CA - Sex-offender laws are ineffective and unfair, critics say

Original Article

10/17/2014

By Puck Lo

Frank Lindsay, 62, is a father, small-business owner and avid surfer. He’s also one of 105,000 people in California — and 760,000 nationally — listed as a sex offender. In accordance with federal law, his name, photograph and home address appear in a public, online offender registry. In 1979, Lindsay, then 27, was convicted of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor under the age of 14.

“I thought I could do whatever I wanted,” Lindsay says. “Add on some alcohol, and I was a real asshole.”

Today, Lindsay considers himself a reformed man. He says he hasn’t had a drink in 30 years, is a Taoist and advocate for restorative justice — encouraging violent people to make amends for their actions. But, he says, “It seems that I can never be forgiven.”

Few groups are as widely despised as sex offenders. Activities prosecuted as sex offenses vary by state, but can include public urination, consensual sex between teenagers, streaking, prostitution, downloading child pornography and rape. In some states, law-enforcement officials distribute flyers to notify neighbors of registrants’ convictions. Some registrants are prohibited from using the Internet. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that indefinite detention at psychiatric hospitals — or “civil commitment” — of sex offenders is constitutional.

The first law requiring sex offenders to register publicly and for life was passed in California in 1947 and targeted gay men, according to Andrew Extein, executive director of the Center for Sexual Justice. But many of today’s laws have their origins in the late 1970s, when feminists and social conservatives worked together to publicize high-profile “stranger danger” attacks on children, says Roger Lancaster, anthropology professor at George Mason University and author of “Sex Panic and the Punitive State.”

Beginning in the mid-1990s, several laws went into effect that changed how sex-offense cases were prosecuted. In 1994, states were required to create databases of sex offenders. Two years later, Megan’s Law, named for a 7-year-old in New Jersey who was brutally raped and murdered by a neighbor with two previous sex convictions, allowed states to make those registries public. States passed their own versions of the law; in some cases, they required that neighbors be notified of paroled offenders’ previous convictions. Later laws moved those sex-offender databases online, created a national registry, required lifetime registration of people 14 years old and up and imposed harsh mandatory minimum sentences for crimes involving children.

But almost 20 years after the passage of Megan’s Law, criminologists and judges, along with a burgeoning movement of sex-offender registrants and their families, are challenging not only the constitutionality of the laws but their effectiveness in reducing sexual assault. In January, a California court ruled in favor of a paroled sex offender who had argued that city and county “child-safety zone” ordinances prohibiting people in the registry from using parks, beaches and similar recreation areas were an unconstitutional form of banishment. In April, the state Supreme Court upheld the ruling by declining to review it.

See Also: California Reform Sex Offender Laws

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NY - “Bathroom Cops” Arresting Men in Public Bathrooms After “Shaking Off” When Done Urinating

Original Article

10/09/2014

By John Vibes

A string of recent complaints filed by alleged victims of wrongful arrest are bringing question to NYPD practices of arresting men in public restrooms. There are currently undercover cops posted up in public restrooms across New York City, waiting to catch “sexual predators” in the act.

However, according to dozens of alleged victims, average men are becoming entrapped by these undercover agents, when they have done nothing wrong. Many of the victims have claimed that after urinating, “shaking off” and zipping up their pants, they were accused of “simulating masturbation” in view of the police officer.

The New York Times recently reported that police have been standing in public restrooms and staring down everyone who passes through, while they use the urinals. If the person makes any movements that the officer does not approve of, they can be arrested for “lewdness” with no evidence aside from the testimony of the officer. Since police have been stationed in public bathrooms, lewdness arrests have increased 7-fold. In the past year alone, over 60 people were arrested in one bus terminal restroom, many of them for alleged “lewdness” in the bathroom stall.

Dozens of the people who have been arrested in this trap have sought legal representation from The Legal Aid Society and other independent sources. Many of these people reported that the police made them feel uncomfortable by staring at them while they used the restroom, and it seems that if anyone is guilty of lewdness it was actually the undercover officer.

It is not clear why undercover agents have been placed in these bathrooms to begin with, even Capt. John Fitzpatrick, the Port Authority police commander who oversees the bus terminal, admits that complaints of lewdness in public bathrooms are “few and far in between”.

Although, Fitzpatrick is still standing by the actions of his officers, claiming that the dozens of men who have now filed complaints were in fact being lewd in the restroom, otherwise, he says, they would not have been arrested.

“They are not sidling up to somebody, trying to sneak a peek and misrepresenting what the person is doing, there is no mistaking their behavior,” he said.

