'To Catch a Predator': The New American Witch Hunt for Dangerous Pedophiles

The degree to which things are about to get uncool for Donnelly is amazing to contemplate. Twenty-eight men are caught in the bust, and the local prosecutor's office brings charges against all of them. If they're convicted, their sentences for attempted sexual assault will range from five to ten years in prison.

In direct response to the high-profile success of To Catch a Predator, laws against online predators have become increasingly hostile: Internet solicitation of a minor is now a crime in a majority of states, regardless of whether an actual minor is involved. By 2009, at least 600,000 of the country's convicted sex offenders -- including those who, like Donnelly, never met an actual minor -- will be required by a new federal law, the Adam Walsh Act, to be listed on a national registry of sex offenders. There, on easy-to-navigate maps for the entire country, their photos and home addresses will appear next to categories such as aliases, sentence and "computer used." Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch even thanked Perverted Justice for "directly impacting" the law's passage.

Twenty-four states now forbid sex offenders from living near a host of public places -- including schools, parks, day-care centers and bus stops -- effectively shutting them out of many cities. Florida and Oklahoma require some sex offenders to submit to GPS monitoring for the rest of their lives. Ohio lawmakers even tried to pass a bill in 2005 to force sex offenders to sport pink license plates on their cars, but pressure from Mary Kay cosmetics, whose logo is pink, stymied the plan. This year, legislators are trying again with fluorescent-green plates.

This is much to the glee of Perverted Justice, which views child sex abuse as a vastly underrated evil, one deserving of harsher punishment. "I'm just a guy working within the Constitution to make the world a better place, using my freedom of speech to chat with individuals on the other end of the screen name," says Frag. "How much more gratifying does it get than finding guys who are about to molest children and putting them in jail? Not many Americans have that."

In reality, though, the stings conducted by Perverted Justice are essentially designed to circumvent the Constitution. Police departments are largely overtaxed in the area of Internet crimes, and since Dateline reportedly pays Perverted Justice $100,000 per sting, the group is able to provide its services to the cops for free. In many ways, it is a subcontracted police force, with Del and Frag even deputized by local cops for one Dateline sting. But because its members are private citizens, their actions are impervious to charges of entrapment. Casey's come-on at the New Jersey house is not unusual: Perverted Justice tries to talk predators who have decided against a date into changing their mind, making calls in calming, baby-girl voices to men who are having second thoughts.

While some police departments enjoy the publicity that Perverted Justice brings, many in the criminal-justice field aren't so sanguine about the group's tactics. "We can't let anyone who wants simply become law enforcement," says Mike Iacopino, co-chair of a task force on sex offenders assembled by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "This is no different than letting a guy with a six-shooter walk around protecting your hometown." Indeed, many child-protection agencies express a disapproval of Dateline. "We've seen numerous cases that would constitute entrapment, and then Chris Hansen shoves a camera in these guys' faces and they end up convicted on the basis of the camera confession," says Brad Russ, director of training for Internet Crimes Against Children, a federally funded task force that declined to partner with Dateline. "The whole thing is a perversion of the way the criminal-justice system is supposed to operate."

There is something undeniably disturbing about watching a delicate law-enforcement operation being orchestrated by a group of citizens hellbent on revenge -- and anonymous ones at that. (During a Dateline sting in Texas, one alleged predator committed suicide while cameras waited down the street from his house.) In addition to the seventy-five "high-security-clearance" members who form the core of Perverted Justice, another 45,000 people have signed up for the group's online forums, where anyone can puff up their chest and play deputy dog. Despite warnings by the group, these nameless volunteers have made harassing phone calls to predators and mailed flyers to local businesses outing sex offenders. In addition, they post their own "investigations" under a section called "Human Shields." Perverted Justice also posts the pornographic material that predators have sent to decoys -- Webcam photos of their penises, videos of themselves masturbating -- alongside their first names and hometowns, thus disseminating the very perversions it fights.

Even more disturbing, anti-predator stings involving decoys may actually outnumber crimes involving real victims. On an early episode of To Catch a Predator, Dateline estimated that there are 50,000 predators online at any moment -- a number the show pretty much made up out of thin air, though that didn't stop Attorney General Alberto Gonzales from citing it as fact in a speech last year. But a study conducted by the University of New Hampshire estimated that there were fewer than 2,900 arrests for online sexual offenses against minors in a single year. What's more, only 1,152 involved victims who were approached by strangers on the Internet -- and more than half this number were actually cops posing as kids.