The Oregon Supreme Court on Thursday for the first time reversed a life prison sentence for an unstoppable public masturbator -- saying Oregon's three-strikes-you're-out law for repeat sex offenders isn't always constitutional.

The high court said locking away 39-year-old Dennis James Davidson with no possibility of getting out is a disproportionate sentence for his crimes.

Davidson masturbated in front of women on a neighbor's porch, in a park, next to a strip mall and at a school playground where children were present in Marion County over five years -- from 2006 until he was arrested in 2011 and ultimately sent to prison for life.

Although the court described Davidson as an "incorrigible" offender, it noted that Davidson has never been convicted of raping, sodomizing or sexually touching any victims -- like other sex offenders sentenced to life terms.

Davidson's behavior, the Supreme Court wrote, doesn't call for "the most severe penalty available under Oregon law, other than the death penalty."

The ruling represents a hit to the three-strikes law as a deterrent to public masturbators. The Oregon Supreme Court had as recently as this summer upheld the 2001 law as constitutional for another serial public masturbator, albeit one with a criminal history that included convictions for molesting children.

Ernest Lannet, who represented Davidson on appeal for the Office of Public Defense Services, said the ruling acknowledges that not all repeat felony sex offenders should be treated the same because they are not all the same. The wide range runs from child rapists on one end to public masturbators on the other, he said.

An individual defendant's circumstances should be considered, Lannet said. Davidson, for instance, suffers from a traumatic brain injury and has never been convicted of molesting anyone, he said.

Davidson was 16 or 17 when a friend struck him in the head with a baseball bat, causing brain damage, court records indicate. He eventually lost his left eye due to complications.

Davidson also appears to have a distorted view of reality, according to court records. In one case, he told police he was masturbating in front of a stranger in a parking lot under the belief that would increase the chances she would want to date him.

Read Thursday's opinion about Davidson here.

In the earlier case this year, the court ruled in June that it wasn't cruel and unusual punishment to sentence William Michael Althouse to life in prison after he was found guilty of exposing his himself to a woman on a Salem jogging path.

The so-called "true life" sentence for Althouse was constitutionally sound because of his long and deeply disturbing record of sexually assaulting children and exposing himself in public over three decades, the high court ruled. The cases included following a 9-year-old boy to his family's motor home in Seaside, winning his trust by asking to play a board game, then putting a shirt over the boy's mouth and sexually assaulting him in the motor home's bathroom.

The Supreme Court also Thursday upheld the life sentence of repeat child molester Douglas Wayne Sokell, a 73-year-old Forest Grove man who was caught in 2011 stroking an 8-year-old girl's buttocks and hips over her clothes in a Hillsboro library.

Sokell had previously been convicted of squeezing a 12-year-old girl's breasts in a store after asking her to try on a backpack he was thinking about buying his niece and reaching his hand up a 7-year-old girl's dress at a Newport library and rubbing her crotch area. Sokell had admitted to his therapist that he'd once raped a 10-year-old girl and that he has more than 120 child victims, according to court records.

"Despite the considerable sex offender treatment (Sokell) has received over the course of several decades, he has continued to re-offend," the court wrote.

"The passage of time and (Sokell's) advancing age have failed to diminish the danger that he poses to children," the court wrote.

Read Thursday's opinion about Sokell here.

-- Aimee Green

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