INTERACTIVE

Sex offenders and nursing homes

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism matched addresses from the state’s sex offender and nursing home databases. Explore the results below.

State law doesn’t require notices to residents

By Nick Penzenstadler and Kate Golden
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

Donald Henriksen is a 74-year-old paraplegic sex offender with cerebral palsy who lives in a nursing home in Tomah. Officials there have deemed him to no longer be a threat to anyone.

But that wasn’t always the case.

In 1992, Henriksen, then 56 and residing at the same nursing home, was sentenced to five years of probation for attempted sexual exploitation of a child.

Henriksen is one of at least 45 registered sex offenders living among other nursing home residents, according to a Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism review of addresses for the state’s nearly 20,000 registered sex offenders and 399 licensed nursing homes.

But unlike many other sex offenders, most of those in nursing homes live unnoticed by their neighbors: State and federal laws don’t require background checks of residents or notification to the vulnerable people who live, work and visit with them.

According to the criminal complaint filed in Monroe County Circuit Court, Henriksen, armed with a camera, followed a 10-year-old girl walking home from school in his wheelchair and asked her to “spread her legs.” Authorities later found nude photos in his nursing home room of other children.

Sex offenders’ residency in nursing homes poses special dangers because many residents are physically or mentally vulnerable, share common areas such as lounges and generally stay in unlocked rooms. Advocates say compounding the problem is some victims’ inability to communicate or report incidents due to their conditions.

Yet under state law, homes are not required to notify nursing home residents of sex offenders in their midst.

In Wisconsin, offenders are required to register with the state if they were convicted of certain sex crimes after Dec. 25, 1993. They must report their residence and place of employment to the state for 15 years or life, depending on the offense.

Notification fliers are distributed by law enforcement for sex offenders moving into neighborhoods only when they are released from confinement — and then only if the person has been a repeat or “sexually violent” offender.

Reporters from the Center called each of the nursing homes where there were matches between the sex offender registry and the nursing home directory. They confirmed 27 of 46 matches and could not confirm the rest because nursing homes either cited privacy concerns or did not respond.

The most common conviction among the matches was first-degree sexual assault of a child, the Center found.

Officials at some of the facilities housing offenders declined to say whether they knew of their criminal backgrounds or whether other residents and staff had been informed. Some cited medical privacy concerns. Others would only say that they follow state regulations intended to keep all residents safe.

New laws follow incidents in Illinois

Wisconsin, along with many other states, doesn’t track how many of its registered sex offenders live in long-term care facilities.

John Gorzela. Photo: Illinois Sex Offender Registry.

A recent string of gruesome incidents in Illinois in which elderly residents were raped, beaten or killed by mentally ill felons spotlighted the problem of criminals living among vulnerable residents. A series of new laws there require criminal background checks of nursing home residents and outline specific notification procedures for residents.

In 2008, officials cited a home in Illinois after a 72-year-old sexual predator, John Gorzela, went unnoticed in a facility and sexually assaulted a female employee, according to a Chicago Tribune report. Illinois now tracks all felons in nursing homes. It reports having 178 sex offenders living in nursing homes out of the more than 24,000 registered offenders in the state.

A bill was introduced into the Ohio legislature last year mandating notification of sex offenders living in nursing homes after a newspaper analysis found 110 living within the state’s facilities.

In 2006, national concern prompted the U.S. Government Accountability Office to investigate the problem of sex offenders living in nursing homes.

The GAO estimated that nationwide, 700 sex offenders were living in nursing homes. The agency also found that 57 percent of the offenders were under 65, and most of them considerably younger than the typical nursing home resident.

Existing rules require protection of residents

Otis Woods, administrator of the Division of Quality Assurance, part of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, said nursing homes must determine if they can adequately care for any patient when considering an admission. He said nursing home administrators are well-advised to know the criminal histories of their residents.

“Right now, not doing a background check isn’t a violation of the state rule, but it’s good risk management,” Woods said.

In Wisconsin, nursing homes that fail to protect their residents from harm — even from other residents — can face the loss of their license.

The problems in Illinois brought the issue to John Sauer’s radar last year. He is executive director of a nursing-home trade group, the Wisconsin Association of Homes and Services for the Aging.

Sauer believes Illinois may have more problems because pre-admission assessments are more thorough in Wisconsin and the state has harsh penalties for failing to safeguard residents.

“Our advice is to collect as much information prior to agreeing to admit the individual,” he said.

William Swadley. Photo: Wisconsin Sex Offender Registry.

But William Swadley’s criminal history apparently was a surprise to officials at the Stoughton nursing home where the 59-year-old was recovering recently from a leg infection. Swadley said it wasn’t until a television news report a year ago that his fellow residents — and according to him, the facility itself — realized Swadley was a sex offender.

“The people that run the place didn’t talk to me about (being a sex offender) until after the news came out,” Swadley said in an interview. The facility, Nazareth Health and Rehabilitation Center, declined to comment for this report.

Swadley was convicted in Dane County Circuit Court in 1990 of sexually assaulting a 9-year-old girl and attempted sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl, and again in 1992 for enticement of a 12-year-old girl. The latter was committed while Swadley was in a wheelchair.

Nursing homes can turn down applicants if they feel they are a risk to other residents, according to Woods, including residents with criminal backgrounds.

In cases where a sex offender is still being closely monitored, a supervisor works with the facility to ensure safety for other residents living near the individual, but the Wisconsin Department of Corrections isn’t required to notify other residents, according to Melissa B. Roberts, a legislative liaison at DOC who has spent more than a decade working with the state’s sex offender registry.

One of the sex offenders living in a Wisconsin nursing home was confirmed by Cherise Nielsen, a DOC supervisor in Whitehall. Nielsen said the department leaves it up to the nursing facilities to decide whether to notify other residents of a sex offender.

“We had one nursing home that posted a sign on a man’s door that said no one under the age of 18 was allowed to visit,” Nielsen said.

Some aging offenders still dangerous

Wes Bledsoe, a national advocate of nursing home regulation based in Oklahoma, hears the same argument everywhere: Regulation is unnecessary because offenders in nursing homes are too old or feeble to pose a threat.

“If you say it’s OK for these people to live there, then you wouldn’t mind this guy living with your family,” said Bledsoe, founder of the group A Perfect Cause.

In Wisconsin, the oldest member of the sex offender registry is 99 and living in a nursing facility. He was convicted of first-degree sexual assault of a child when he was 82.

“We’ve documented people in wheelchairs or with amputations that have raped other residents,” Bledsoe said.

Although an offender’s threat tends to subside with age, impulsive and inappropriate sexual behavior may become harder to manage with certain conditions such as dementia or stroke, said Michael Caldwell, a psychologist from Mendota Mental Health Institute who researches sex offenders.

Caldwell pointed out that nursing homes already routinely deal with such problems even among non-offenders.

“I would advise nursing homes to assess someone’s medical and behavioral history first,” Caldwell said. “Their criminal history should be looked at, but is a secondary issue.”

