Justice Kennedy’s statements were wrong then and they are wrong now. They were based on an article in a lay publication, Psychology Today, not a peer-reviewed journal, that was written by a sex offender counselor, not a researcher, who earned his living selling his counseling program to prisons. The author has since disavowed these numbers and said they were never meant to be used as a basis for any type of judicial ruling.

It is now clear, based on decades of data, that those who have committed sexual offenses rarely recidivate. Indeed, while the recidivism rate for drug offenses exceeds 80%, study after study finds the three-year recidivism rate for people who commit sex offenses to be 3.5%, much lower than that claimed by Justice Kennedy. This low recidivism rate is in line with the finding that the vast majority of sexual offenses — as high as 95% — are committed by people who are first-time offenders and thus are not on the registry at all.

University of Miami law professor Tamara Rice Lave found an Arizona state government analysis showing only 2.4% of the 209 individuals released in 2001 had committed a new sex offense within the next three years. ”[T]he … belief that sex offenders have a high rate of reoffending is not supported by the evidence,” she concluded.

Professor Ira Ellman, retired law professor at ASU, points out: “Many assume that most registrants committed violent rapes or molested children, but they would be wrong.” In fact, sex offense registries sweep in individuals with vastly different backgrounds who pose vastly different levels of risk. Individuals have been placed on the registry for such acts as teenagers having consensual sex, public urination, or sexting.

Ellman said “if the registry’s main purpose is to let us monitor and warn people about those who committed violent, coercive, or exploitative contact sex offenses, we dilute its potential usefulness when we fill it up with people who never did any of those things.”

Several of the Supreme Court justices in Doe wrote separately.

Justice David Souter wrote, “The fact that the [registration process] uses past crime as the touchstone, probably sweeping in a significant number of people who pose no real threat to the community, serves to feed suspicion that something more than regulation of safety is going on; when a legislature uses prior convictions to impose burdens that outpace the law’s stated civil aims, there is room for serious argument that the ulterior purpose is to revisit past crimes, not prevent future ones.”

Justice Stevens noted that registrants and their families justifiably live in fear of vigilante justice. They have experienced “profound humiliation and isolation as a result of the reaction of those notified. Employment and employment opportunities have been jeopardized or lost. Housing and housing opportunities have suffered a similar fate. Family and other personal relationships have been destroyed or severely strained. Retribution has been visited by private unlawful violence and threats.”

The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg complained that the registry completely ignores the possibility of rehabilitation. “Offenders cannot shorten their registration or notification period, even on the clearest demonstration of rehabilitation or conclusive proof of physical incapacitation,” Ginsberg wrote. “However plain it may be that a former sex offender poses no threat of recidivism he will remain subject to long-term monitoring and inescapable humiliation.”

The American Law Institute, authors of the Model Penal Code, an independent organization consisting of thousands of lawyers, judges and scholars, recently concluded a nearly ten-year process to help guide states in updating their laws, making positive recommendations for reform to the sex offender registry.

The Supreme Court’s decision 20 years ago has led states to implement increasingly onerous laws that feed the public’s fear of people who commit sexual offenses while at the same time doing nothing to enhance public safety. Decades of data show unequivocally that the sex offender registry is a failed social experiment. It’s time for a new paradigm in sex offender policies, one that considers real studies by real scientists.

John Covert is with Arizonans for Rational Sex Offense Laws, ARSOL

SOURCE: Arizona Capitol Times 

On March 8, 2023, a 27-year-old Grand Marias vigilante, Levi Axtell, covered in his victim’s blood and gore, drove to the sheriff’s office, and with his hand on his head, he said he had just killed Lawrence Scully, 77, in Mr. Scully’s home. Mr. Scully’s body bore defensive injuries, as the Associated Press reports.

The old man reportedly fought back against a killer almost a third of his age.

Good for him.

The weapons were a shovel – wielded up to twenty times against the victim’s head according to Axtell — and a rack of moose horns, items found in the victim’s home. Axtell was arrested and charged with second-degree murder.

Axtell’s reason for his action is that he believed Scully intended to sexually molest his – Axtell’s – young daughter and her daycare peers and believed Scully had been stalking her.

