opinion

Giunchigliani fought to save sex offender registry bill: Leslie

There appears to be no limit as to how low the Sisolak campaign and its supporters will go to make sure that Chris Giunchigliani doesn’t win the Democratic primary for Governor. They continually make the absurd claim in TV commercials and mailers that she’s not a progressive. They portray her deceased husband as a grifter who overcharged her campaigns for his professional services even though Sisolak also hired him to run campaigns and paid him plenty. Now they want you to believe she protects child molesters.

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The latest charge is associated with a bill from a legislative session 13 years ago that suddenly has become campaign fodder. It’s no coincidence that this convenient controversy is tied to a bill sponsored by Sisolak supporter Dina Titus. The accusation is that, according to an article in the Reno Gazette Journal, Giunchigliani “hollowed out” a bill that would have added teachers and other professionals to a required sex offender registry. The article seems to suggest that she stripped an amendment in the waning days of the 2005 session because she was a teacher and former union official as was the Judiciary Chairman Bernie Anderson who also had qualms about the amendment.

As someone who knew the now-deceased Chairman Anderson well, I can say with complete certainty that Bernie would be livid at the insinuation that he and Chris were trying to protect teachers who were child molesters. If the departed could speak, we’d all be getting an earful.

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The committee minutes from the hearing in Ways and Means show that I also raised questions about the amendment, based on testimony from Titus herself who noted that “39 percent of sex offenders fail to register in Nevada, which has the fifth-worst record in the country on sex offenders who fail to obey the law.” Testimony from law enforcement in Washoe County concurred, saying our community had “1,200 offenders and just three officers assigned to track them and work with their compliance notification.” I tried to get funding added to the budget to provide more enforcement of the registration requirement and more supervision of the offenders to no avail. The bill’s advocates just wanted it passed; they were less concerned about its effectiveness.

In the last hectic days of any legislative session, bills with conflict over amendments either pass with a compromise or they die. Was it better to pass a broader version of the bill, pretending it would make a difference, knowing that the resources weren’t there to actually track offenders? Or was it better to insist that more positions be added to the budget to ensure that sex offenders complied with the rules? Giunchigiliani, as the committee’s vice-chair, was assigned to forge a compromise to save the bill. She did her job and the bill passed.

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Giunchigliani is a survivor of sexual abuse herself, along with a sister. She’s lived her life serving others. It’s disgusting to suggest the compromise she negotiated to save the bill was actually a maneuver to protect teachers rather than children. It’s not just disgusting, it’s despicable.

Sheila Leslie served in the Nevada Legislature from 1998 to 2012.