Regulation push faces opposition

Bledsoe has lobbied Congress and states for years to mandate video monitoring in nursing home common areas and for criminal background checks of residents. He said strong opposition from the nursing-home lobby has blocked legislation in Washington, D.C. and at the state level.

He believes residents, visitors and staff at facilities where sex offenders live deserve to be notified.

“It should be posted on every entrance so that visiting families, church groups and Boy Scouts know,” Bledsoe said. “Don’t you think these groups would want to know?”

Sauer and other nursing home administrators interviewed for this article are leery of any notification requirement.

“The fact that somebody might have a checkered past doesn’t necessarily translate into them posing a serious and immediate threat,” Sauer said. “By the time people in our state need nursing home care, they’re generally in a fairly compromised position medically. … The posting could backfire and actually be counterproductive and create unnecessary concern.”

Representatives of some facilities say they already have and follow detailed plans for handling sex offenders. Trempealeau County Health Care Center in Whitehall houses three offenders in its Institute for Mental Disease facility, according to the state’s sex offender registry.

“We’re not a typical geriatric nursing home,” said Phil Borreson, the home’s recently retired director. “We have the ability to provide locked units … we’re very skilled and adept at handling the behavioral challenges.”

Kandi Hammond, a social worker who cared for Henriksen in Tomah, said last year the man had been there for a long time and no longer posed a threat.

“For a while, he wasn’t allowed to have contact with minors,” Hammond said. “We knew if we had minors coming in for an activity, he just couldn’t participate.”

Hammond said the facility checks the sex offender registry before admitting any resident and implements necessary safeguards.

But Bledsoe said leaving safety in the hands of individual nursing homes is too risky.

“The bottom line is when you put predators in with prey, someone’s going to get bit,” Bledsoe said. “That has happened again and again, and it happens far more than any of us know.”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio and the UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication and other news media. Lauren Hasler, a reporter for the Center, contributed to this report.

Wisconsin InfoLink is an almanac of Wisconsin facts and resources compiled by Ron Larson. Each week on the WisconsinWatch blog, Larson introduces us to some of these gems.

When you need information, one of the best resources to begin your research is a newspaper archive. Until recently, there weren’t many places to go online for a large collection of newspapers without having to pay for your results.

On my last blog posting, I focused on the newly launched Wisconsin Newspapers Digital Research site on BadgerLink. It’s a great searchable resource of Wisconsin newspapers since 2005 and it’s free.

The one big problem with the site: BadgerLink has buried the link so the casually browsing user will not see it.

But another great resource, which does appear on BadgerLink’s main page, is Access NewspaperArchive. (I’ve bookmarked it for you at Wisconsin InfoLink’s Education tab, too.) According to the BadgerLink promo, “AccessNewspaperArchive contains millions of searchable newspaper pages, dating as far back as the 1700s, presented in a pdf format that preserves the original context and format of content.”

Featured: Wisconsin InfoLink: Education > BadgerLink > Access NewspaperArchive

When you are looking for that one bit of historical information, such as your grandmother’s birth announcement or the big fire that happened in your hometown in 1921, AccessNewspaperArchive is a very handy research tool. For more in-depth research questions, however, this resource can be a bit unwieldy. Setting up the search criteria is clunky and tedious. It certainly is not the most intuitive search page you will encounter.

But this collection is valuable. It contains newspapers from all across the country, including hundreds from Wisconsin, most of which are no longer in print.

As with other postings on BadgerLink, if you have a Wisconsin-based Internet provider or a Wisconsin library card, you will have free access to AccessNewspaperArchive.

Even though AccessNewspaperArchive is handy for those special historical research needs, my opinion is the new Wisconsin Newspapers Digital Research site will be more valuable on more occasions to most people. So, please, BadgerLink, link to Wisconsin Newspapers Digital Research site on your front page!

Just in case BadgerLink isn’t listening, I am preparing a special newspaper subject area on Wisconsin InfoLink with bookmarks to a number of important databases.  So stay tuned. It should  be available soon.

— Ron Larson

Ron Larson, a blogger for WisconsinWatch.org and serials librarian at the Wisconsin Historical Society, spent most of his professional life organizing information and helping reporters find facts and data as the library director at the Wisconsin State Journal and The Capital Times.

Documents

Statements of economic interest for the 2011 Legislature and executive branch office holders

Interactive tables

Public high-school military recruitment, 2000-2009
Story: Amid slow economy, more Wisconsin students heed the calls of military recruiters Aug. 5, 2010

Wisconsin boating accidents, 1999-2009 (updated in 2010)
Stories: 16 die, but boating safety stalls in Legislature Aug. 1, 2010
Accidents in non-motorized boats often deadly July 9, 2009

Sexual assaults at the University of Wisconsin, 2006-2008
Stories: Suffering in Silence: Campus sexual assaults vastly underreported Feb. 28, 2010

Suicides in Wisconsin, 1999-2008
Story: Wisconsin suicide toll rises, exceeds rates of neighboring states Feb 21, 2010

Wisconsin traffic fatalities, 1999-2008
Story: Traffic deaths: Wisconsin’s rural roads are significantly more dangerous Jan. 31, 2010

Post-conviction DNA testing requests and results in Wisconsin
Story: Nine people freed on strength of DNA testing in Wisconsin Dec. 13, 2009

Wisconsin’s deer population goals, 2008-2009
Story: DNR continues to miss own goals for managing CWD Nov. 23, 2009

Wisconsin public school subsidized lunch eligibility, 2000, 2007, 2008
Story: Wisconsin’s low-income school population rises, includes nearly 4 in 10 elementary students Sept. 20, 2009

Voter turnout and party affiliations, 2004, 2006, 2008
Story: Wisconsin voter turnout patterns shift, creating tough landscape for Republicans in governor’s race Aug. 30, 2009

This chart from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse depicts the case backlog at the Immigration Court in Chicago, which handles deportation and asylum cases in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana.

New data released last week from a research center at Syracuse University says immigrants facing deportation or seeking asylum, including individuals detained in Wisconsin, are waiting more than a year to have their day in court.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse reports that nationwide, the number of cases awaiting trial reached 242,776 at the end of March, up more than 30 percent in the past 18 months. The backlog is at its highest level since at least 1998.

“The system is definitely being pushed to its capacity,” said Edward Fallone, associate professor of law at Marquette University in Milwaukee. “Resources from the Department of Homeland Security tend to be spent on border enforcement that get you nice pictures in the newspaper with guards and night vision goggles, but there is huge need in the infrastructure and in prisons.”

Immigrants detained in Wisconsin, Indiana and Illinois are funneled through a Chicago court operated by the Executive Office for Immigration Review. Before they get to the court, however, they need to take a number. The average national wait time has ballooned to 443 days. In Chicago, the wait has improved since its peak in 2007 of 505 days, but remains lengthy at 370 days.

The backlog in the Chicago court stands at 10,428, the highest level since at least 1998.

While waiting, immigrants are either put out on bond, or put into the general Wisconsin prison population.