Apparently, Axtell had held this belief for some time, having made a complaint in 2018 and asking for an order of protection against Scully. It was granted but removed after several weeks because law enforcement investigations found no evidence to support the claim.

Scully’s status as a registered sex offender was certainly known in the tiny town. He ran for mayor in 2014, and media stories then discussed his crime and conviction. It is unclear whether he was ever displayed on Minnesota’s public registry. A search of the database did not return his record nor, incidentally, any current registrant at all in Cook County, Minnesota.

One bizarre twist to this already bizarre story are the postings of a woman named Melissa Axtell, identified as the “believed-to-be” sister of Levi. She expresses gratitude to the people of Grand Marias for their “outpouring” of love and support for Levi upon his becoming a murderer. She is also sponsoring a fundraising page, a page whereon at least one donor used the comment function of the page to call Axtell “a hero.”

The inappropriateness of calling the vicious killer of a defenseless, elderly man a “hero” for committing a violent criminal act pushes the limits of “bizarre” to a new level. One of the media outlets writing about this, while not going as far as the fundraising page comment, includes a quote from a former FBI agent that implies a jury might share this view of Axtell.

“Former FBI agent Jennifer Coffindaffer believes that the jury will be ‘very sympathetic’ to Axtell. ‘I am not excusing his actions. . . But typically, a person who commits a crime like this, for these reasons, is received [sic] a lighter sentence’ Coffindaffer said . . .” Additionally, a YouTube video that calls Axtell a hero has received well over nine thousand views.

This is, of course, not an unexpected twist nor a particularly original one. Several years ago blogger Shelly Stow and member of Reform Sex Offender Laws, Inc, (now NARSOL) pointed out that those with sexual offense convictions and in general population in prison have a high expectation of being beaten or murdered, and that expectation is shared by staff and administration. National media carried reports of praise and acclaims of heroism for an Alaskan man who used the registry to hunt down and violently attack registered sexual offenders with a hammer.

James Fairbanks was hailed as a hero in some reports for the coldblooded murder of a formerly convicted sexual offender. And these are all, except for YouTube, mainstream media.

YouTube and other social media platforms are rife with praise and accolades for those who “protect children” by killing “sex offenders.”

The subtext is clear: Those who are on a sexual offender registry – regardless of the offense – or who have a sexual offense conviction are worth less than everyone else; they deserve to be attacked, maimed, or killed; they should be killed; killing someone like that is a noble act, an act of bravery.

This is what the sex offender registry says about every man, woman, and child listed on it.

Would Lawrence Scully have molested a child? We don’t know. We will never know. But among the things we do know are these:

We do not, in this country, take the law into our own hands, in vigilante fashion, and kill someone.

We do not, in this country, kill someone for something we believe they might do, something for which they have not been arrested, let alone convicted.

We do not, in this country, bludgeon and massacre someone to death with shovels and moose horns.

And when we do, it is, literally, murder; it is an unconscionable criminal act. It is not the act of a hero. Heroes die on battlefields saving their comrades in arms. They rush into burning buildings to rescue children. They sacrifice their own lives to stop others from being killed. They spend years of their lives caring for the aged, the maimed and the vulnerable.

They do not wantonly, cruelly, or viciously commit murder.

Levi Axtell is currently in Cook County jail and is scheduled to appear in court on April 10.

SOURCE: thecrimereport.org

Sandy Rozek is a contributor for The Crime Report’s Viewpoints series and the communications director for the National Assc. for Rational Sexual Offense Laws — NARSOL — an organization that advocates for laws based on facts and evidence and for policies that support the successful rehabilitation, restoration, and reintegration of law-abiding, registered persons into society as the path to a safer society. We are a national organization with an interest in both federal, state, and local issues, policies, and legislation related to our interests. Her articles have appeared in a variety of publications.

“Homelessness was one of the main reasons I ran for office,” said then-vice mayor Ben Sorensen, who led the proceedings. “If we all pitch in and support each other and support some of the least of these, we can do amazing, amazing things.” The city recognized 18 organizations for their work with the unhoused and tweeted out a happy photo of the group.

But Sorensen didn’t mention that the city’s own rules are, in part, driving up homelessness. An ordinance forbidding most people on the state’s sexual offense registry from living within 1,400 feet of schools, daycares, parks, or playgrounds puts all but 1 percent of residences off limits to those on the offense registry and forces hundreds to live on the streets. Today, a sample of the city’s unhoused people on the state registry shows that a majority camp on a commercial strip on a major highway in north Fort Lauderdale.

