State officials say they’ll fight the release of serial rapist Thomas Duvall from the state’s Sex Offender Program, after a panel of judges approved sending him to community housing under intense surveillance. The judges concluded 62-year-old Duvall, convicted of three sexual assaults of teenage girls in the 1970s and ’80s, had made significant progress in treatment. But state Human Services Commissioner Emily Piper says Duvall still “poses an exceptional risk to public safety and should not be released into the community at this time.” Duvall’s case sparked a political firestorm in 2014, even as the state’s Sex Offender Program later survived a major legal challenge, with a federal judge declaring it unconstitutional but an appeals court reversing that ruling.