“Those people need to sit in jail, they’re separated from their families, they’re cut off from their jobs, they just don’t know when they’ll be released,” Madison immigration attorney Sarah Mazzie-Briscoe said. “For those with the ‘good fortune’ of being out of jail they’re kind of stuck in limbo because they have to wait so long for a hearing.”

The long wait times are attributed to a shortage of judges. Mazzie-Briscoe said that in Chicago, the wait has worsened in recent months with the loss of a judge who has yet to be replaced.

Check out the interactive data sets here, and remember Wisconsin is included in Illinois statistics.

The website, a project by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, ranks counties by “health outcomes” — weighted measures of health factors that contribute to length and quality of life — in every U.S. state. Among the factors impacting the health of the physical environment in Wisconsin are measurements of contaminants in municipal water, which in many counties exceed the maximum contaminant limits set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

This 2010 County Health Rankings map shows the percentage of county populations exposed to maximum contaminant limits in municipal water. The darker the shading, the higher percentage of people exposed. The data behind the map is at www.countyhealthrankings.org.

• 35 show at least one third of the county population is exposed to contaminant levels beyond the maximum recommended for human health
• 23 show at least half of the county population is exposed to unhealthy contaminant levels.
• 5 counties — Manitowoc, Marquette, Jefferson, Winnebago and Douglas — report more than 90 percent of the population exposed to unhealthy contaminant levels.

Find out where your county ranks.

According to Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Public Water Supply Chief Lee Boushon, the data may not take into account the water treatments applied to combat contamination since the measurements were taken.

“The numbers seem a bit high for what we’ve seen,” Boushon said. “Overall [Wisconsin water quality is] very good. We do have situations where communities have levels that are above the standards, but in the majority of cases they employ treatment.”

Which contaminants are in Wisconsin’s drinking water?

That information is available from another source.

With the help of The New York Times, the advocacy organization Environmental Working Group released a database in 2009 detailing how much of which contaminants were found in the water from most suppliers in the U.S. In Wisconsin, these suppliers range from large utility companies like Milwaukee Waterworks, serving more than 600,000 people, to various schools, churches and campgrounds that may serve as few as 50 people.

Contaminants in Wisconsin included lead, nitrates and drycleaning chemicals.

Pinpoint drinking water contaminants that have been found in your supply.

University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate Abby Panozzo says she was raped at an off-campus party in 2006. Read her story and hear her account in her own words by clicking the photo. WCIJ/Andy Hall

By the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

At University of Wisconsin campuses, sexual assaults remain seriously underreported and many women still face barriers to notifying authorities. Most victims do not report crimes. The statistics are inconsistent. And most rapists go free.

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism today launches Suffering in Silence: Sexual Assaults at the University of Wisconsin, an investigation that examines how UW is tackling sexual assaults on its 13 four-year campuses. The multimedia project, which includes audio clips and a searchable database of campus reports, is the result of dozens of interviews the Center’s reporters conducted with rape victims, UW officials, advocates, researchers and others.

Reactions to the investigation began even before the stories were published. As a result of our reporting, on Tuesday, Feb. 23, the UW System acknowledged its annual summary of sexual assaults — required by the Legislature — should be more accessible and posted it on a new Web page. Two days later, UW-Madison Dean of Students Lori Berquam issued a statement saying that “reading these stories reminds us of the importance of the work we are doing to try to prevent these horrible acts, to respond in victim-centered ways and to seek accountability from those who would perpetrate them.”

Berquam added, “We are deeply sorry that the women identified in these stories were assaulted and then experienced challenges in obtaining assistance that they sought.”

The Center produced this investigation with support and collaboration from the Center for Public Integrity, and published it in coordination with other reports on campus assaults from colleagues in the Investigative News Network.

The links that follow will send you to the separate site we’ve created for this project. We invite you to share your reactions with us by posting comments on the stories or by writing to Andy Hall, the Center’s executive director, at ahall@wisconsinwatch.org.

MAIN STORY
Suffering in silence: Campus sexual assaults underreported

At UW campuses, estimated rapes outnumber reports by a margin of 17-1. That means nearly all rapists go unpunished, whether by schools or the criminal justice system. Victims tell us how tough the system is on them, and why they don’t want to file reports.

SIDEBAR: THE STATS
Data draw murky picture of sexual assaults on Wisconsin campuses

No one contests that campus sexual assaults are underreported. But even nailing down how many are reported at a campus is a challenge. At UW-Madison in 2008, either one, five, eight or 44 sexual assaults were reported — depending on which report you consult.


SIDEBAR: UW’S DISCIPLINARY SYSTEM
How will recent changes affect rapists and rape victims?

In a controversial move, the University of Wisconsin System last fall revised its campus conduct code. Some experts say the changes could make it easier to punish rapists, while others worry that one change could intimidate victims.


SIDEBAR: PROMISING PRACTICES
Teaching students to intervene in acquaintance rape

Rape whistles are out, and there’s evidence some campuses are tailoring prevention programs to the most recent research on college rapes. Given the vast underreporting, it may seem like there are countless rapists out there. In reality, a small minority of men — undetected serial rapists — perpetrate many of the crimes. New “bystander intervention” programs aim to teach students to identify and prevent predatory behavior.


Karen Albrecht is pictured holding a picture of her brother, Raymond Eiden, who took his own life in April 2008. Wisconsin's suicide rate has been higher than the national rate for about a decade. WCIJ/JOSEPH W. JACKSON III

Suicide crisis centers report increase in calls across Wisconsin. Is the economy to blame?

By Sara Jerving
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

On April 28, 2008, Raymond Eiden learned Janesville’s General Motors was eliminating the night shift he had worked for 27 years. That same day, he took his own life.

“After he heard the news about General Motors, he probably had an overwhelming flood of emotions and couldn’t think beyond that moment,” daughter Vickie Eiden said.

The elimination of the assembly plant’s night shift was followed by news the entire plant would close. Ultimately about 2,800 people lost their jobs.

Eiden was among 737 Wisconsin residents who took their lives in 2008, when suicides hit the highest level in at least 20 years.

Interviews with mental health experts and an analysis of Wisconsin suicide data by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism found:

Hope Lutheran Church in Milton hosted a tree lighting ceremony in early December attended by about 30 families in remembrance of loved ones lost to suicide. WCIJ/JOSEPH W. JACKSON III

• A total of 6,513 people took their lives in the 10 years from 1999 through 2008.
• The state’s suicide rate continues to rise, exceeds those of neighboring states and has remained higher than the national rate for about a decade.
• Suicide crisis centers in Wisconsin and across the nation report an increase in calls since the recession began.
• Stigma over discussing suicidal thoughts, lack of access to mental health care and insufficient funding are barriers to suicide prevention.

Search database of county, state suicide data

Experts say Wisconsin’s high suicide rate, relative to those of neighboring states, could be linked to a high rate of binge drinking, easy access to firearms and lack of available mental health care, especially in rural areas.

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in Wisconsin, behind influenza and pneumonia and surpassing deaths from breast and prostate cancer as well as motor vehicle accidents, according to state Department of Health Services data. Figures for 2009 aren’t yet available.

