GUILTY WA - Gary Blanton, 28, & Jerry Ray, 55, shot to death, Sequim, 2 June 2012

mysteriew

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Convicted felon Patrick B. Drum, accused of murder in the weekend shooting deaths of two convicted sex offenders — one of them his roommate — had intended to kill more sex offenders when he was arrested following an extensive manhunt, Clallam County Prosecuting Attorney Deb Kelly said Monday.

A probable-cause statement issued Monday by the Clallam County Sheriff's Department alleged that Drum, 34, of Sequim committed two counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree burglary.
http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/a...ler-might-have-had-vendetta-for-sex-offenders

http://www.tv20detroit.com/news/local/157272385.html
 
If Patrick B. Drum had a particular dislike of sex offenders, his family didn't know about it, his mother said on Monday.

"Something must have happened that we don't know about," said his stepmother, Suzanne Drum, of Arizona. "Maybe they did something to set him off or he learned something that really bothered him."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2018356700_sexoffenders05m.html
 
I know that murder is murder but my first reaction was, dayum, too bad he didn't get to more before they caught him.
 
LadyL, I had the same reaction. I have a hard time feeling sorry for SOs.
 
Give this guy a badge and a gun he should be working for LE. Blah just a fantasy of mine...living in a world where rapists and child molesters get shot on site, or castrated on site (or whatever else in women's cases), etc. I could only dream :/ Don't get me wrong I don't think murder is right, but these people NEVER stop. It's a mental sickness to desire to harm and torture others in this fashion IMO and the only way to stop them is to kill them! Murder that could spare other peoples' lives and well being. Prison isn't going to change them its goin to make it worse JMO
 
Not to excuse sex offenders, but I'm horribly disturbed by the last few posts. Yes, there are some who have committed the most heinous of crimes, but there are also many people in the sex offender registry who do not deserve to be stigmatized for life, and certainly don't deserve to have their lives put at risk. I have a lot of problems with these laws in the U.S. There was one case within the last few years where a young man who landed on that registry because he had sex with his teenage girlfriend when he was 19 was murdered by a vigilante. I forget what his name was. I'll go look. It infuriated me. The last thing we need to do is encourage murderous hoohahs.

EDIT: Can't find the case in question, but here is an interesting article from The Economist: http://www.economist.com/node/14165460
EDIT 2: I found the guy. His name was William Elliot: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5355980
 
Sorry, I did not mean to offend. My sincere apologies. I do see some of your point of view. Allow me to rephrase. Perhaps if our justice system was harsher on these monsters, people wouldn't feel the need to be murderous. Not trying to excuse them but I can also see their side of things.
 
Thanks lovelydork. I can see your point. Rape and child molestation are horrible crimes. They scar and traumatize the victim in a really invasive way. I'm not sure the laws can be any harsher than they are, tbh. Certainly child molesters should receive at least a decade of jail time, and violent rapists and murderers need to be locked away for good. However, sex offenders actually have a very low recidivism rate. The rarely re-commit. Most sex crimes are committed by those close to the victim (family members/friends). The public registry does little to protect these victims. In fact, I think having this registry available to anyone on the internet stirs up hysteria, and possibly leads to paranoia.

There's not really anything that can prevent complete psychopaths like this Patrick Drum guy from committing murder. This was not a heat-of-the-moment type deal. It was premeditated and strategic. There are people with murderous inclinations everywhere. Harsher laws will not satisfy them.
 
If Patrick B. Drum had a particular dislike of sex offenders, his family didn't know about it, his mother said on Monday.

"Something must have happened that we don't know about," said his stepmother, Suzanne Drum, of Arizona. "Maybe they did something to set him off or he learned something that really bothered him."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2018356700_sexoffenders05m.html

Drum is suspected of killing his housemate, 28-year-old Gary Lee Blanton Jr., who was convicted of third-degree rape in 2001, and Jerry Wayne Ray, 56, who was convicted of first-degree child rape in 2002.

Gary was convicted at 17 here is the legal defintion of his charge.


http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=9A.44.060

Jerry was 47 when he was convicted

Here is the legal definition of his charge
http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=9A.44.073

Jerrys victim at now would only be 22 at most. And may be much younger.
 