One man, accused of “simulating masturbation” says that he was simply “shaking off”, a near instinctual act that is not at all lewd or uncommon.

“I wasn’t committing a lewd act, I was peeing in the beginning, but I was shaking off when the guy stepped back and looked at me,” Mr. Holden, a 28-year-old baker, said of his police encounter.

After Holden walked out of the bathroom he was arrested by police and taken to jail. When Holden was being processed in the jail he overheard one of the other cops refer to his arresting officer as “the gay whisperer”. This was a fairly offensive comment for Holden, consider the fact that he is a gay man, and feels that may be the reason why he got arrested.

“I wore a leather jacket, fitted clothes. I guess that fits the description of a homosexual male, I was like, O.K., although I’m gay, I wasn’t doing anything,” he said.

Holden’s story is just one of dozens, and although there may be a few perverts in the bunch, it is safe to say that a vast majority of these people are innocent.

TX - We can do better on sex offender laws

Original Article

07/17/2014

By Steve Blow

Let’s face it, we’re more sympathetic to the plights of some than others.

Lost puppies and sad children rank right up there atop the sympathy scale. And at the bottom.

Well, can you think of a group lower than sex offenders?

It’s a tough sell, but a national conference is meeting this week in Dallas with the goal of making things a little easier for those convicted of sex-related crimes.

Hang on! Don’t stop reading. You may not be brimming with sympathy, but the truth is that the reformers have a point. And this doesn't just affect the sex offenders.

Our laws have become expensive and ineffective. In our zeal to protect against sexual predators, we might even be making things worse.

The national conference of RSOL — Reform Sex Offender Laws — began with a social hour Wednesday night. It gets down to business Thursday through Saturday, meeting at Skillman Church of Christ in East Dallas.

About 125 people are expected. Virtually all of them are like RSOL executive director Brenda Jones. They come because of a personal connection.

“I have a family member still serving time,” she said. “One of the things I promised him is that I would make sure he could have a life when he got out.”

The group’s central message is that sex offender registries have become an enormous burden on the individuals required to register, and they yield no safety benefit for the public.

“There’s no statistical evidence that it’s doing any good at all,” Jones said. “And there’s growing evidence that it could actually be doing harm.”

Those on sex offender registries often can’t find a job or a place to live. It drives many into hiding. The pressures can make those with sexual addictions more likely to offend, not less.

As with most things, this began with a good idea: Law enforcement should know where convicted child predators live. But in our zeal to protect kids, the movement went overboard.

The list was made public. Registry was required for more and more offenses. The result: Texas has almost 80,000 people on its sex offender registry.

“It was sold as a parent having the right to know there’s a predator next door. But the vast majority of the people on that list never touched a child, never had an offense against a child and may not have even had a sexual offense,” Jones said.

Even public urination sometimes ends up as a sex crime requiring registration.

Mary Sue Molnar of San Antonio leads the reform effort in Texas. She is founder of Texas Voices, an affiliate of RSOL.

“Several years ago, my son made some really bad choices. He was 22. The girl was 16,” Molnar said. “He would be placed on the sex offender registry for the rest of his life. He would never be able to serve his time and move on with his life, like any other offender.”

California has almost 100,000 on its sex offender list. And its oversight board wants to make a change. In a recent policy report, the board said:

“Research on sex offender risk and recidivism now has created a body of evidence which offers little justification for continuing the current registration system.”

The California report estimated that local governments spend $24 million a year maintaining the sex offender registry. Yet most people never consult it. And most who do take no action as a result.

Nobody is making excuses here for people who commit crimes of any sort. But if safety is what we’re after, we’re not getting our money’s worth.

OK - Sex registry law needs overhaul

David Slane

Original Article

06/04/2014

By David Slane (Law Firm)

In 2007, the Oklahoma State Legislature approved a new law that required all sex offenders be classified under a three-tier system that placed offenders in a specific category depending on the nature of the sex crime.

However, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (DOC) went a step further and made the new registration law retroactive to 1998. However, in June 2013, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled the retroactive application of the rule was unconstitutional.

The court’s landmark ruling allowed more than 2,000 sex offenders to remove their names from the statewide registry because their registration requirements had either expired or would be prolonged by the 2007 law.

The law has left everyone scratching their heads about what’s next. The current registration system makes no sense and leaves plenty of room for debate about fairness and public safety.

It makes sense for the state Legislature to return to the drawing board and start over on this law.

Some people are on the registry because they urinated in a public street, and they’re not sex offenders. State officials need to stop wasting time and precious resources on those registrants. For the record, indecent exposure convictions and other low-level offenses require 15 years of registration.