Sorenson also did not acknowledge that the Florida Action Committee (FAC), a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of people placed on sexual offense registries, had, for months, been asking city and county leaders for a plan to house registrants. In the days after the Nov. 1 meeting, FAC escalated its actions. On Nov. 14, the group petitioned the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, alleging that the U.S. public sex offender registry contravenes provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The declaration bans “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” The group asked the UN to investigate and attached a change.org petition that’s been signed by almost 4,500 people.

“The act of placing human beings on a public shaming list for life and subjecting them to the crippling and dehumanizing consequences, when that list has been proven through empirical research to be ineffective at preventing recidivism or reducing sexual offending, is cruel and degrading,” the group wrote to the UN.

If the UN determines the complaint is admissible, it will be sent to the U.S. government for a response and could eventually be referred to the UN’s Human Rights Council for further action. As yet, FAC has heard nothing back from the UN, Gail Colletta, the group’s president, told The Appeal.

Continue reading in The Appeal

‘The slick fella, too handsome for his own good, whose shifty eyes furtively appraised the family silver,’ or, ‘the well-dressed, good-looking young man whose frank curiosity about the family heirlooms showed an appreciation for life’s finer things.’

Why?

Word choice makes all the difference. Some words are so emotionally laden with either positive or negative connotations that just using them automatically produces the corresponding emotion in the reader or hearer. Producers of media know this and often choose emotionally loaded language to sway the readers to their way of thinking. This is fine for editorials and opinion pieces, but the purveyors of news pieces bear the responsibility of using neutral language, of presenting the facts, the “plain, unvarnished truth,” and allowing readers to form their own conclusions.

These are the facts about the term pedophilia. It is a medical term, not a legal one. There are no laws or statutes criminalizing pedophilia. Depression might cause a person to shoplift, but the criminal act is shoplifting, not having depression. Not everyone who shoplifts has depression, and not all with depression shoplift.

The same is true with pedophilia. Not everyone who molests a child has pedophilia – in fact, research suggests the percentage is low – and not everyone with pedophilia has engaged in any criminal conduct, including molesting a child. And certainly, not all registrants are pedophiles. Sexual convictions run the gamut from public exposure to violent rape.

Recently a series of news stories were published in Joliet, Illinois, by Joliet’s local Patch homepage.  The situation is one where the mayor is doing his best – or worst — to close down an apartment building designed as reentry housing for men with sexual crime convictions. After losing round one by way of a federal ruling, Mayor Bob O’Dekirk launched round two: the city bought a lot with a vacant house a block away from NewDay Apartments, the home of the registrants and for full disclosure, one of NARSOL’s many partners in implementing fact-driven policies that advance meaningful criminal justice reform.

The mayor’s plan, unanimously approved by city council without a grandfather clause, is to demolish the home and create a park/playground there. Projected to be functional by June 2023, the park would place the residents of the apartment building out of compliance with state law and effectually, the mayor hopes, put the apartments out of business. Called a “pocket park,” Joliet is not the first city to resort to this strategy in order to make areas uninhabitable for registered individuals.

Joliet Patch, the local news homepage for the town on Patch.com has published four articles about the situation in Joliet, three since city hall got involved. Those three all scream, in huge headers, about the “Pedophile Palace” that the mayor has sworn to shut down.

Of all words in our language designed to evoke a strong, visceral, negative reaction, that one ranks right at the top. Seldom fully understood, almost always misused, and often misspelled, pedophilia requires a qualified physician’s diagnosis before one can accurately be labeled a pedophile.

Patch is not the only media outlet to choose and misuse that word to steer readers and listeners toward a specific reaction. Some weeks prior to the most recent article in Joliet, in a recent broadcast of Tucker Carlson, Fox News, in bold headlines, announced, “TUCKER CARLSON: No healthy society can tolerate pedophilia,” with a sub-heading of “Tucker speaks out against child sexual abuse.” The connection is made: Pedophilia and child sexual abuse are interchangeable terms.

