By Michael D. Antonovich
Originally published at www.foxandhoundsdaily.com
A Superior County judge has announced that Christopher Evans Hubbart, a violent sex predator believed to have raped as many as 50 women over 20 years, will be released to Los Angeles County.
Based on his criminal history, the state’s planned release of this predator into our communities will create a very serious public safety threat. Obviously, the prison sentence for this criminal failed to match his crimes – a predator of this nature deserves life without parole.
In 1982, Hubbard was sentenced to 16 years in prison after being convicted of rape with force, oral copulation and five counts of burglary in Santa Clara County. In 1983, he was convicted of a 1972 rape in Los Angeles County and sentenced to nine years, which he served concurrently. In 1973, was served seven years in a state mental hospital.
Four months after paroled in April, 1990, Hubbart was convicted of a new crime and sentenced to five years in prison for falsely imprisoning a woman. Paroled again in 1993, his parole agent decided to return him to custody after two months based upon his mental condition.
A hospital medical director, psychologist and attorney say Hubbart is not a public safety risk because he’ll have to wear an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet
How does an ankle bracelet prevent rape? It doesn’t. It doesn’t incapacitate them or prevent one from committing crimes.
According to a recent Los Angeles Times story on the failure of ankle bracelets, officials found that batteries died early, cases cracked and reported locations were off by as much as three miles. They also found that tampering alerts failed and offenders were able to disappear by covering the devices with foil, deploying illegal GPS jammers or ducking into cars or buildings.
Adding another serial rapist to our streets on top of the thousands of felons the state has already dumped on our counties’ probation departments and our overcrowded county jails is a recipe for disaster.
As of June 28, 43,000 prisoners are now serving time in local jails instead of state prisons, of which 14,337 were sentenced to Los Angeles County jails. Some are serving 8 to 40 year sentences in facilities built to house inmates for up to one year. Of the 16,162 state parolees dumped in Los Angeles County for probation supervision, there have been 17,082 new arrests – due to multiple rearrests.
The Governor has the ability to immediately expand existing contracts with in and out-of-state detention facilities in order to stop the increased crime in California which began after the Governor’s shift of state felons from state parole to county probation and state prisons to county jails. The 58 counties will be severely impacted – operationally and fiscally – if the Governor does not use available cost-effective solutions that also protect public safety.