Court Opinion

ID: 9734417
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 17:34:13.600244+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:19:10.065728
License: Public Domain

DANIEL F. FOLEY, Judge,
dissenting.
I dissent.
The lenient treatment extended to this defendant ignores a stark reality of our times — the sexual abuse of the very young.
It is a conceded fact in the case that the defendant is a pedophile who has preyed upon very young boys over a period of four years — not once, not twice — but repeatedly. This abuse, repeated again and again, included fellatio, repeated sexual contact and instances of the defendant exposing himself to the victims.
There should have been an executed prison term of 98 months. The kind of disposition imposed in this shocking case is hardly meaningful punishment, nor serves as a deterrent to anyone.
I fully understand that a trial court has a certain discretion in sentencing, but I cannot concur in the result reached here. I share the view of the probation officer that the defendant is not amenable to probation, and thus I cannot dismiss the leniency in this case as a proper exercise of the court’s discretion. The sentence here is a shocking disregard for the good of the community and should be reversed.
The affidavits of Dr. James Kaul, Director of the Sex Offender Treatment Program at Oak Park Heights, Dr. Nancy Steele and Robin Goldman clearly show the sex offender programs in prison are much more structured than the program at the University of Minnesota, which was selected by the trial court. To quote Dr. Kaul,
The sex offender treatment program at Oak Park Heights is the primary long-term intensive program available to sex offenders in prison. The program is very structured, and involves a full seven hour program each day, including therapy, education and work assignment.
Dr. Chris Johnston of Dakota Mental Health, Inc., diagnosed defendant as a “pedophile with recurrent sexual urges and sexual activity with pre-pubescent children.” Dr. Johnston further expressed the view that he was skeptical defendant would do well in long-term treatment based in part on defendant’s “obsessive quality to his history of sexual misconduct.” Dr. Johnston recommended defendant be involved in as highly a structured sexual offender program as possible.
However, the trial court, because of its reluctance to imprison defendant, chose to follow the recommendation of Dr. Janice Amberson, who was retained by the defense to conduct an evaluation of defendant, and which she did — for 4½ hours— and thus the decision to participate in the program at the University of Minnesota with county jail time and work release. Based on this single evaluation, the trial court determined that defendant is “amenable to probation supervision.”
The pedophile is considered amenable to probation supervision and yet consider the comment of Ms. Rita Curn, mother of one of the boys:
Eric Dokken literally put my family through hell. I have had to file bankruptcy. It was over $100,000 in bills, now there is $25,000 more in psychiatric help for [my son] because of his damage.
Consider as well that there are four separate victims that involved separate sexual conduct with young boys over a period of four years.
One of the boys, a six-year-old, was violated by defendant fondling the boy’s penis *921and having oral sex, and the boy put his penis in defendant’s mouth. Consider too that defendant offered another boy a bribe to let him fondle the boy’s penis. There is also the sordid conduct with a 12-year-old boy. The defendant admitted that he touched the penis over the clothes; but the boy had alleged much more serious conduct in addition to that, including the violent action of pointing a gun at his head while having anal intercourse and giving him a little white pill that made him tired.
The defendant sought to deny some of these allegations, but after violating these boys over a four-year period, the story of each of the boys has the ring of credibility. The denial of defendant does not.
By no stretch of the imagination can it be seriously asserted that defendant is amenable to supervised probation.
My experience tells me that many criminals, including pedophiles, seem to express remorse for their actions before sentencing and seemingly cooperate with law enforcement personnel, but this should not serve in this case as the basis for granting probation instead of the executed presumptive term. Placing defendant on probation for 20 years is little comfort to these victims. What is needed is the highly structured environment of Oak Park Heights with intense sexual offender therapy. The participation in such a program of therapy would be voluntary, but if defendant is truly remorseful, he would participate. It is the next five to six years that are crucial in defendant’s treatment, and not waiting for probation to be vacated in the event of the abuse of another young child.
I reaffirm my strongly held view that the trial court be reversed with directions to impose the presumptive executed term of 96 months.