The Fourth Circuit yesterday issued two published opinions dealing with the civil commitment of sexually dangerous persons, United States v. Timms and United States v. Hall. The two cases were decided by unanimous vote of a panel made up of Chief Judge Traxler, Judge Agee, and Judge Motz. They are follow-up cases to the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Comstock, which upheld Congress’s power to enact § 4248 under the Necessary and Proper Clause.
The opinion in Timms, by Judge Agee, contains an overview of the evolution and current state of judicial treatment of the “civil commitment system established by § 4248 as part of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006.” The decision reverses a district court’s dismissal of a commitment action against Gerald Timms. The Fourth Circuit concludes that § 4248 does not violate the Equal Protection Clause and that Timms’s right to due process was not violated by extended delays in the consideration of his commitment (large chunks of which were due to the lengthy constitutional challenge to § 4248 resolved by the Supreme Court in Comstock).
In United States v. Hall, authored by Chief Judge Traxler, the Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s determination that the government had failed to prove by clear and convincing evidence that Hall is sexually dangerous.
These two decisions are important because the vast majority of those that the federal government has certified as sexually dangerous persons are in FCI-Butner, the federal correctional facility in Butner, North Carolina. According to the opinion, the government has certified 130 persons as “sexually dangerous,” and 116 of those certifications were filed in the Eastern District of North Carolina. (Last February, the Raleigh Public Record did a two-part story (here and here) on the men at FCI-Butner being held as “sexually dangerous.”)