WATCH: Click to view WCIJ partner Wisconsin Public Television's coverage of suicide trends on Here and Now program.

Increasing calls for help

Some suicide crisis center hotlines across the state have reported an increase in calls since the economy began to deteriorate. While it’s hard to pinpoint why these increases have occurred, officials speculate they could correlate with rising unemployment rates that contribute to losses of health insurance, financial security, a person’s daily routine and a community of colleagues workers rely on for companionship and support.

“We are very concerned about what the suicide rates for 2009 are going to look like,” said Shel Gross, director of public policy for Mental Health America of Wisconsin, a nonprofit outreach program. “Looking at some of the preliminary data, we think there will be increases in Wisconsin that will probably be more directly attributed to the economic situation — people losing jobs and homes and the effect that has on people.”

Wisconsin’s suicide rate has been higher than the national average since 1998 and has continued to rise, while the national rate has remained relatively consistent.

Wisconsin’s rate rose slightly in both 2007 and 2008 to just about 13 deaths per 100,000. Nationally, about 11 people per 100,000 take their lives each year, according to 2006 data, the most recent year available, with higher rates in the Western states. Wisconsin’s suicide rate is higher than that of all of its immediate neighbors — Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois and Michigan.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds in Wisconsin and the 10th leading cause for all ages. Men are more than three times as likely as women to kill themselves.

With a suicide rate two and a half times as high as the state average, Menominee County was hit harder than any other county over the past decade. Experts say the high rate is influenced by

“Each person has losses throughout their life, but some people are not equipped to deal with losses like others,” Derer said. “My son was one. He had lost his dad, his grandparents and at the end, he lost a major relationship with his fiancee. He just could not take one more loss.”

The loss of a job can cause feelings of humiliation and despair that in a person with underlying mental or emotional conditions, such as depression or bipolar disorder, can lead to suicide, according to the U.S. Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration. And working-age men, such as Eiden, tend to be the most vulnerable to suicide during times of economic hardship, according to the federally funded Suicide Prevention Resource Center.

In Rock County, where the jobless rate was the state’s second-highest for much of the year, the Human Services Department in 2009 saw a nearly 20 percent increase in suicide crisis contacts such as phone calls and police interventions. Crisis intervention supervisor Brad Munger says the suicide rate for 2009 may be the worst Rock County has seen in more than a decade.

Racine County officials report a similar pattern. The unemployment rate in Racine doubled to 10.2 percent in February 2009 from what it had been five months earlier. One crisis line noticed a spike in suicide crisis calls in March and April of 2009, after layoffs and closings at Pioneer Products, Circuit City, Racine Residential Care Hoplite and elsewhere.

The crisis line at Milwaukee County’s Behavioral Health Division also experienced a 15 percent increase in calls from 2008 to 2009. Similarly, the Outagamie County Crisis Center, which includes the city of Appleton, saw an increase in suicide crisis calls during 2009. Appleton saw its unemployment rate more than double between October 2008 and March 2009, and it remains high at 10 percent.

“A lot of the calls we get are about finances and loss of jobs,” Outagamie crisis phone supervisor Lisa Anderson said. “Some of the suicide attempts have been due directly to loss of jobs and not being able to maintain a certain lifestyle.”

In 2009, the U.S. Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration conducted a study in which it recorded the number of suicide crisis calls to the national hotline that were related to economic stress. In the first six months, it found 27 percent reported financial distress as one of the reasons callers were feeling suicidal.

Overall, calls over the past two years to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline also are up, which project director John Draper attributes to the economy.  The national hotline saw a 36 percent increase in calls from 2007 to 2008 and an estimated 14 percent increase in 2009 — a jump of about 220,000 calls from 2007 to 2009.

“We have an increase in calls every year, but we never have seen increases in volumes that have been as consistently large as the last two years, without any other clear explanation than the

Raymond Eiden is remembered by family and friends for his love of growing popcorn. He grew more than an acre of popcorn each year for more than 30 years. The winter before he took his own life, he decided he would stop growing his crop. Mental health experts say that a loss of interest in once-loved activities can be a warning sign for suicide. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

economy,” Draper said. ”The routine and structure that having a job once provided has been removed, and a sense of purpose and way in which to organize the day is now a void. Coming to work is a way to be with people. You have not only lost the structure in your life, but a community of people that you have shared daily experiences with.”

An increase in calls to crisis centers does not necessarily mean that the suicide rate will rise; it could just mean more people are seeking help, American Association of Suicidology Executive Director Lanny Berman said.

In response to a national need for data on suicidal thoughts and behavior, questions on suicide were included on the 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. It found in 2008, an estimated 8.3 million people had serious thoughts of suicide in the past year, and 1.1 million reported attempting suicide.

A variety of reasons beyond financial problems can trigger suicidal thoughts. In Wisconsin, about 15 percent of suicides are reported to be associated with recent legal problems, according to the Wisconsin Violent Death Reporting System. For example, on Jan. 29, a Reedsburg man took his own life the same day he was charged in Sauk County Circuit Court with possession of child pornography. Mental health experts say that an otherwise respected individual accused of something considered shameful, such as child sexual abuse or embezzlement, may have a heightened suicide risk.

Many don’t seek help

According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 90 percent of people who die by suicide have treatable mental illnesses such as depression or substance abuse disorder. These are often undiagnosed or untreated.

Vickie Eiden said her father may have suffered from bipolar disorder, but never sought treatment because he thought he could handle problems on his own. Years ago, Eiden would spend days in bed, getting up only to go to work. But in the days before his death, he seemed all right, said his wife, Carrie Eiden.

That’s why the suicide of the 60-year-old came as to a shock to family, friends and co-workers — some of whom recalled sharing jokes and laughs with him at his nephew’s birthday party the day before.

Vickie Eiden, pictured with father Raymond Eiden at UW-Madison's Camp Randall Stadium, found comfort in attending meetings at a local support group after her father's suicide. Talking openly about suicide helps to break down the stigma associated with suicide, prevention advocates say. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

Eiden’s family began attending Survivors of Suicide (SOS) support group meetings in Madison two weeks after his death.

“It helped us to make some sense of a tragedy we never imagined would occur within our family; to understand a little more about something that seemed incomprehensible, and to find some comfort and peace through learning and sharing with a community of others who have also experienced the complex grief associated with suicide,” his daughter said.  “Too many people are isolated, embarrassed and afraid; there is just too much stigma around suicide.”

David de Felice believes an important first step in suicide prevention is for people to recognize that most such deaths stem from treatable mental illnesses. De Felice is a Dane County supervisor who lost his wife to suicide in 2006.

“Mental illness is not a personal failing or a character flaw, it can be treated and people can recover from it,” de Felice said. “Until we realize that, we can throw as much money as we want at suicide prevention, and there is still going to be resistance.”

The passage of the federal Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Acts could have an important role in the prevention of suicide, said state Rep. Sandy Pasch, D-Whitefish Bay. The federal law, which took effect at the beginning of 2009, requires coverage of mental health and substance abuse disorders be equal to medical and surgical benefits offered by businesses of 51 or more employees. Under this law, employers aren’t obligated to provide coverage, but if they do, mental-health coverage must be on par with other medical benefits.

A bill for Wisconsin mental health and substance abuse parity sponsored by Pasch awaits consideration by the full Assembly. The measure could fill the gap for some 700,000 workers in Wisconsin who work at smaller businesses, but it would allow employers with fewer than 10 employees, or those who see a big                                                                                      increase in costs due to parity, to opt out of the requirement.

Carrie Eiden thinks concern over the welfare of his fellow General Motors colleagues drove her husband, Raymond Eiden, to take his own life after finding out his shift would be eliminated. Experts believe that a rise in calls to suicide crisis centers across the country could partly the result of an unstable economy and rising rates of unemployment. WCIJ/JOSEPH W. JACKSON III

The state provided $20,000 for school-based suicide prevention activities for 2009 and 2010 and also gave Mental Health America of Wisconsin a grant of $95,000 to coordinate suicide prevention efforts throughout the state. Wisconsin created a suicide prevention strategy in 2002 that has been effective in galvanizing forces towards reducing suicide, but it still lacks funding for local efforts, said Cheryl Wittke, director of Safe Communities, an organization that works with agencies, businesses and neighborhoods to prevent serious injuries and death, including suicide.

Gross, with Mental Health America of Wisconsin, said an ideal approach to suicide prevention is a locally based safety net where community members are educated on suicidal behavior and have the capacity to respond to warning signs with health care, support groups and proper police response.

While tapping into the community has helped Eiden’s family cope with his suicide, there are times, like his daughter’s wedding last year, when his absence is especially difficult for his family.

“There will be hard times like that again in the future, like grandkids he won’t see,” Vickie Eiden said. “But he left us with a lot of good memories. For me, over 30 years of good memories.”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with its partners — Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio and the UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication — and other news media.

Suicide Prevention Tips

According to Helping Others Prevent and Educate about Suicide (HOPES), a nonprofit organization based in Madison, people considering suicide may:

• Talk about killing themselves and become fixated on death.
• Make statements of hopelessness and belittle their own worth.
• Suddenly become happier or calmer.
• Lose interest in hobbies.
• Start visiting or calling loved ones.
• Start putting affairs in order and making arrangements.
• Start giving things away.

More than 90 percent of those who kill themselves have treatable mental illnesses, such as depression or substance abuse.

Some signs of depression:

• Substance abuse.
• Irritability, increased crying, anxiety and panic attacks.
• Difficulty concentrating and remembering.
• Disrupted eating and sleeping patterns.
• Loss of interest in ordinary activities.
• A persistent sad mood.

What to do when you notice a warning sign:

Talk with the person about depression and suicide in a nonjudgmental way to prompt him or her to seek help.

Some questions to ask include: “Do you ever feel so badly that you think of suicide?” and “Do you have a plan?” and “Do you have access to what you would use?” These questions will help to gauge whether the danger is immediate, and if immediate help is needed. Always take action when you learn of suicide plans, including calling 911 or taking the person to the emergency room.

Don’t try to minimize the person’s problems, convince him or her that things will get better or that he or she has many reasons to live. This may only increase feelings of guilt and hopelessness. It’s better to let the person know that help is available, depression is treatable and suicidal feelings are temporary.

If you deem the danger not immediate, acknowledge the person’s suffering as legitimate and offer to help work through the pain. Help to find a doctor or a mental health care professional right away.

Where to seek help

If you are contemplating suicide or have lost a loved one to suicide, these state and national organizations offer services such as counseling and support, or can connect you with help:

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (Call this number if you are in crisis)
800-273-TALK (8255)

Helping Others Prevent and Educate about Suicide (HOPES)
www.hopes-wi.org
608-274-9686

Mental Health America of Wisconsin
www.mhawisconsin.org
Milwaukee office: 414-276-3122 or toll-free 866-948-6483
Madison office: 608-250-4368

National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)-Wisconsin
www.namiwisconsin.org
608-268-6000
800-236-2988

Douglas Meyers, pictured with oldest son Chaise on his first birthday, always thought of others before himself, helping people whenever possible, says his widow, Traci. Douglas Meyers, who died on a rural road in October, was one of 18 traffic fatalities in Marinette County in 2009 as the county traffic death toll tied an all-time record. Photo courtesy of Traci Meyers

By Kryssy Pease

Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

On the afternoon of Oct. 5, Douglas Meyers’ pickup struck a bridge abutment on rural Cemetery Road in Marinette County.

Meyers, 47, the father of three sons, died at the scene.

“I believe he would be alive if there was just a guard rail there,” Meyers’ wife, Traci, said of the crash, which occurred in dry weather on a straight stretch of road in the town of Middle Inlet in northeastern Wisconsin. “That accident shouldn’t have happened, and I believe this could happen to someone else if it’s not fixed.”

In 2009, Marinette County reached a grim milestone by tying an all-time record of 18 traffic deaths — a toll that included a crash early in the year near Peshtigo in which five family members were killed by a drunk driver.

But overall, traffic deaths in Wisconsin were down in 2009 to the lowest level in 65 years. The state Department of Transportation has reported a preliminary total of 547 deaths on Wisconsin’s roads last year, 7 percent lower than 2008′s total of 587.

Traffic deaths were not down everywhere last year, however. The tolls in Marinette and 11 other mostly rural counties — Buffalo, Calumet, Grant, Green Lake, Iowa, Lafayette, Monroe, Pierce, Sheboygan, Walworth and Washington — surpassed their average annual totals of the previous five years.

Search database of county, state traffic fatality data

An analysis by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism of 10 years of traffic fatalities, from 1999 through 2008, shows that drivers in Wisconsin rural counties continue to die at a high rate even while the overall number of traffic fatalities in the state has fallen to one of the lowest points ever. Among the Center’s findings:

• Crashes killed a total of 7,571 people during the period. The single deadliest year was 2003, when 836 people lost their lives on Wisconsin roads.
• Travel in rural counties is significantly more dangerous than travel in more urbanized counties.
• For every mile of travel, motorists in Menominee County, the state’s most dangerous county for travel, were nearly eight times as likely to die as in La Crosse County, the state’s safest county. Menominee County is entirely rural while La Crosse is Wisconsin’s 12th largest city.
• Alcohol was a factor in at least 79 percent of traffic fatalities in Florence County, the highest percentage in the state. Statewide, the number was 40 percent. Florence County, like Menominee, is entirely rural and has no incorporated communities.
• Travel became safer, as the statewide fatality rate dropped to one death per 100 million miles traveled in 2008 from a decade high of 1.4 in 2003.

Vehicle safety improvements and driver behavior, including fewer miles driven and slower speeds, have contributed to the decline in Wisconsin’s traffic fatalities, said Dennis Hughes, chief of safety programs for the state DOT. State officials have measured an average decrease of 1 mile per hour on rural divided highways since mid-2007. Federal figures also show vehicle travel in Wisconsin was down an estimated 5 percent in 2008, the most recent year available, from the all-time high set in 2004.

