish zones near schools and parks in every Maine municipality where sex offenders could not live. Currently it’s up to cities and towns whether to restrict where people convicted of sex crimes against children can reside. Daggett wants to make the “sex offender-free” zones mandatory across Maine.
Motivated by her traumatic experiences and a desire to help other survivors, Daggett has jumped into a longtime policy debate that pits a victim’s sense of justice against the tangible needs of offenders upon their release. There is no evidence residency restrictions make children safer, and people on the Maine Sex Offender Registry are already monitored by police and face difficulties finding housing.
A bill to require statewide residency restrictions for offenders of sex crimes against children didn’t go forward in the fall because the Maine Legislature was only considering emergency legislation. If reelected, Sen. Marianne Moore, R-Calais, said she plans to submit the bill again, at Daggett’s urging.
“We’re putting [up] a guardrail,” Moore said. “I would not want it to be a false safety.”
As Daggett grew older, she realized everything Martell had done to her was wrong. When she was 15, “his hands went to my chest, and something inside of me just snapped. I just swatted his hands away,” she said. “He laughed. He thought it was funny.”
She confided in her aunt. Together they told Daggett’s mother, and the family left it up to Daggett whether to also report the abuse to police. Unsure at first, she finally decided to tell the authorities because, “I don’t want him to do this to someone else,” she said.
The news upended all their lives, she described. After reporting Martell to police, Daggett had nightmares he would rape or kill her. She became terrified of leaving the house because she thought she might see him. For a long time, she refused to speak his name.
“You just don’t go back to normal,” she said. “Now I see how dark the world is, how evil it could be. That careless 15-year-old girl was pretty much gone that day.”
She was relieved when Martell went to prison, but, about a month before his release, she learned in a meeting at the court that he would keep his Baileyville trailer park and continue living there when he got out, even though his probation conditions prevented him from having contact with children.
The U.S. Constitution protects people’s rights to private property, so the district attorney said it would be a fraught legal issue for a court to take away someone’s home and business. In this way Martell and the criminal justice system were able to walk a thin line. It felt wrong to Daggett, even though she said she understood the legal reasoning.
“It would be like the government taking your property without due process by telling you you can’t continue to run a business that’s already going,” said Matthew Foster, the district attorney for Washington and Hancock counties. “Yes, there might be children who live there, but there are sex offenders who live in our communities who might live right next to kids. As long as they’re not in a ‘safe zone,’ there’s no violation of law.” He did not prosecute the sex crime case against Martell.
He is in favor, however, of establishing uniform rules for the whole state on zones where sex offenders can’t live, he said.
Currently, municipalities can choose to adopt ordinances that prohibit people convicted of felony sex offenses against children from living within 750 feet of schools, or parks, athletic fields or recreational facilities primarily used by kids. Moore’s future bill would make the residency limits mandatory everywhere.
This is not the first time a Maine lawmaker has tried to restrict where sex offenders live. In addition to banning them from living within certain distances of schools and parks, past failed proposals have attempted to forbid them from living within a certain distance of the victim’s home and where the offense occurred, and sought to keep them out of towns with no police department.
Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Windham, who has served in various political offices since the 1970s, has listened to many different ideas for how to deal with sex offenders, and, today, “I don’t think we are that much more sophisticated, frankly,” he said.
For instance, the volume of online child pornography is increasing, fueled by a multibillion-dollar worldwide industry. Instead of residency restrictions for sex offenders, Diamond would like to see funding for more staff at the Maine State Police Computer Crimes Unit, which has a backlog of child pornography evidence to review before it can move forward with criminal investigations. He would also rather see a more individualized approach to try to prevent people from reoffending, because offenders pose different levels of risk.
But there is no evidence that restricting where sex offenders live makes people safer. In 2008, Diamond chaired a committee that studied sex offender registration laws. After hearing testimony and examining the research, it concluded that residence restrictions make it more difficult for sex offenders to live and work, and therefore find stability, increasing their chance of reoffending.