In another video, Carlson bemoans the fact that California is “Putting thousands of pedophiles back on the street.” He is speaking of individuals who have been convicted of a sexual crime, have completed the court-ordered incarceration period, and are released under community supervision for the remainder of the sentence.

Once again, the connection between the word and the crime is inescapable, and now not only is child sexual abuse the same as pedophilia, but also everyone on the registry for any sexual crime is a pedophile.

But it is a false connection.

Carlson and Fox News ignore the facts and do everything possible to cement the false connection and establish a belief in the viewers’ minds that precludes any reasonable and factual discussion about sexual offending.

Throughout the Joliet pieces, other pejorative language is used. The apartment dwellers are “sexual predators” at every possible occasion, not “men,” not “tenants,” but “sexual predators.”

Tucker continues to use “pedophile/pedophilia” as often as possible, but at least his rhetoric is labeled “opinion.”

I reached out to Joliet Patch and to Tucker Carlson’s team while working on this piece, but have not heard back.

Words shape our beliefs, opinions, and actions. They also shape the beliefs, opinions and actions of our lawmakers, and inaccurate words and words whose meanings have been twisted will lead to laws and policies that are inaccurate and twisted. Laws that are based on falsehoods and incorrect beliefs do not advance public safety.

Legislation grounded in empirical evidence and arrived at in the cold, impassionate light of accurate and connotation-free verbiage has the very best chance of providing society with laws that are fair, just, and work as they should.

Source: thecrimereport.org

Sandy, a NARSOL board member, is communications director for NARSOL, editor-in-chief of the Digest, and a writer for the Digest and the NARSOL website. Additionally, she participates in updating and managing the website and assisting with a variety of organizational tasks.

In the 28 years since the law has passed, sex offender registries have become a tool for the public to identify offenders and find out where they live. Now one national organization is working to eliminate those registries altogether. Robin Vander Wall serves as the chair of the National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws, or NARSOL.

“Our vision has always been that this is a bad tool,” Robin Vander Wall says.

Vander Wall is calling for an end to sex offender registries nationwide, saying it prevents former offenders from moving on with their lives. Vander Wall said that NARSOL feels the constant exposure from the internet isn’t fair and only fuels violence and discrimination.

Others say that the sex offender registry is a vital tool designed to help people protect themselves. Some sexual assault convictions can lead to a sentence of life in prison. Some who advocate for keeping the registries consider serious sex offenses as malicious and evil as murder, such as Executive Director of Standing Together Against Rape — or STAR Alaska — Keely Olson.

“Child sexual assault, kidnapping, those kinds of things; they’re unclassified felonies and they’re going to be treated akin to a homicide,” Olson said.

STAR Alaska provides free services to survivors of sexual trauma, which they say is a critical component of their recovery. Olson feels sex offender registries are especially important in Alaska. . . .

Sex offender registries were created before the internet exploded, and Vander Wall says since that happened it has created chaos and fear, virtually casting offenders out of society. He says the public has a misconception that sex offenders are more likely to reoffend. . . .

“If we really live in a culture that believes in second chances, is committed to restoration and restorative justice, then there’s just no place in that culture for a sex offender registry, period,” Vander Wall says.

Watch the video on KTUU.   

Sex offenders in particular are seldom given the nuance and rehabilitation we afford to other people with criminal histories. Their lives are forever affected by the convictions they carry, just like other people convicted of crimes. But unlike some others, they face additional punishment at the hands of the state, even after they’ve served their time. In North Carolina, residents who are registered sex offenders . . .  are not allowed to attend any agricultural fair, including the N.C. State Fair underway in Raleigh. . . . .

Laws like this come from an understandable desire to protect people, particularly children. The reality is that it’s a difficult law to enforce that does not differentiate between varying degrees of sex crimes, or take into consideration the everyday situations that are most responsible for childhood sexual abuse. Advocates for sex offenders see it as an extra burden that is not applied to other offenders with criminal records of violence. “It’s egregious and outrageous. It’s overkill,” Robin Vander Wall, president of North Carolina Association for Rational Sex Offense Law, said in a press release. “This is a matter of fundamental fairness and equal protection under both the state and federal constitutions.”   . . .