Thanks lovelydork. I can see your point. Rape and child molestation are horrible crimes. They scar and traumatize the victim in a really invasive way. I'm not sure the laws can be any harsher than they are, tbh. Certainly child molesters should receive at least a decade of jail time, and violent rapists and murderers need to be locked away for good. However, sex offenders actually have a very low recidivism rate. The rarely re-commit. Most sex crimes are committed by those close to the victim (family members/friends). The public registry does little to protect these victims. In fact, I think having this registry available to anyone on the internet stirs up hysteria, and possibly leads to paranoia.

There's not really anything that can prevent complete psychopaths like this Patrick Drum guy from committing murder. This was not a heat-of-the-moment type deal. It was premeditated and strategic. There are people with murderous inclinations everywhere. Harsher laws will not satisfy them.

HurlyBurly welcome to WS!

I agree with you on your remarks about vigilantes. I don't think that murder is right in any case. But I also agree that the US legal system isn't generally harsh enough on sex offenders in the first place. If the system would be harsher, fewer people would see it as necessary to become vigilantes.

But I do wish you would do a litte more research on the recidivism rate.
http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1136

And considering that in each case where a sex offender reoffends, another child recieves scarring I think the emotional cost is very high, both for the victims and their families. And that is not to mention the associated financial costs.

As far as the public registry it can do a lot. If people will use it. I have seen where proactive parents have found school employees, coaches and even doctors on the sex offender registrys. Possibly preventing more emotional tradegies from occcuring. Parents who do use the registry can monitor who has access to their child. It won't stop someone who is about to commit a first offense, but it does provide one layer of protection if a parent will use it.

And child molesters usually will recieve much less than a decade for child molesting. Sometimes only months, usually less than 5 years for a first offense. Often the child will not even have attained the age of majority yet when their abuser is released.
 
Hi mysteriew. I got the information on recidivism from one of my courses in criminology. If I recall correctly, compared to other crimes, the recidivism rate is relatively low. I agree that we need to prevent as many children from being scarred as possible. I have many thoughts on rape culture and the culture of violence prevalent in the U.S. that are prescient here, but I won't go into them. Needless to say, this isn't the venue for that sort of discourse. Thanks again for your response! :)

EDIT: I've just read more of the BJS link you provided. It does seem the jailtime being given these offenders isn't lengthy enough. I would like to see that aspect improved.

I guess the only thing I have a problem with are those cases of teenaged consensual sex that end up registered sex offenders. It just doesn't make any sense. Many states have "Romeo and Juliet" clauses, but not all. There are many in the registry who are guilty of just that, and I don't think it's fair to stigmatize them for life or signal them out as scapegoats to some disgruntled vigilante.
 
I am conflicted. Maybe this guy knew there were plans to harm children and he couldnt take it.

On the other hand maybe he felt Garys no sentence time for the first rape and then a short time period for the other crimes he commited compared to his own jail sentence was somewhat unfair.

At first I thought wow ,maybe he did not have to kill gary who was youthful in 2001. Not so much in 2005 but in 2011 when he commented these next crimes he was well over his youthful stage and a mature sex offender maybe on his way to child murder . I dont feel bad Gary wont get to mature any longer.
Quoting the same media link from above

It is unclear how much time Blanton served after his 2001 conviction for third-degree rape, but DOC spokeswoman Selena Davis said he was in prison from 2005 though 2010 after he was convicted of first-degree attempted kidnapping. He was also charged in 2011 with second-degree assault of a child, but the case had not been resolved.

I dont feel bad for Jerry either. I feel bad that this man felt bad enough about what the SO'S have done to give up his life as a free man. But then I figure he gave up some of it before, for much less noble causes.
 
Hi mysteriew. I got the information on recidivism from one of my courses in criminology. If I recall correctly, compared to other crimes, the recidivism rate is relatively low. I agree that we need to prevent as many children from being scarred as possible. I have many thoughts on rape culture and the culture of violence prevalent in the U.S. that are prescient here, but I won't go into them. Needless to say, this isn't the venue for that sort of discourse. Thanks again for your response! :)

EDIT: I've just read more of the BJS link you provided. It does seem the jailtime being given these offenders isn't lengthy enough. I would like to see that aspect improved.

I guess the only thing I have a problem with are those cases of teenaged consensual sex that end up registered sex offenders. It just doesn't make any sense. Many states have "Romeo and Juliet" clauses, but not all. There are many in the registry who are guilty of just that, and I don't think it's fair to stigmatize them for life or signal them out as scapegoats to some disgruntled vigilante.

