Parole Authority whistleblower says agency intentionally botched sex offender cases

The veteran parole officer alleges her agency deliberately ignored high-risk sex offender cases to satisfy the governor’s orders to reduce incarceration and state custody.

Rita Flynn, 67, has worked for the Department of Corrections and Community Services for 42 years, spending eight of those years on cases for convicted sex offenders.

Cases were deliberately botched, she said, including cases where convicted pedophiles were released from supervision despite red flags to be arrested for new sex offenses, and colleagues were promoted for looking the other way and closed cases.

The guards even discouraged her from reporting signs of abuse, Flynn said, in a desperate attempt to make the state’s sex offender surveillance program look like a success.

“They cover up criminal activity from high-risk violent criminals just to expose it, appease Albany, and fire people to appease the governor’s office,” Flynn told the Post.

Flynn, who worked as a parole officer at the DOCCS offices in Westchester and Dutchess counties after working in the Sex Offenders Unit from 2007 to 2016, asked the Office of the Inspector General to investigate her allegations and included in her letter, that she had deliberately ruined deeds, including:

  • The agency approved the transfer of a convicted pedophile jailed for child pornography to North Carolina, where he was arrested twice last year and charged with multiple counts of child exploitation. The parole was granted a transfer to another state, despite the fact that he is again under investigation for child pornography, which, according to state law, should have banned him from moving, she said.
  • A colleague was promoted after recommending the dismissal of a Westchester Grammar School teacher convicted of child sexual abuse. According to her, the recommendation came despite the fact that the pervert was sentenced to lifelong supervision. ” [officer] the coverage of this case clearly played into our administration’s tawdry agenda…and was rewarded when she was politically promoted to the highest office in the agency,” Flynn wrote.
  • A “sado-masochistic” school administrator imprisoned for assaulting a child was convicted of refusing to register as a sex offender after he was released from supervision. Flynn claims he shouldn’t have been out of custody at all, but he did after the department ignored a report she filed against a man who violated his parole by talking on the phone with another convicted sex offender. .
  • A high-risk pedophile convicted of sexually abusing an 8-year-old child was under state surveillance when a photo of him lying in bed shirtless with the baby on his chest surfaced, Flynn said. According to Flynn, the officer assigned to the case was ordered by the administration to “stand back” and not file a report to the Albany child abuse hotline about the patient’s photograph. She reported it and her agency reprimanded her.

“They were deliberately mismanaging sex offender cases,” she wrote in a letter to IS. “The agency now functioned like a mule to push through the governor’s new agenda, which called for the devastation of the prison system based on the ‘less is more’ theory.

Flynn said she was forced to resign in February 2020 after repeatedly speaking out against agency corruption, which she said began under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and continued through Gov. Hole’s term.

The case, according to Flynn, which ultimately ended her career, involved a serial pedophile who was let go to a motel in upstate Liberty that Sullivan County paid to house sex offenders, despite her outspoken warnings that he is likely to reoffend and needs a treatment plan.

Instead, the agency removed Flynn from her special assignment in 2016, but she refused to close the matter. In February 2020, she said, she was offered two options: either withdraw her complaint against the department and sign resignation papers, or face two years in prison for sharing information about her parole with her lawyer.

She signed on out of fear and learned to her horror that the serial pedophile in her latest special assignment case had been released from custody late last year, Flynn added.

“I could drink Kool-Aid like I was told,” Flynn said. “I could keep my job, but I couldn’t put my head down at night. I am a disgraced officer. It’s hard on my heart, but in my mind I tried to do the right thing.”

Flynn currently has two pending lawsuits against the department and its executives, including a federal lawsuit for violations of free speech and due process. She is appealing a federal case after it was dismissed in June by a judge who ruled that her freedom of speech was not covered by the law when she was acting as a public employee rather than a citizen.

She also has an open whistleblower revenge case in the New York Court of Claims, filed in April 2021, which remains open.

Inspector General spokesman David King said he could neither confirm nor deny whether his office was investigating Flynn’s complaints. DOCCS declined to comment, citing the ongoing nature of the cases.

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