DAILY HERALD CENTRAL UTAH — Jan 22 — Deputy county prosecutor David Sturgill asked the judge to dismiss one of two 2004 cases against Parkinson in which police say the man met a woman on an LDS-themed dating Web site in September 2004, took her to his home and forcibly sexually abused her. Though investigators and prosecutors said he had again used an Internet dating site to meet the woman, they said his methods had evolved as he had used alias names on more than one dating site and with the accuser. He faces 10 first-degree felony counts of rape, two of forcible sodomy and one count of aggravated kidnapping in the latest case and is being held in the Utah County Jail on $250,000 cash-only bail.
The full article was originally published at Daily Herald Central Utah, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Might background checks have caught this guy?
I must admit – they found one in the 40 million. Does anyone know if he had any previous charges? Kind of irrelovant though, don’t you think. Some that do this will have records, some won’t.
Background screening in general is a method of utilizing past behavior in order to predict the risk of future misconduct. According to the Colorado Department of Corrections, in 1998, DOC records showed that the median number of known victims per sex offender was two, but after taking polygraphs, offenders revealed that they’d assaulted a median of 184 victims before being caught.
The truth is that Verified Person would not have caught Parkinson. Outside of a traffic based infraction, there would be no past indicator to point to Parkinson being a risk. Background screening is not a psychological profile of a person; it is a statement of facts about a person past.
With such a high rate of recidivism in criminal behaviors, not conducting screenings can be viewed as fairly careless. However, this particular situation would not have been predicted.