Senator Hamilton secures passage of legislation to ensure death penalty option for child rapists

Senator Warren Hamilton, R-Mc-Curtain, today successfully passed legislation off the Senate Floor to ensure the death penalty is a prosecutorial option for criminals convicted of child sex abuse after a first offense.

Warren D. Hamilton

“There should be no second chances for an individual so depraved to rape a child,” Senator Hamilton said. “The state of Oklahoma has collectively made the decision through ballot initiatives or legislation to make it easier for individuals to get second chances, and I agree in part that some people deserve a second chance for making a mistake. But we should all draw a hard line when it comes to raping a child. For individuals who commit these types of horrific acts — there is no form of effective rehabilitation, and there is no amount of therapy or programming to make them better or make up for this crime. That is why the death penalty and life without parole are the only punishments allowed by law that are appropriate for these predators.

“When we tuck our children into bed at night, we try to convince them monsters don’t exist. We try our best to shield them from the evils, and horrors of the world. But unfortunately, monsters do exist. Child rapists are those monsters, and they should be dealt with accordingly.

“I appreciate my colleagues who voted to pass this commonsense measure and look forward to working with my House counterparts to ensure we get this to the governor’s desk. Only the harshest penalties possible for these immoral actions is appropriate.”

According to a nine-year study by the Department of Justice, convicted sex offenders are three times as likely as other ex-convicts to be rearrested for a sex offense.

A brief filed by the state of Oklahoma in a Colorado case, where judges upheld the Colorado sex offender registry law, reversing a district court ruling states – estimates of sex offender recidivism rates range from 30 percent to as high as 80 percent. These are likely underestimates because around 85 percent of sex crimes go unreported.

The state’s brief concludes by quoting a judge in a 2016 Wisconsin case who wrote in defiance of conflicting recidivism statistics cited in favor of the defendant – even assuming much lower recidivism rates, “readers of this opinion who are parents of young children should ask themselves whether they should worry that there are people in their community who have ‘only’ a 16 percent or an 8 percent probability of molesting young children.”