[U]nder the law, people convicted of crimes must serve their punishments. Once those punishments are fulfilled, they should be allowed to re-enter society. That’s how it works for other criminal offenses, and it’s the best way to reduce the number of people who re-offend. Even people convicted of manslaughter or assault are allowed to return to society and try to be better people. We don’t ban them from the fair.

Read the full  piece here at the News and Observer.

Now, let’s say that you possibly paid the girls for their sexts, and then allegedly threatened to expose them unless they sent more of them. That’s not normal. It’s obviously immoral, probably illegal, and quite simply wrong.

But are you knowingly creating child pornography and transmitting it across state lines?

That’s what Eric Beyer Jr., of Hutchinson, Kansas, is accused of. He faces up to 70 years in federal prison.

“I’m not saying that I don’t think my son should be punished for that,” says Jessica Meloney, Beyer’s mother. “Absolutely, he should know what he did was wrong and should get in trouble. I’m not saying my kid should get nothing. Even if you want to give him five years, I’m okay with that, because I know he’ll never do it again. But to take an 18-year-old kid and put him in jail for longer than he’s been alive?”

When Beyer was 17, he made a fake account on Snapchat and started contacting girls about his same age. He was in high school at the time. The FBI became aware of his activity in June of 2021, probably because one of the girl’s parents found out what he was doing and brought her phone to the authorities. But the FBI waited until September, a month after Beyer turned 18, to act.

Then, at about 4:30 a.m., a SWAT team raided the house where Beyer lived with his dad and brother, and handcuffed all three, according to his mother, who is divorced and lives in Pennsylvania. Then they put Beyer in the cruiser for questioning. He was read his Miranda rights and responded, “I understand.”

When questioned, Beyer said that yes, the Snapchat account was his, and no, he wasn’t sharing it with anyone. He asked if his father could be there with him, but the agents said he was old enough to be alone. Then they told him, “We need your password.” Unaware that he could refuse, Beyer gave it to them, whereupon they opened his account and put him under arrest, according to his mother.

Beyer has been in jail awaiting trial ever since. His family could not afford the $5,000 it would take to bail him out, and by the time they got the money together, it was too close to his trial date—which has been moved several times—to release him.

How is it that photos exchanged—or even extorted—by teens who all reside in Kansas can be considered an interstate crime? Simple: Snapchat’s server is in California. The images electronically left Kansas, crossed state lines, and came right back.

Nonetheless, the authorities had a choice: They could have brought district charges against him, or federal ones.

“When there’s a case with overlapping interests, a lot of times the federal and the state prosecutor have a conversation about who is going to do the case,” says Troy Stabenow, a federal assistant defense attorney. Who takes the case could be based on something as simple as who has more time on their schedule, or who thinks they would get the most appropriate punishment.

It’s not clear why Beyer’s case went to the U.S. District Attorney. The prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Hart, did not respond to a request for comment.

Kansas City-based criminal defense attorney Chris Angles says the federal statute can result in extremely heavy consequences, regardless of offender age.

“These crimes are unfortunately increasingly common among teens,” says Angles. “State laws, unlike federal ones, are crafted to address age and other mitigating factors. Applying the federal law in this case, with the facts as we understand them, seems overly punitive.”

In fact, the attorney continued, under Kansas law, there aren’t even mandatory minimums.

“A state prosecutor could exercise discretion and the sentence could be tailored to the facts of the case, with a judge having discretion to depart,” says Angles. “His likely starting range under Kansas law would be 4-20 years.” A plea, he indicated, would probably be lower.

Beyer’s federal charges—two counts of knowingly producing and transporting child pornography and one of possessing it—carry far lengthier sentences. Each production charge is punishable by not less than 15 nor more than 30 years. The possession charge is 10 years.

These sentences could be served concurrently, but Melone says her son’s public defender has warned Beyer that they could also be “stacked”; in other words, he might have to serve them one after another. In that case, if convicted of all three charges, he would be facing a minimum of 40 and a maximum of 70 years behind bars. He’d get out at age 58 or age 88.

It’s worth noting that each year of incarceration costs taxpayers roughly $40,000.

Beyer’s public defender had recommended he take a plea deal that would cap his incarceration at 20 years and perhaps get him 12 to 15 years in prison, followed by registration as a sex offender.

