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State Representative Tony Cornish
100 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
651-296-4240
For more information contact: Jason Wenisch 651-296-2317
NEWS COLUMN
REPEAT SEX OFFENDERS SHOULD BE LOCKED UP FOR GOOD
What’s wrong with this picture? Sex-offender John Rydberg was convicted of attempted rape in 1969. In 1975 he was convicted of sexual assault. In 1976 he committed two violent rapes at gunpoint. During treatment programs he twice escaped and in the last escape, raped a woman at knifepoint in front of her three children. While in treatment, he confessed to dozens of other rapes. This is confirmed information! What about the ones that he just plain forgot or planned and wasn’t able to carry out? Now we are considering letting him make unsupervised visits to town?
This man and others like him should be locked up for life, not let out on unsupervised furloughs or visits uptown. You know why? We can’t afford the risk of trying to be sympathetic. We can’t afford to put our young women out there as test bait for a guinea pig program to see if sex offenders are really cured this time. They lost their rights, not us! They need to be locked up! We shouldn’t have to look over our shoulders and wonder when it is going to happen next time. We didn’t lose our right to feel safe in a free society. We paid our taxes and did our jobs and obeyed the law.
As a former deputy sheriff I transported a man to prison who had raped a woman and when he let her out of the truck, gave her his phone number and asked if she wanted to do it again sometime. When I took him into Stillwater State Prison, upon entering, he started waving to old buddies. Lets face it folks. We have made very little progress in rehabilitating serious sex offenders like the above.
At one point in my career, I was investigating a complaint that I had heard that sex offender rehabilitation and treatment was going on and it was rumored that the patients there were being allowed to watch pornographic movies. I investigated and found it out to be true. Triple-X rated hard core pornography of all types! And you know what the counselors thought they were doing? Desensitizing them! This is why I strongly support legislation recently introduced in the Minnesota House that would lock up the most violent sex offenders for life. Enough is enough.
Something has to be done folks. When will the rehabilitation community start to realize that sometimes the need for our children and women to be safe from harm just plain outweighs any perceived right of a repeat convicted sex offender. Somehow John Rydberg has paid his legal debt to society? No way. How can he pay the debt owed multiple women carrying the scars of violent rape their whole lives? He can be forgiven, yes. But, he cannot pay his debt by simply serving straight time and going through classes. He needs to be behind bars. Forgiveness and justice should go hand in hand.
News Items
- REP. CORNISH ANNOUNCES REDISTRICTING PLAN - (Posted: 2012-02-23 00:00:00)
- REP. CORNISH INVESTIGATES LACK OF TRIBAL CASINO GAMBLING ENFORCEMENT - (Posted: 2012-02-02 00:00:00)
- REP. CORNISH AUTHORS FAMILIAL DNA PROPOSAL - (Posted: 2011-04-14 00:00:00)
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