Instead, devote the majority of resources to the high-risk offenders who need the most intensive supervision and strictest registration requirements the state can offer. The high-risk offenders should be required to check in daily, which would give the public a higher level of security.

Level 2 offenders, those who pose a moderate danger to the community, must register for 25 years. Meanwhile, Level 3 offenders, those who pose a serious danger to the community and are likely to engage in criminal sexual conduct, must register for their lifetime.

Part of the problem is that DOC officials, when implementing the system, tossed most of Oklahoma’s sex offenders into the Level 3 category. They didn’t want to take the heat to make an honest assessment of each case.

Changing the system will take a groundswell of public support. Still, reform of any kind might cause consternation for most state lawmakers who have never seen a sex offender law they didn’t like. It’s popular to be tough on crime, which includes drunks who urinate next to their car.

It’s time for Oklahoma legislators to stop thinking about re-election and polls and study what works and doesn’t work with the sex offender registration system.

One solution is to remove the registration assessment out of the hands of DOC only and rework the procedure to include trial judges, district attorneys and defense attorneys. That would provide a higher level of fairness while ensuring public safety. A broken system gives parents and the community a false sense of security while really protecting no one.

When most people think of a sex offender, they think of a baby raper or serial rapist. But the truth is most sex offenders are convicted of nothing even similar. We need to stop painting every sex offender with the same broad brush and look at individuals for what they did and act accordingly.

While high-risk sex offenders need to be closely supervised, it’s critical for others who have completed their sentence to be given a second chance at life.

NH - State's sex-offender registry overreaches

Original Article

05/20/2014

The N.H. Supreme Court is pondering the fate of a man convicted, several decades ago, of sexually assaulting his teenage stepdaughter. The man has served out his prison sentence, undergone years of counseling and been deemed “rehabilitated” by the court. Now in his 60s, he is disabled.

None of which would be fodder for the state’s highest court, except that since he was released from prison in 1990, the state has repeatedly enacted laws calling for those convicted of sexual assault against children to register with the police, so a legal — and public — eye can be kept on them. And yes, such laws include those who were sentenced long before the new laws were enacted.

The man now before the Supreme Court seeking relief from these laws has been dubbed John Doe to protect his anonymity. It’s ironic that Mr. Doe can hide his identity from the public in court, because the reason he’s there is that he can’t hide it anywhere else. Thanks to these laws — both state and federal — John Doe and others must allow not only the police to know where they are, they must let everyone know, by keeping their current address in a database accessible to anyone online.

And in many cases, they must do so for life. There is no mechanism for getting off the list, and failure to keep the information updated carries harsh penalties in itself.

If all this seems over the line of reasonable punishment, in many cases we agree. However, the state has argued inclusion on this public online registry is not a punishment, but a regulatory matter.

We think that reasoning is absurd. Clearly, it is a punishment, tantamount to those on the list being forced to wear a large letter “P” pinned to their chests in public.

And while belling the cat may be a good idea for those whose crimes indicate they will continue to pose a threat, there are some crimes designated as sexual in nature that may not, such as public urination.

This is not to ignore the real danger posed by sick minds — the hardcore predators who will never be rehabilitated. Given the recidivism rates involved in sexual assault cases, especially those victimizing children, there’s a lot to be said for keeping the public informed of legitimate threats. There does need to be some way for the public to be informed.
- What recidivism rate?  You mean that sex offenders have one of the lowest recidivism rates of any other ex-felon?

Hearing the arguments of the John Doe case earlier this month, the justices seemed taken aback by the logic of the laws. One argued a paraplegic on the registry who now poses no threat to anyone could himself become a victim of vigilantes who look up his address online. If that seems far-fetched, consider the case of Stephen Marshall, who in 2006 killed two men whose names and addresses he’d looked up on Maine’s sex-offender registry.

We, too, worry that inclusion on a public registry could make a target of people who have otherwise served their sentence for crimes committed. We hope the court’s review will result in a close look at the state’s sex-offender registry, including how long someone who has been deemed rehabilitated by the courts should be on it and whether the list of crimes for which one qualifies needs to be culled.
- It also puts the lives of family members (innocent people) in danger as well, not just the ex-offenders!

OK - Thousands come off sex offender list months after new law

Original Article

05/13/2014

By La'Tasha Givens

A new law took thousands off the sex offender registry.

Exposing yourself near a playground, urinating in public or peeping in a bathroom stall are just some of the actions that have landed thousands of people on the sex offender registry.

Now many of those names are disappearing from the list.