“It doesn’t sound like much to go from 72 down to 71, but that one mile per hour can be the margin of difference between life and death in some cases,” Hughes said. “It also reflects just a general moderation. If you get more people traveling a little more moderately that pays some dividends.”

Wisconsin traffic fatality rates

Rural roads most dangerous

When drivers head out onto a rural road or two-lane highway, their chances of being involved in a fatal crash shoot up compared to city driving. Federal Highway Administration Public Affairs Officer Doug Hecox says the difference in safety between different types of roadways is “something most people never even realize.”

Rural crashes tend to be more severe, mostly due to the higher speeds and high occurrence of head-on collisions, Hughes said. Other factors include the fact that crashes on rural roads are less likely to be seen by others who could call for help. And emergency response time and level of available medical care may vary widely in rural versus urban areas. The same crash that might result in a relatively minor injury in Milwaukee County could prove fatal in Sawyer County, Hughes said.

“Bottom line, some people die as a quirk of geographic fate,” he said. “The injury they suffered was in the wrong place at the wrong time. To some degree, it’s the geography of northern Wisconsin that works to its disadvantage for survivability.”

Travel is most deadly in Menominee County, Wisconsin’s smallest county with fewer than 4,700 residents. The county is dominated by the Menominee Reservation and is located about 40 miles northwest of Green Bay. The fatality rate in Menominee County for 1999 through 2008 was 4.6 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles of travel — 3.5 times as high as the statewide 10-year average of 1.3 deaths.

La Crosse County recorded the state’s lowest fatality rate over the same time period at 0.6 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. Seven mostly urban counties had 10-year fatality rates under 1.0: Brown, Dane, La Crosse, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Waukesha and Winnebago.

Experts say one reason for Menominee’s higher average death rate could be its lack of interstates or divided highways, which separate oncoming vehicles with grassy medians or cement barriers.

“You often have two-lane traffic with no protection between either one of them, whereas in your bigger cities, you’ve got more lanes and traffic flows in one direction, at least on your interstates,” Hughes said.

County highways had the highest fatality rate of any type of road system in Wisconsin in 2008, 10.5 times as high as on urban interstates, DOT figures show. Rural state highways had a fatality rate 6.5 times as high as urban interstates and 2.6 times as high as urban streets.

The safety disparity between rural and urban road travel is not unique to Wisconsin. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, nearly 57 percent of U.S. traffic fatalities took place in rural areas in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, though rural roads accounted for only 40 percent of vehicle miles traveled. In Wisconsin in 2007, 66 percent of traffic fatalities took place in rural areas, while rural roads accounted for 47 percent of vehicle miles traveled.

A Whitewater woman died in this January 2009 crash on Highway 33 near the Dodge County Airport after her Honda Accord crossed the center line and struck an oncoming semi-trailer. Dodge County Sheriff Todd Nehls said his county consistently ranks among the top few Wisconsin counties in traffic fatalities, in part because of the number of vehicles traveling between Madison, Milwaukee and the Fox Valley. "Our traffic counts are very high for a rural county," Nehls said. Photo courtesy of the Dodge County Sheriff's Office

Crash rate high, fatalities low in Wisconsin cities

That’s not to say there are fewer crashes in the cities. Milwaukee County had the highest average crash rate for the past 10 years, but is tied for the second-lowest fatality rate. While Menominee County reports the state’s highest fatality rate, it has the second-lowest crash rate, meaning that while there are relatively few crashes in the county, those crashes tend to be more deadly.

The state DOT factors in crash rates when deciding which road projects get funded. Officials say Menominee County is at a disadvantage because of how its crash statistics are compiled. The Menominee Tribal Police Department handles most of the crashes but, because the tribe is a sovereign entity, the department isn’t required to report any crashes to the state. It voluntarily reports some crashes, but Master Sgt. Warren Warrington said it reports “well under 1 percent” of traffic crashes. Both DOT and tribal officials are confident the fatality numbers are accurate.

“If you look at the crash data for Menominee County, it shows that we’ve got great drivers and there are very few crashes that are reported through the state system,” said Menominee County Highway Commissioner Ben Warrington, Warren Warrington’s brother. “Everything is data-driven, and the data for Menominee County just isn’t there.”

Alcohol plays a bigger role in fatalities in Menominee County than in most of the rest of the state. In Wisconsin, 40 percent of the 7,571 traffic fatalities that occurred between 1999 and 2008 were alcohol-related while the rate was 55 percent for Menominee.

“There is a greater problem with drinking and driving on rural roads,” AAA Chicago’s spokesperson Beth Mosher said. “It’s not necessarily that people are drinking and driving more on these roadways, but when you’re on city streets, there tends to be more traffic around you. Rural roadways are more open so people will go faster and might lose control of their car. It’s a counter-intuitive safety advantage to have more traffic.”

Menominee County Sheriff Butch Summers called drunk driving in Menominee County a “big concern.”

“There are times you just can’t prevent (fatalities),” Summers said. “The deputies are out there doing their jobs. They crack down on speeders and OWIs (drivers operating while intoxicated). The only thing we can do is keep doing what we’re doing. We’re a small force. We can’t stop everything.”

Wallet a motivating factor

Experts say higher gas prices contributed to a 5 percent reduction in total miles traveled in Wisconsin in 2008 from an all-time-high of 60.4 billion in 2004.

The state also enacted a primary enforcement seat belt law in June, meaning motorists can be pulled over and ticketed solely for not wearing a seat belt. Previously, police could issue motorists and other occupants a ticket for not wearing a seat belt, but only if they had a separate reason for pulling that vehicle over.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 200 lives were saved in Wisconsin in 2008 by child restraints and seat belts. The agency estimates that an additional 105 lives could be saved if all Wisconsin motorists used restraints. Wisconsin’s seat belt usage was eighth lowest nationally in 2008, at 74.2 percent — a number that’s been decreasing since 2006. The nationwide average in 2008 was 83 percent.

Funding for high-risk roads

Since 2006, the Federal Highway Administration has set aside $90 million per year for the High Risk Rural Roads Program. States use this money for construction and operational improvements on rural roads. Wisconsin received $1.7 million last year.

Hecox acknowledged that a few million dollars isn’t a lot compared to Wisconsin’s 2009 transportation budget of just under $3 billion.  But he said even small improvements — such as guardrails, better signs, rumble strips and wider shoulders — can be life savers.

The DOT recently installed 12 miles of guard cables on the medians on Highway 41 in Outagamie County. Scott Nelson, DOT northeast region safety engineer, said these barriers prevented a tractor trailer from crossing into the opposite direction of travel in a snowstorm last December, avoiding a potential serious injury or fatal crash.

“It sounds almost entirely too simple, but it’s often those simple little solutions — and they’re relatively low cost — that actually can make a pretty big difference when you’re protecting people’s lives,” Hecox said.

Meyers’ wife said her husband was a kind, gentle man with a huge heart who would want something good to come from his death. “He helped people whenever possible. If his story can bring attention to these unsafe roads and save someone’s life,” Traci Meyers said, “it’s what he would want.”