Recently, Beyer received some good news. He sent a note to the judge pointing out that he was just a month away from his September 27 trial date and still did not know how his public defender planned to argue the case. This moved the judge to dismiss the public defender and allow a pro bono lawyer to take over. Now his trial has been pushed back indefinitely.

This development gives Melone a ray of hope. It’s possible that Beyer might even be allowed to come home before his trial now.

It does sound like Beyer probably committed a crime—one all too easy to commit in this technological age, but one that warrants punishment, nevertheless. Those 16-year-old girls—indeed, all minors—obviously deserve protection from exploitation, and blackmail is a serious issue.

But it also sounds like the relevant laws, which cover interstate production and transmission of illegal images, were written for the era before the internet, when data didn’t fly through the air. These laws do not map directly onto the dismaying conduct of teens, other teens, and smart phones. A young man who solicits nude photos from young women and then threatens to expose them has done something wrong; he needs to make amends and be taught better behavior. But does he really need to spend the rest of his life in prison?

“I have a three-year-old,” says Melone. “If my three-year-old takes a magic marker and draws all over my walls and I beat him half to death, the punishment doesn’t fit the crime.”

Source: Reason Magazine

By Sandy . . . In Fayetteville, North Carolina, what could and should have been a warm, human-interest story was re-shaped by law enforcement into something entirely different.

The real story is about those who take very literally the Biblical admonitions to serve the least of those in society, to help our neighbors, and to do unto others as we would want done to us. Additionally, the members of Fayetteville Urban Ministry who visit and take food and other essentials to the men living in tents along Martin Luther King Freeway and Gillespie Street Bridge in Fayetteville are training their children in selfless service to others.

The Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department, however, saw something different. They shifted the focus away from the real story and turned it into a “public service announcement.”

“Cumberland County Sheriff Ennis W. Wright and the deputies assigned to the Sheriff’s Office Sex Offender Registration Enforcement Unit (SOREU) have increased concern for the public’s safety . . . Registered Sex Offenders live under and around the MLK and Gillespie Street Bridge.”

People on the sex offender registry are homeless due to restrictions about where they may live, restrictions that are shown by all studies to be of no public safety value whatsoever, restrictions that have even been denounced by the U.S. Justice Dept. in the summary of their chapter on sex offender management strategies: “Finally, the evidence is fairly clear that residence restrictions are not effective. In fact, the research suggests that residence restrictions may actually increase offender risk by undermining offender stability and the ability of the offender to obtain housing, work and family support. There is nothing to suggest this policy should be used at this time.”

This action by the sheriff’s department begs the question, “What has this accomplished?” – not “Why did they do this?” for that is known only by those involved, but, “What has been accomplished? Who has been helped?”

Without this “public-service announcement,” were children at risk? There is no evidence of that. Even if there were any risk from the occupants of the tents – and there is also no evidence whatsoever that there is — any children visiting there were part of the Urban Ministry group, supervised by parents and other adults.

Without this announcement, would hordes of Fayetteville citizens have rushed to the tents, putting themselves at risk, again a risk that no evidence supports even existed. Why did the sheriff’s office have “. . . increased concern for the public’s safety”?

So what has been accomplished?

Further vilification of a segment of society. Further portraying of people with past sexual crime convictions as “the other.” Further ostracization and isolation of everyone on the registry.

In other words, what the sheriff sees as “a public safety announcement” is, in reality, further reinforcement of the conditions which science shows lead to sexual offending in the first place, conditions that create further barriers to integration of those with past sexual crimes into the community, integration which science deems necessary to maximize rehabilitation and reduce even further the already very low rate of reoffense.

So what has the Cumberland Sheriff’s Department accomplished?

Quite possibly the exact opposite of what will actually increase public safety.

This may be one: When people who have been in prison return to society, society wants them to be rehabilitated, commit no more offenses, find employment, and be positive, contributing societal members. Indeed, one would be hard-put to find someone who said he disagreed with that.

And of course, while some with past criminal convictions will not live up to that, many will.

Luke Heimlich did; he had a lucrative career in baseball.

Steven Striegel, an actor, was happy to have even small roles as long as he was working.

Bruce Habowski is an accomplished artist whose work hung proudly in the University of Maine’s art gallery.

