County not liable for murder by released sex offender

By Michael A. Patterson

Where a statute that allows but does not require a county to notify citizens of a sex offender's release into the community, the county is not liable for the sex offender's crime after his release, the Washington Supreme Court has held.

Lee Smart attorneys Charles P.E. Leitch, Daniel G. Lloyd, and I defended Mason County in Osborn v. Mason County. The parents of Jennie Osborn, a 15-year-old girl, sued Mason County for Jennie’s rape and murder by Joseph Rosenow, a released sex offender. In 2000, Rosenow was released from prison and registered with the county as a sex offender. As a state statute authorizes, Mason County prepared, published, and posted a notice on the County's website. Rosenow was on probation with the State Department of Corrections for prior sex offenses at the time, and he was under the Department of Corrections’ supervision.

On February 24, 2001, Rosenow murdered Jennie. He later pleaded guilty to murder. Until the time of the murder, the Osborns had had no contact of any kind with the County regarding Rosenow. Nevertheless, the Osborns sued both the State Department of Corrections and Mason County. The Osborns alleged that the Department of Corrections negligently supervised Rosenow and that the County was negligent in meeting the statutory requirements when notifying the community about Rosenow.

Before trial, the Department of Corrections settled out of the case for $1.75 million. On behalf of the County, we moved for summary judgment of dismissal. We contended that the notification statute permitted the County to notify the community about sex offenders but created no duty to do so. We also argued that the lack of any relationship between the Osborns and the County precluded any legal duty to them specifically. The intent of the statute's language that said that no individual had a duty to provide such notification was to encourage municipalities to provide notification voluntarily without the risk of liability for doing so. Furthermore, under the public-duty doctrine, a county could be liable only when the duty breached was owed individually, rather than to the public in general (“a duty to all is a duty to no one”).