“If you were to slap a woman on the behind, that would be sexual battery and you would have to register for 15 years and that has nothing to do with children on the playground,” said attorney David Slane. “People who urinated in public or fall under what we call the Romeo and Juliet situation, where the young man may have been just a little bit older than the girl or vice versa. They’re the ones typically being removed.”

Slane said he’s taken on over 400 sex offender cases, more than anyone else in the state.

In many situations the offenders were on the list way past their punishment because the laws kept changing.

“They’ve had a number of changes or revisions of sex offender registration act over the last ten or 15 years and the court said those later laws could not apply retroactively,” said Jerry Massey spokesperson for the Department of Corrections (DOC).

Out of the 2,400 now off the list, Slane said most are level one or level two offenders which does not include those who committed violent and heinous sex crimes.

He also said under the new law a judge is able to decide a punishment on a case by case basis and not paint all offenders with a wide brush.

Slane said, “The more serious cases are the one we should spend our resources on, not someone who urinated in public.”

DOC officials say they still have another 2,700 cases to review to see if there are more offenders who are eligible to come off the list based on the new law.

UK - Even the innocent should worry about sex offender apps

Original Article

03/26/2014

By Sharif Mowlabocus

The average citizen may not feel that they have anything to fear from the rise of apps that promise to identify sex offenders in their area but they are part of a worrying trend that should act as a warning about what happens when personal data is flattened out and sliced up into apparently user-friendly services.

Sex-offender-locator apps proudly boast that they can help users find sex offenders in their local area. But they aren’t, of course, actually detecting anything. US federal law mandates that every state must collect information on convicted sex offenders and make it available to the public online. Sex offender locator apps take this freely available data and repurpose it.

After loading the app on your phone, you are presented with a map of your surrounding area and an icon, such as the commonly used blue dot, to show your own position. As you move around your neighbourhood, the app tracks your movements and the blue dot moves accordingly. At the same time other dots or pins also appear on the screen. These are most often coloured red and indicate the address of a registered sex offender. Clicking on a pin opens a profile containing an image of the sex offender, some personal data such as their age, sex, ethnicity, date of birth and address, and a list of convictions together with the date of those convictions.

At first sight these applications seem helpful. Many parents would want to know if there was a sex offender living next door for understandable reasons. And since SORNA mandates that local police forces should notify communities when sex offenders convicted of more serious crimes move into their neighbourhood they aren’t necessarily providing much more information than users would receive without an app.

There is a crucial difference though. As well as informing residents, SORNA also mandates that crime prevention teams work with local communities to explain how to keep children safe, how to talk to them about stranger danger and sexual abuse and how to deal with having an offender living in the local vicinity.

It is this contextualisation that is notably absent from the sex offender identification apps that are currently available. It is always good to know who we are living next to but without further resources such knowledge becomes at best meaningless and, at worst, the root of paranoia and fear.

The mapping illusion

Reoffending rates for sex offenders are far lower than many other crimes but these apps don’t give you that information. They might provide you with a sex offender’s last known address but fail to tell you that an alarmingly high percentage of convicted sex offenders have no fixed abode.

And it’s important to note that even though SORNA is a national law, different states have drastically different rules for which crimes will land you on the sex offender register. Few would argue that a violent child rapist should be included but in some states, you can end up on the register for having consensual sex in a public place or even urinating in an alleyway.

Then there is the mapping of sex offenders. Maps are amazing things. They tell us where things are – most of the time, when they work. Google Maps is only as accurate as the last time it was updated. The same can be said for these applications.

Worse still, the SORNA mandated databases are, frankly, a mess. There is no funding to implement SORNA and as a result, the information contained in them is often out of date and sometimes incorrect.

The mapping techniques employed by sex offender apps are therefore doubly illusory. The live tracking of our own movements by these apps belies the inaccuracies of the databases and suggests that what we are seeing is up to date, perhaps even being provided in real time, when in fact it isn’t.

Mapping us all

You may not feel concerned about this. You may think that sex offenders deserve what they get. But the prospects of people being affected in the same way, even if they’ve never committed a crime, are on the horizon.

In the UK, for example, discussions are ongoing about making patient records and data held by the NHS available to third parties. It has not yet been decided how these third parties will use this data but already companies have been found to be offering mapping services based on the information.

You may have been depressed in your teenage years. You may have even contemplated suicide. You may now be living a healthy, happy life and have long forgotten those anxious adolescent years. But if you reported it, if you sought help or advice from the NHS, then that record is still there.

And when data becomes compressed by third parties, when it gets flattened out into one single data stream, your present and your past collide with potentially huge ramifications for your future.

When it comes to personal data – of any kind – we not only need to consider what it will be used for but how that data will be represented, and what such representation might mean for us and others.