Meyers’ funeral in October was held in the village of Wausaukee, population 556.

Eight hundred people attended.

The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with its partners — Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio and the UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication — and other news media.

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Calculating fatality rates

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Highway Performance Monitoring System calculates fatality rates for motor vehicle traffic crashes per 100 million vehicle miles of travel (VMT). Traffic coverage counts get taken in about one-third of Wisconsin counties each year. Estimates for counties not counted in any particular year are calculated by applying the statewide growth factor average to the previous year’s count. The estimated VMT for 2008 in Wisconsin is 57.5 billion. Estimates for 2009 are not yet available.

]]> http://www.wisconsinwatch.org/2010/01/31/with-wisconsin-traffic-deaths-near-record-lows-travel-on-rural-roads-remains-the-most-deadly/feed/ 2 http://www.wisconsinwatch.org/2009/12/13/nine-people-freed-on-strength-of-dna-testing-in-wisconsin/ http://www.wisconsinwatch.org/2009/12/13/nine-people-freed-on-strength-of-dna-testing-in-wisconsin/#comments Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:39:34 +0000 WisconsinWatch http://wisconsinwatch.org/?p=2214 2001 law helps wrongfully convicted find justice

Forest Shomberg, right, walks to greet his attorney Byron Lichtstein, left, and law student Peter Middleton, center, both of the Wisconsin Innocence Project whose efforts were successful in overturning Shomberg's conviction on Nov. 13 in Dane County Circuit Court in Madison. Shomberg had served more than six years in prison for a sexual assault that new DNA evidence indicates he did not commit. WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL/CRAIG SCHREINER

By Dee J. Hall
Wisconsin State Journal

A few cells of skin left on the clothing of a sexual-assault victim were the key to freeing Forest “Woody” Shomberg from his cell at Columbia Correctional Institution last month.

The Madison man served six years of a 12-year sentence before a powerful new form of DNA testing called “touch DNA” found that, while unknown male DNA was found on the woman’s clothing where she had been violently groped in a dark alley, Shomberg’s was not.

When he was freed Nov. 13, Shomberg, 45, became the ninth Wisconsin prisoner whose conviction was overturned at least in part on the strength of DNA test results, according to a review of the state’s online court database and cases examined by the Wisconsin State Journal and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.

To date, about one-third of the post-conviction DNA testing in Wisconsin has resulted in a conviction being overturned, the review found, with several cases still pending.

That number could grow as the Wisconsin Innocence Project embarks next year on an 18-month $647,000 federally funded project to identify potential DNA exoneration cases and officials scramble to collect DNA profiles from 12,000 convicted felons discovered missing this fall from the state’s database.

Nationally, the New York City-based Innocence Project estimates that at least 245 people wrongfully convicted of murder, rape and other crimes have been released since 1989 at least in part on the strength of DNA evidence.

“While these (DNA) cases demonstrate that tragic mistakes can be made, the system allows us to acknowledge and correct those mistakes,” said John Pray, co-director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project.

There is no central database of postconviction DNA cases in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism commissioned Court Data Technologies of Madison to examine 10 years’ worth of electronic circuit court records to locate cases in which Wisconsin prisoners requested post-conviction DNA testing.

Of the 35 cases in which post-conviction DNA testing was sought:

• Twenty-three test requests were granted by judges, while 12 were denied.
• Eight of those requests resulted in overturned convictions, while one prompted a reduced sentence.
• At least one request yielded results that implicated the prisoner.
• In another case, DNA evidence collected pretrial played a key role in overturning the murder conviction of a man whose appeal attorneys successfully argued his trial lawyer should have presented DNA test results excluding the man.

Search and download database of DNA testing requests.

Details of cases in which prisoners were freed (download Word file).

Three of the nine convictions overturned by DNA evidence in Wisconsin were in Dane County. In addition to Shomberg, Ralph Armstrong was released this summer after nearly 30 years in prison for a murder that DNA and other evidence suggests may have been committed by his now-deceased brother. And Anthony Hicks was freed in 1997 after about five years in prison when DNA testing revealed that hairs purportedly connecting him to a 1991 rape weren’t his.

Post-conviction DNA testing also provided a break in a Milwaukee serial killer case. Chaunte Ott was released in 2008 based on DNA test results that showed the unknown male DNA found on a young woman he was convicted of murdering also had been found on two other murder victims killed while Ott was in prison

Testing expanded after 2001 law

Seven of the nine vacated convictions occurred after 2001, when Wisconsin passed a law requiring that prisoners claiming innocence be allowed post-conviction DNA testing under certain circumstances.

The law also requires that biological evidence be preserved in criminal cases until all people convicted in the case have completed their sentences. Wisconsin has been using DNA testing in criminal cases since 1995, said Jerome Geurts, director of the state Crime Laboratory in Madison.

A prosecutor who was a leader in advancing the use of DNA evidence said the law is working as intended.

“It does just what it was designed to do,” said Norman Gahn, a Milwaukee County assistant district attorney who served on a national DNA task force chaired by Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Shirley Abrahamson.

“It gives convicted offenders who believe that they were wrongly convicted the opportunity to prove their innocence through DNA testing.”

Scott Walker, a former Republican state representative, was one of the champions of Wisconsin’s DNA law. Walker said the bill started out as an effort to extend the statute of limitations in rape cases to allow prosecutions made possible by the growing database of DNA profiles. He said provisions requiring biological evidence preservation and postconviction DNA testing under certain conditions were added at the request of the Innocence Project.

“We felt if it was good enough to nail a criminal for committing a crime, it should be good enough to be used for someone who hadn’t,” said Walker, now the Milwaukee County executive and a Republican candidate for governor.

“Whether it’s proving someone’s guilt or someone’s innocence, in either case, it keeps us safer because if somebody is innocent, that means somebody who’s guilty is still out there, and we can use that evidence to get them off the streets.”

Can’t catch all bad convictions

Attorneys for the Innocence Project, housed at the University of Wisconsin Law School, praised the law but said it can’t detect all wrongful convictions.

In a “significant number” of cases, biological evidence has been discarded, lost or never collected, making DNA testing impossible, said Keith Findley, co-director of the project and president of the national Innocence Network. Most of those cases predate the 2001 law, he said.

In other cases, judges have used too high of a standard in denying inmates the chance to test biological evidence, believes Innocence Project attorney Byron Lichstein. Under state law, a judge must permit post-conviction DNA testing where it is “reasonably probable” that the person would not have been convicted had exculpatory DNA evidence been available at trial.

Lichstein said some Wisconsin judges have cited “overwhelming” evidence of a person’s guilt in denying testing. He said such a standard can make qualifying for testing impossible since all convictions are supposed to be based on guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“The point of the statute is, if there’s a chance the testing can prove innocence, you do the testing,” Lichstein said. “It’s not an issue of saying, ‘Well, this guy looks really, really guilty, so we’re not going to allow testing.’ “

DNA just one part of puzzle

Despite its power, DNA evidence doesn’t always offer a clear picture of a crime. Geurts said testing has become so sensitive that DNA profiles of people who have nothing to do with an incident can turn up.

