Sex offender relocation to St. Paul neighborhood stirs questions, some concern

A man committed to Minnesota's Sex Offender Program will soon have a bit more freedom when he moves to a halfway house in St. Paul.

Next week 50-year-old Oliver Lenell Dority will become the fourth person provisionally discharged from MSOP since 2012.

State officials held a community meeting Wednesday night to answer questions and hear concerns from some of Dority's new neighbors.

Dority served 13 years in prison after pleading guilty in Ramsey County in 1995 to criminal sexual conduct. According to court documents, Dority admitted raping a woman after accepting a ride from her at a restaurant. Four months later, he got into an empty car near a gas station. When the driver returned to her vehicle, Dority jumped up from the back seat and ordered the victim to drive to an alley, where he raped her.

After Dority finished his prison sentence, a judge ordered him civilly committed to the Minnesota Sex Offender Program. He was granted a provisional discharge last month and will move to Reentry Ashland, a halfway house in St. Paul's Summit-University neighborhood next week.

Elizabeth Barbo, MSOP's reintegration director, said Dority will be supervised closely.

"He will be wearing GPS monitoring, random drug and alcohol testing, and we have the right to supervise and search his residence, property," she said. "He wouldn't have access to anything unsupervised like the Internet without prior approval."

About 60 people attended the meeting, and Minnesota Department of Human Services officials got dozens of questions — mostly about the security arrangements at Reentry Ashland.

Steve Bisch, who oversees the halfway house, says the facility is staffed around the clock and there are security cameras all over the building. He says residents must follow strict rules about coming and going as well as their personal behavior.

"Somebody said something unfortunate to one of our neighbors three years ago. They were back in prison within two hours. We take what we do very seriously," Bisch said. "Our goal is to help guys make that transition while keeping the community, the area that we work in safe."

But that did not reassure Katie, who lives nearby and declined to give her last name. She doesn't want Dority in her neighborhood.

"It's great that he's being rehabilitated and that he's being acclimated to the environment. I just don't think the location is exactly appropriate. We have four parks right within that area. It's unsettling," she said.

Marcy Wallace lives across the street from the halfway house. She has no concerns whatsoever.

"Mr. Dority did some things that are terrible. And I'm not inviting him over for coffee anytime soon. But I don't believe he's a danger," she said. "We're still going to let our 8-year-old great-granddaughter walk our little toy poodle around the neighborhood. I'm still going to walk around alone at night. I'm not at all worried or afraid."

Echoing Wallace's optimism is Mary Huot, Dority's court-appointed attorney. Huot says her client took his treatment seriously and never had any disciplinary infractions while in the Minnesota Sex Offender Program.

"When things got really tough for him, he stuck with the program even though he had health issues, he had deaths in the family. Those things a lot of the time set people back in this program. But Oliver honestly stayed on task throughout," she said.

Huot said Dority understands that his success or failure on the outside could affect hundreds of others in the program.

"He needs to keep up the good work that he has demonstrated because he knows that he's carrying a lot of other people's dreams with him."

More may soon follow in Dority's footsteps. The approximately 725 people confined in Moose Lake and St. Peter are plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit alleging their post-prison confinement is unconstitutional. Last year, U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank agreed, and ordered reassessments of everyone.

The state is challenging that ruling. Oral arguments are set for April 12 at the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis.