SPOKANE – A repeat sex offender has been freed because a Spokane County Superior Court jury found that he met only three of the four requirements for being committed indefinitely as a violent sexual predator.

The decision Wednesday in the case of James M. White, 54, was believed to be only the second jury verdict of its kind in more than 150 such proceedings since the sexual predator commitment law took effect in 1990.

Assistant Attorney General Krista Bush asked for 48 hours to warn White’s victims and to consider filing an appeal that might keep him behind bars, but Superior Court Judge Gregory Sypolt said that under state law White had was entitled to immediate release.

One of White’s former girlfriends has offered to let him live with her, lawyers in the case said. He still must register as a sex offender.

News reports indicate the first jury verdict of a similar kind was in 2003 in Seattle, when a King County Superior Court jury decided not to have Curtis Shane Thompson locked up. About a year later Thompson was charged with breaking into a woman’s apartment and raping her and with attacking two women in an elevator.

The jury in White’s civil commitment case determined that he had been convicted of sexual violence, has a mental abnormality that results in serious difficulty in controlling is sexual behavior and is likely to commit more violent sex crimes if he is not confined, but the panel ruled that prosecutors failed to prove he committed a “recent overt act.”

That element would not have come into play if state officials had filed for commitment before White was released from prison in May 2000. Instead, they acted only after he was returned to prison for parole violation on a rape complaint by a woman who lived with him for 51/2 months at the Otis Hotel.

Because of a state Supreme Court ruling, prosecutors had to prove she was raped to win a commitment order. The woman said White struck her and forced her to have sex against her will, but jurors also were told she did not accuse him of rape right away and continued to live with him afterward.

White was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman at knifepoint in 1974 in front of the victim’s two young children. Evidence showed White and a woman accomplice abducted the victim and her children before the assault.

Less than a year after his release from prison in December 1977, records show, White molested a 5-year-old girl in Snohomish County, received a 10-year suspended sentence and was sent to Eastern State Hospital for outpatient treatment as a sexual psychopath.

His probation was revoked when he exposed himself to three girls in downtown Spokane in 1982.

White was released from prison in January 1988 but, nearly six years later, was convicted of trying to kidnap a 17-year-old Spokane girl at knifepoint as she waited for a bus. Investigators found that he fondled the struggling teenager and dragged her toward his car, then fled when a car approached.