“With increasing sensitivity and increased swabbing of crime scenes, we are getting a lot of extraneous profiles,” Geurts said.

Even DNA results that exclude the person convicted of the crime sometimes aren’t enough to persuade a judge to order a new trial.

That’s what happened to David Bintz. Post-conviction testing detected none of his DNA on a partially clad woman found murdered in Brown County 10 years ago. Bintz had acknowledged calling the victim, a bartender, and threatening her for allegedly overcharging him, but he had insisted he didn’t kill her.

A judge refused to overturn Bintz’s conviction, saying the semen from an unknown man found on the victim could have come from consensual sex before the murder – a fact the jury knew before convicting him. The state Court of Appeals agreed, refusing to order a new trial.

“It’s not always enough to say it isn’t our guy’s DNA,” Pray said. “Sometimes, you have to identify the person’s whose DNA it is.”

Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reporters Jacob Kushner and Alex Morrell contributed to this report. The nonprofit Center (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with its partners – the UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication, Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television – and other news media.

DNA exonerates man ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’

By Dee J. Hall
Wisconsin State Journal

Fred Saecker figures he’d still be in prison today if his mother hadn’t paid for DNA testing.
In 1996, Saecker was released in what is believed to be the first DNA exoneration in Wisconsin.

Saecker was convicted in Buffalo County Circuit Court in 1989 of sexual assault, kidnapping and burglary. The victim and her husband both said Saecker wasn’t the assailant, and no physical evidence tied him to the crime in Bluff Siding in which a stranger attacked and kidnapped a woman from her home.

Saecker even had an alibi - a time-stamped receipt from a cash machine at the time the crime was committed.

But Saecker, a drifter and heavy drug and alcohol user, had been picked up by a trucker in the area, reportedly with blood on his clothes. After his arrest, Saecker made false incriminating statements to other jail inmates to “get them off my back.”

It was a mistake that cost him seven years of his life.

Even after DNA testing excluded him as the source of semen found on the victim, prosecutors fought Saecker’s release, but a judge let him out. In 2001, Saecker successfully petitioned for the maximum compensation under state law for wrongful conviction, $25,000.

Saecker, 59, now lives in Sparta and drives a forklift for a living.

“I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.

Wisconsin has spent nearly $41 million in state and federal money since 2002 to fight chronic wasting disease. PHOTO/DNR

Latest population figures nearly 160 percent over target

By Kryssy Pease
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

Wisconsin’s gun deer season is under way this week, but efforts to manage a threat to future deer hunts — chronic wasting disease —  are having little effect, despite seven years and nearly $41 million in state and federal spending, data and interviews show.

The Department of Natural Resources has failed to meet critical goals for reducing the size of the deer herd and reducing infection totals in areas hit by the fatal deer disease, Davin Lopez, who heads the agency’s CWD program, acknowledged in an interview.

For instance, in one Southwestern Wisconsin deer management unit being monitored for CWD, the population goal is about 1,800 deer. Estimates from earlier this year put the herd around 11,500 in that unit.

The two times the DNR looked to be making progress with population within the CWD Management Zone, it was only after goals were relaxed and made easier to attain. The population goal in 2008 was more than three times the goal in 2002, when the DNR first started specifically monitoring for CWD.

The rate of infection in adult bucks in the core western area of the CWD management zone, which covers mostly western Dane and eastern Iowa counties, increased from 10 percent in 2007 to 15.5 percent in 2008.

“There’s no question more needs to be done,” said Ed Harvey, chairman of the Conservation Congress, a 360-member advisory body that works with the Natural Resources Board to manage the state’s natural resources.

CWD is a contagious fatal neurological disease that affects deer, elk and moose and is similar to mad cow disease in cattle. There have been no cases of the disease infecting humans or other animal species to date, but inter-species transmission remains a concern, especially for those eating infected meat.

Click map to search statewide deer population estimates

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CWD has been found in wild populations in 11 states and two Canadian provinces and “is likely to continue to grow.”

A diseased and depleted deer herd would be of most concern to the state’s 700,000 deer hunters, but consequences of CWD would hit every Wisconsinite, as deer hunting brings an estimated $1 billion in total impact to the state’s economy annually.

The Department of Natural Resources has consistently said its main weapon in fighting CWD in Wisconsin is population management, but Lopez said officials are “nowhere close” to targets “that would have a drastic effect on the disease transmission.”

Within the CWD Management Zone, which encompasses much of the lower third of the state, current density goals range between 15 to 24 deer per square mile of deer range. The last post-hunt count this spring put density levels between 34 and 103 in the 18 deer management units within the management zone.

The DNR earlier had set goal densities between five and 10 deer per square mile of deer range but eased the goals drastically in 2008 as it became clear the agency was failing to reach those target numbers. Goal densities in one zone increased fourfold.

In the seven years CWD has been monitored in Wisconsin, the closest the DNR has gotten to one of its goal population figures was the 2008 hunting season, when numbers were 159 percent over the goal. This was after the goal population was more than doubled. In 2007, figures were 424 percent above the goal.

Lopez said the DNR is doing all it can and the responsibility lies with the public, not the agency.

“We set the regulations, but to get the herd reduction like we want, we rely on hunters,” Lopez said. “There’s really no other way to do it. We can’t do it. We just don’t have staff to do it.”

Hunters don’t like over-hunting because they like having a lot of deer — particularly older, trophy deer — around to hunt. A smaller deer population means a less-pleasurable hunting experience, Lopez said.

Lopez compared the fight against CWD to global warming: He said it’s difficult to ask people to care about an issue that won’t directly affect them. He estimates the disease won’t cause Wisconsin’s deer population to sharply decline for 25 to 50 years.

“There was a lot of resistance — either a lack of awareness or a lack of recognition that it’s going to be a disease that has profound effects on the deer herd in the future,” Lopez said. “People just didn’t care enough about that now. It’s hard to sacrifice now for future generations.”

John Welter, secretary of the Natural Resources Board, was one of seven board members who unanimously voted to delay action on a five-year CWD management plan proposed by the DNR staff this August.

“If you look at CWD and population control efforts to date, it may be that there’s been some temporary or local reductions,” Welter said, while on his way last week to a shooting range with his son and daughter, preparing for the gun deer season, “but not much in the way of overall reductions.”

Since 2002, DNR has analyzed almost 152,000 deer with a total of 1,172 free-ranging deer testing positive for CWD. All the positive deer were found within the CWD Management Zone. PHOTO/DNR

When the board did not approve the proposed management plan, it asked six independent CWD experts from around North America to review the agency’s goals and proposed solutions. The panel is expected announce its findings to the Natural Resources Board in early December. Welter wants to wait and see what the experts say about the DNR’s plan.

Harvey thinks more immediate action needs to be taken.

“Maybe the opportunity has already passed. I don’t know,” Harvey said. “But whatever is to be done needs to be done at an accelerated pace … Right now there’s no end in sight.”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with its partners — Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio and the UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication — and other news media.

Click map to search deer population estimates in CWD zone.