Living restrictions can push sex offenders out of urban areas where there are more spots for children to congregate and less space in which to live, and into the country, Diamond said. In addition, most sex offenders are known to their victim, and come into contact with kids through family or friends, not because they live near a school or park.
What’s more, sexual assault and abuse are some of the most underreported crimes, meaning most sex offenders are not convicted and would not be subject to residence restrictions in the first place.
“It’s a false security in many ways,” Diamond said. “I think my urging would be: Don’t try to do this simply. Don’t try to make a simple solution out of it.”
Baileyville, where Martell still resides, doesn’t have an ordinance limiting where sex offenders can live. But anyone on the sex offender registry is monitored closely, Baileyville Police Chief Bob Fitzsimmons said. Since Martell is a lifetime registrant on the registry, anyone can look up his conviction and address, and Martell is required to check in at the police station regularly. His photo on the registry is updated each year. If a new sex offender moves to town, Fitzsimmons will alert neighbors by using social media or knocking on doors.
The chief said he wouldn’t mind keeping sex offenders a certain distance away from schools and parks. But it is not his top priority. “What my top priority is, is making sure I know where they live, and they know we’ll be watching, and to make the community aware that this is a person that has been convicted of child pornography or child abuse,” he said.
Though Martell violated his probation once by possessing pornography, Fitzsimmons said he has not received complaints about Martell bothering kids.
Despite common assumptions that sex offenders reoffend more frequently than other types of perpetrators, the research shows how the matter is more complicated. One large national study, for instance, found that released sex offenders were more likely to be rearrested for a sex crime than non-sex offenders. Within the first three years following their release from prison, 5.3 percent of the 9,691 tracked sex offenders were rearrested for a sex crime, while 1.3 percent of non-sex offenders were rearrested for a sex crime.
Overall, however, sex offenders were less likely to be rearrested. The study found 43 percent of released sex offenders were rearrested for any type of crime — not just sex crimes — within three years, while 68 percent of non-sex offenders were rearrested.
A similar study of Maine sex offenders also suggests that sex offenders do not reoffend at significantly higher rates than other offenders. It found that 3.9 percent of released Maine sex offenders were rearrested for another sex crime within three years, versus 0.4 percent of non-sex offenders.
Martell, convicted of six counts of unlawful sexual contact in 2010 and sentenced to 18 months in prison, spoke to a reporter briefly on the phone. He doesn’t own the trailer park anymore, he said, and being a lifetime registrant means police always know where he is.
Adding more rules, such as restricting where sex offenders live, wouldn’t affect those like him who are already convicted because “you can’t make somebody move if they’re already sitting somewhere,” he said.
Martell said it “bothers” him to be on the sex offender registry for life. But it was part of the plea deal he accepted. “She had me down for 14 counts. That’s bull,” he said. When asked if he was saying he didn’t harm a child, he said he wasn’t going to talk to the reporter and hung up.
Neither the local police chief nor Daggett have ever seen Martell take responsibility for his crimes. It has only added to Daggett’s post-traumatic stress. What Martell did to her was not physically painful, she said, which made the situation more confusing as a child. He also gave her attention and presents, and told funny stories, things she now believes were meant to groom her.
With time, Daggett grew more comfortable speaking publicly. When she was 17, a sexual assault survivor from Washington County spoke at her school. Daggett asked if she could say something to her fellow students, too. She told them she had been abused and that they should be careful how they treat others. All day after that, people kept giving her hugs.
“I was tired of being ashamed and tired of hiding from it. When I was going through this in high school, I was a mess. I was crying a lot. I was isolated from everyone. I wanted them to know why I was the way I was,” she said.
Speaking out made her feel empowered, and it also allowed her to reach other survivors. Before long, people were confiding in her about their own experiences of sexual assault, she said. She has heard the arguments against limiting where sex offenders live, such as how residency restrictions can hold offenders back indefinitely after they’ve completed their sentence. For her, the restrictions would be about achieving a sense of justice for victims because “what I’m going through, this is permanent,” she said.