Yes there is a problem with kids consenting to having sex. But I still consider the 30 year olds who give the kids alcohol or drugs and then have sex with them, or who offer them $20 for sex, use their adulthood to coerce sex or who threaten them or trick them by convincing them it is "true love" to give up the sex to still be rapists. Even if the sex was consensual. I call it consensual rape. It is still rape.

The whole reason for the sex offender laws is to protect kids who aren't mature enough to make determinations for their own best interests. If the kids are old enough to make those kinds of decisions for themselves, then why do we insist that parents be responsible for them?
 
Yes there is a problem with kids consenting to having sex. But I still consider the 30 year olds who give the kids alcohol or drugs and then have sex with them, or who offer them $20 for sex, use their adulthood to coerce sex or who threaten them or trick them by convincing them it is "true love" to give up the sex to still be rapists. Even if the sex was consensual. I call it consensual rape. It is still rape.
I would consider that sexual coercion, which is indeed a form of rape. I'm not denying that. However, when I was in high school, I had a boyfriend who was about three years older than me. We had sex, as do many teenagers. Had we lived in another state, this would have been considered rape. That is insane to me.

The whole reason for the sex offender laws is to protect kids who aren't mature enough to make determinations for their own best interests. If the kids are old enough to make those kinds of decisions for themselves, then why do we insist that parents be responsible for them?
Well, yes. A portion of sex offenses involve children. They also protect adult men and women (yes, men can be raped as well) from sexual exploitation. Some of these laws, however, are political hysterics. My qualms are mainly with the registration laws, which I find excessive considering that most people listed are NOT child molesters or rapists. These registries contribute to an entire subculture of vagrants and social pariahs. Considering some of these things considered sex offenses, it borders on Orwellian, highly incommensurate with the severity of the crime. From the Economist article previously listed:

Every American state keeps a register of sex offenders. California has had one since 1947, but most states started theirs in the 1990s. Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.

Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded. As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota. As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. America’s registers keep swelling, not least because in 17 states, registration is for life.

Georgia has more than 17,000 registered sex offenders. Some are highly dangerous. But many are not. And it is fiendishly hard for anyone browsing the registry to tell the one from the other. The Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board, an official body, assessed a sample of offenders on the registry last year and concluded that 65% of them posed little threat. Another 30% were potentially threatening, and 5% were clearly dangerous. The board recommended that the first group be allowed to live and work wherever they liked. The second group could reasonably be barred from living or working in certain places, said the board, and the third group should be subject to tight restrictions and a lifetime of monitoring. A very small number “just over 100” are classified as “predators”, which means they have a compulsion to commit sex offences. When not in jail, predators must wear ankle bracelets that track where they are.

Despite the board’s findings, non-violent offenders remain listed and subject to a giant cobweb of controls. One rule, championed by Georgia’s House majority leader, banned them from living within 1,000 feet of a school bus stop. This proved unworkable. Thomas Brown, the sheriff of DeKalb county near Atlanta, mapped the bus stops in his patch and realised that he would have to evict all 490 of the sex offenders living there. Other than the bottom of a lake or the middle of a forest, there was hardly anywhere in Georgia for them to live legally. In the end Georgia’s courts stepped in and suspended the bus-stop rule, along with another barring sex offenders from volunteering in churches. But most other restrictions remain.
 
Hi mysteriew. I got the information on recidivism from one of my courses in criminology. If I recall correctly, compared to other crimes, the recidivism rate is relatively low. I agree that we need to prevent as many children from being scarred as possible. I have many thoughts on rape culture and the culture of violence prevalent in the U.S. that are prescient here, but I won't go into them. Needless to say, this isn't the venue for that sort of discourse. Thanks again for your response! :)

Sex offenders do have a high recidivism rate, but they usually end up back in prison for some non sexual offence. Repeat offences for the same crime are very low in the group, but those that do repeat are very likely to repeat again.

That is where the confusion usually comes in. Folks in favor of harsher sentences and registries like to quote the overall recidivism rate, and not the rate for the same or similar crimes (which is what most people are worried about). It plays on people's fears. There are offenders who are especially dangerous and should be monitored, but mostly the registry is used to harrass people.

Btw, the lowest recidivism rate is actually for murderers, probably because the only ones let out are the one time special situation murderers.

Another interesting snipet is that the probability of a general criminal being sent back to prison for a sexual offence is not too different from a first offence sex offender doing the same. But you don't see people proposing to put ALL criminals on the sex offender registry.
 

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