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 

“We’re here to address some of those collateral consequences, to ask our legislators to believe in our ability to change, to hold space for our ability to transform our lives and to provide ourselves a chance at good footing to have a second chance in our lives,” Kristie Puckett Williams with the North Carolina Second Chance Alliance said.

Puckett Williams was among several speakers who gathered outside in Downtown Raleigh to discuss the challenges and barriers that people face after they spend time in jail or prison.

“I’m a recovering drug addict and a survivor of severe substance abuse. My story is of redemption, restoration and hope and that people who suffer from drug addiction, from trauma, can restore their lives, can return to full healthy lives, and we need to return to full citizenship,” Puckett Williams, who has three felony convictions on her record in the state of North Carolina, said.

Dwayne Daughtry, a lobbyist and Executive Director of North Carolina for Rational Sexual Offense Law, was among other organizations in support of second chances for all who hoped to spread awareness and express concerns of how state laws unfairly target and impact people on the sex offender registry.

Bishop William J. Barber II, a social activist and President of Repairers of the Breach, was also among several speakers that helped energize crowds and tout a message that second chances for all are essential to reintegration to communities all across America.

“We’re all flawed people, but there’s a point where you can get released from your past. These are people who have paid their debt to society, and they want to be full citizens in this democracy,” he said.

At one point, the large crowd headed inside to hold a press conference and directly talk to North Carolina lawmakers. Several residents expressed concerns about a recent court ruling that ended voting rights for some people with criminal convictions. Organizers also hoped to support ending the harmful use of mugshots, expanding criminal record relief, ending debt-based driver’s license suspensions and eliminating/reducing criminal court fines and fees.

Additionally, Senator Julie Mayfield of Senate District 49 said she is committed to second chance issues and breaking down some of the barriers. Mayfield said she recently introduced Senate Bill 730, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Benefits Bill to eliminate waiting periods and bans on services.

“Everybody says we want these folks to be productive, want them to stay out of the criminal justice system, and yet there are so many barriers to them doing that,” Mayfield said.

With support, Mayfield said she is hopeful that the bill will pass.

Puckett Williams said it meant a lot to see so much support on Tuesday.

“Oftentimes, people living with criminal convictions don’t participate and are locked out of the political process. We are showing people that we are people who are interested in what’s happening politically, that we care about our community and we are going to be here and want to be addressed,” Puckett Williams said.

It matters because a (negligently or not) sourcing error, in part, is what led us to have such sprawling, burdensome, and ineffective registries.

The research brief in that was commissioned has the eye-catching title Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act — Summary and Assessment of Research. Published by the Federal Research Division, it reads like police-state apologetics — doing its dead level best to dismiss the research casting doubt on various aspects sex offense registries. I had occasion to review it for a client, and if the title didn’t catch my eye, the abstract certainly did:The top-level conclusion in the abstract is that “as of June 2019” (emphasis added) the research is “inconclusive” regarding the effectiveness of registration. This came as something of a surprise to me, because I’m aware of quite a few studies within the last decade that have found either no effect or a negative effect (i.e., an increase) in recidivism, but none that show it leads to less recidivism (and I feel like if there were one demonstrating effectiveness, it definitely would have been included in this brief).

So I was very eager indeed to see what evidence the Federal Research Division had amassed to support this incredible claim. On page 2, note 7: they cite two sources, one published in 2008, and one published in 2009:

Perhaps it goes without saying, but those sources themselves do not prognosticate about the state of research a decade into the future. Nor does the report grapple with several major research studies over the last decade that have concluded that SORN either do not have an impact on recidivism or make recidivism slightly worse. It simply pretends they do not exist. (1)

I thought it might be a typo at first — never ascribe to malice what you can ascribe to incompetence etc etc — but the 2019 claim is repeated several times, and is a key finding in the abstract. Further, there are two sources that are offered to support the claim, but none of which are from the late 00’s. It’s hard to know what to make of it except that the government is simply lying because it can and no one cares if it’s to keep the public safe from ‘sex offenders.’

Here’s why the research brief matters: the scientific findings related to the effectiveness of registries are relevant to legal arguments about whether or not they constitute punishment, amongst other things. It’s not hard to imagine (if it hasn’t happened already) this getting dropped into an AG’s brief, and then getting regurgitated into an opinion of a court of not-insignificant note, and it becoming judicially accepted “fact” even though it has no support.

It’s happened before.

In the early 00’s, the Supreme Court considered a series of cases regarding extraordinary treatment of people convicted of sex offenses (e.g., whether registration constituted punishment). In those cases, Justice Kennedy claimed that recidivism rates of people convicted of sex offenses was “frightening and high.” The only support for this claim, as Ira and Tara Ellman discovered, was a 1986 Psychology Today article written by a clinician who was marketing his own services as a treatment provider (and who has since repudiated how his statement was used). The Ellmans discovered that the phrase “frightening and high” regarding purported recidivism rates was subsequently cited in 91 judicial opinions and briefs in 101 cases, but that was 8 years ago, and courts and government lawyers are still turning to that very phrase to ward off arguments that registries and registry-related paraphernalia (e.g., exclusion zones, regulation of travel, communication) are unconstitutional.

So a research brief that muddies the waters and concludes (falsely) that the state of research is inconclusive is going to undoubtedly be very attractive to judges looking for a way to punt to the legislature on constitutional claims over registration.

