State wants repeat sex offender who fled country committed
The Illinois attorney general’s office wants a 41-year-old former West Dundee man, who was convicted of trying to rape two different women, to be classified as a sexually violent person and held by the state’s Department of Human Services indefinitely after his release from prison Monday.
Jamal Sharifpour was 18 when arrested on charges of attacking the women in fall 1989. One of the women had her ankle broken when Sharifpour hit her with a car while she was jogging.
Sharifpour had a record of sexual abuse dating back to when he was a juvenile, records show.
Under a 1998 state law, a person can be committed to the DHS after a prison term is over if the inmate has committed a sex crime, been diagnosed with a mental disorder, and a jury decides it’s “substantially probable” the person will commit another sex crime.
Since the law went into effect, the attorney general’s office has had more than 330 people committed to the DHS until they are no longer deemed a danger to society.
According to court records and a psychologist’s report, Sharifpour had six convictions of assaulting women as a juvenile starting when he was 14. Several of the attacks began when Sharifpour shouted obscenities at women in their 20s in public places, groped them and fled on his bicycle, records show.
He was charged with attacking two women in Elgin in fall 1989 on separate occasions. In one instance, he used his sport utility vehicle to strike a woman who was jogging, ripped off her clothes on the side of the road before driving off and “smiling” as she winced in pain from her injuries, records show.
Sharifpour, whose parents are from Turkey and Iran, fled to those two countries to avoid prosecution but was arrested in August 2000 in New York, according to court records.
He was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison for the two 1989 attacks.
Deborah Nicolai, a clinical psychologist who interviewed Sharifpour last month, recommended he be committed.
“The recurrent sexual behaviors against non-consenting females establish a presence of intense sexual urges to overpower and sexually assault women,” Nicolai wrote in a report. Nicolai also concluded Sharifpour fit the criteria to be diagnosed with sexual sadism. “Based on the circumstances of his sexual offenses, it appears he derived pleasure from inflicting pain onto the women he victimized in the commission of sexual offending,” she wrote.
When Sharifpour is released from the Dixon Correctional Center on Monday he will be held in the custody of the DHS while the case proceeds against him.
He’s next due in court March 7.