And Artimus Pyle, a musician of long standing, has. Once with the band Lynyrd Skynyrd, he has had his own band since 2013, the Artimus Pyle band, and according to venue organizers averages eighteen concerts a year.

Most recently the band is booked to headline one of the nights of the popular Historic Morganton Festival held in September each year in Morganton, North Carolina. However, a petition has been created to remove Mr. Pyle from the program.

In 1993 Artimus Pyle was placed on the sex offender registry in Florida after a no-contest plea conviction for attempted sexual battery, charges that he denies. The discovery of Pyle’s name on the registry prompted the petition, initiated by someone who withholds his name but is identified only as “Concerned Citizen.”

According to statements made by Mr. Pyle to WSOC-TV, he has lost jobs before due to his inclusion on the registry.

If Morganton holds fast to their current status, he won’t lose this one.

Unlike Luke, whose career was destroyed, unlike Steven whose scenes were cut and career ground to a halt, unlike Bruce whose art was pulled from the gallery, Artimus has, at least for now, found a champion.

The board of directors for the festival said that he had been completely open with them about his past. In announcing their decision to keep the Artimus Pyle Band in their festival lineup, they said, “It is significant that many of the concerts, which the Artimus Pyle Band has performed in recent years, have been in public venues such as auditoriums or outdoor stages, all without inappropriate incidents.”

We may all say that we want those with past criminal convictions to build meaningful lives and enter society as contributing members, but the actions of all too many show that to be untrue.

Thankfully, the Historic Morganton Festival, Inc. Board of Directors are showing their beliefs by their actions. They are to be commended.

By Elizabeth Thompson . . . Chris Budnick is in an impossible position.

As the leader of Healing Transitions, a peer-based recovery-oriented service for homeless and uninsured people located in Raleigh, Budnick is left scrambling if someone with a sex offense comes to him for housing.

Some of society’s most vulnerable people come to Budnick, asking for help. He has to turn them away due to the location of Healing Transition’s men’s campus on the edge of the new Dorothea Dix Park.

“I’ve heard people say you have a better chance if you murdered somebody with like, moving on in your life after you’ve done your time,” Budnick said.

Some 98 percent of people currently incarcerated will eventually reenter society, according to the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, most of those people will face barriers upon reentry. Sometimes people who have been incarcerated for years don’t know how to use now-familiar technology such as computers and cell phones. Others have difficulty rebuilding relationships with family, or struggle to find work and housing.

For people exiting prison with sex crimes on their record, it can feel like a life sentence, said Coleman, who was formerly incarcerated for a sex crime and asked to go by a different name.

Discussions over how people convicted of sex crimes should be punished popped up during incoming Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s recent Supreme Court hearings. As a student at Harvard Law School, Jackson critiqued sex offender registries and questioned if they could infringe on the rights of people who could be considered some of society’s most hated.

Even when people with sex crimes are released from prison, their crimes follow them in the form of the sex offender registry.

“No matter what, you’re going to be on the registry,” Coleman said. “And that really affects it seems like every part of reentry and just being a citizen in the world.”

People with sex crimes may not live within 1,000 feet of any public or non-public school or child care center, and their crimes immediately come up on background checks, making it difficult to find work or housing.

During a telephone interview, Coleman admitted he was preoccupied. He was supposed to meet a landlord later that day, and he had to tell him that he was a registered sex offender. If the landlord denied his application, he’d have to start his housing hunt all over again.

Stephanie Treadway, founder of Redirection NC, a non-profit that houses women coming out of prison, said the sex offender registry makes it incredibly difficult for the women she works with to find housing.

“Once you’re tagged as a sex offender, there is no level to that until you get into the nitty-gritty of it,” Treadway said. “And somebody that’s housing somebody or going to employ them, they don’t go into the nitty-gritty, they just see sex offender, big red flag. They carry it for the rest of their life.”

Not being able to find housing is likely to just continue a cycle of abuse, Treadway said. The average lifespan of a homeless person is shorter than a housed person by about 17.5 years, according to one study.

Treadway said some of her clients who have struggled to find housing or employment end up with few options. Sometimes they end up selling drugs to get by.

“They know how to make money — it’s not legal — but they know how to make money,” Treadway said. “Then they get around the same people and do the same things and then they end up getting high. And so they don’t last a long time.”