Likely very few people other than myself will care about this as it combines things that your average person would rather not think about: “sex offenders,” research briefs, footnotes, and the federal government. I also realize we are now in an era where SCOTUS openly ignores the factual record in cases to reach a desired conclusion (to say nothing of arguably abandoning stare decisis), so my concern about proper attribution in footnotes is kind of cute and anachronistic. But all the same, I still feel it’s worth spending my Saturday morning to spill some ink about it. (2)

This is available 20 years after release from confinement, or if no confinement from sentencing – as long as you have no class A misdemeanor, felony, or capital felony in the last 20 years.

Perhaps North Carolina should seriously consider a similar law.

As Jordan tells Stewart, “There are 100 million people in this country that have a criminal record. There’s 100 million of us here! We’ve served our time. We’ve paid our debt to society, and we’re facing 40,000 legal restrictions! When will my sentence end?” Watch

The Problem with Jon Stewart season two is airing weekly on Fridays on Apple TV+ right now.

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

Many citizens know the Miranda v. Arizona case, where police must inform suspects of their rights before questioning. An appearance at a local sheriff’s office that is supposed to be a verification check turns into a line of police questioning. There are no Miranda rights presented to the registry community. Instead, it is quite the opposite effect. Police use an open-warrant tactic to investigate a group of citizens that continually lose rights at every in-person visit.

The right to remain silent doesn’t appear to be an option for people on the registry in North Carolina. Registrants often complain to NCRSOL about deputies who pepper them with questions unrelated to an in-person appearance requirement. Instead, the in-person condition quickly escalates, becoming an investigatory moment for police to ask anything they want, where civil rights are completely ignored. Those that do attempt to challenge deputies are promptly threatened with a non-compliance arrest. Registrants are often dominated or mentally and emotionally drained to comply, only to have the same police tactics repeated in another six months or ninety days.

Perhaps the state’s culprit of registry conditions is how the registry is managed. There are one hundred counties in the state, with an elected sheriff in each county. However, one hundred county law enforcement chiefs of the registry equate to one hundred different opinions on managing a statewide regulatory scheme. Additionally, the registry has no formalized intake or duplicative measures on paper. Each county creates its version of unofficial forms, making them appear official without any disclaimers of consequences.

Another culprit of spending waste is the certified letter standard on how registrants are informed. In-person registry letters are delivered by certified mail to every active registrant in the state. Registrants sign a postal release and then take the same document to the sheriff’s office to sign again. Is this practical? COVID and postal deliveries were met with many registrants complaining to NCRSOL of certified mail not being delivered or constructively placed back in the postal system as undeliverable without question, which triggered an investigation where Miranda was entirely ignored.

Lastly, another issue is where deputies perform home checks of registrants. Deputies have been known to appear at registrants’ homes knocking on doors in the early hours of the morning or dark hours of the night to verify a registrant. However, police begin questioning the validity of the person that answers the door or will wait until a person appears to make an unnecessary verification and a waste of valuable police resources.

The state registry isn’t a true statewide managed program. It is an outsourced multitudinous policing experiment supervised by political, social, and personal leadership influences inflicting more harm to civil rights than its intended purpose of protecting the general public. The time has come for the state’s registry to end unnecessary in-person appearances that primarily are used as a tool for unconstitutional police questioning and snap investigations.

We should be able to live in a state where we trust those that protect and serve our communities. But equally, citizens without probationary requirements should be able to live in peace without superfluous police knock searches and in-person examinations.

‘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.

The arctic blast is expected to bring severe weather in the form of thunderstorms, ice, damaging winds, and low temperatures in the teens, according to the Governor.

“With the possibility of icy conditions in the western part of the state and below average temperatures expected as an arctic mass approaches… a State of Emergency [was signed] today to activate the state’s emergency operations plan, waive transportation regulations to help the transport of fuel and critical supplies, help first responders and protect consumers from price gouging,” Cooper’s office said.

Tuesday saw temperatures in the high 30s, with the low in the low 30s. But Wednesday will offer the first chance of severe weather with snow projected in the forecast.

Then, on Thursday, thunderstorms are possible with damaging winds and the transition to cold temperatures.

Those low temperatures will drop as far down as 17 degrees, and stay there Friday-Sunday. This brings the true threat of the arctic blast.

“Most areas will see overnight lows in the teens, with afternoon highs struggling to climb above freezing. Even colder temperatures are expected across the mountains. Due to the duration of cold temperatures, especially across western N.C., water in poorly insulated or open pipes may freeze,” Gov. Cooper’s office said.

Additionally, the strong wind gusts across multiple days has a chance to present downed trees, power outages, and wind chill values in the single digits across North Carolina.

To keep safe during winter weather, North Carolina Emergency Management advises residents and visitors to follow these tips:

• Pay close attention to your local forecast and be prepared for what’s expected in your area;
• Keep cell phones, mobile devices and spare batteries charged;
• Use a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather radio or a weather alert app on your phone to receive emergency weather alerts;
• Dress warmly. Wear multiple layers of thin clothing instead of a single layer of thick clothing;
• Store an emergency kit in your vehicle. Include scraper, jumper cables, tow chain, sand/salt, blankets, flashlight, first-aid kit and road map;
• Gather emergency supplies for your pet including leash and feeding supplies, enough food for several days and a pet travel carrier;
• Do not leave pets outside for long periods of time during freezing weather; and
• Look out for your friends, neighbors and the elderly during winter weather.

The official State of Emergency document can be read here.

If you are at risk of homelessness or are actively homeless due to registry conditions, please contact North Carolina Health and Human Services to locate appropriate assistance.