Attorney General Josh Stein has had since 2017 to address sex offender issues and sheltering during hurricanes, yet hasn’t produced one memo or suggestion on how to resolve the issue. According to Mr. Stein’s election website promoting priorities of public safety, “To live our lives to the fullest, we must first be safe and secure at home and in our communities.” Mr. Stein doesn’t intend to live up to addressing safety for all since registrants are still banned from all hurricane shelters primarily because they are facilitated on school properties.

Mr. Stein should be reminded that people on the registry have been adjudicated in court for their past wrongdoings. Mr. Stein shouldn’t use the registry as punishment and banishment from basic essential needs and accesses to safety. However, this is exactly what the Attorney General continues to do each hurricane season.

But let’s not put the Attorney General in front of the bus just yet. Our legislative leadership should share some blame in this issue. The N.C. legislature has had nearly a decade to fix the law banning registrants from shelters on school properties. Since 2011, not one bill has been introduced on the house or senate floor to address the state of emergency conditions for registrants and their families.

But while N.C. Governor Roy Cooper stands in front of microphones requesting federal funding to mitigate an approaching hurricane, he also shares a tremendous responsibility of not addressing registrants at emergency shelter issues during his long tenure as Attorney General before he became elected to the states highest office.

It is time for state leaders to take a moment and think of the bigger picture. People on the registry are human beings that paid their price in court. However, people on the registry continue to be the “fear selling modern-day boogie man” used as pawns during elections. Enough is enough! Either we address the most challenging task today, or we will never address the issue at all. Registrants are humans and deserve the same benefits of safety as other humans. Registrants should have the right to unrestricted safety, security, and emergency shelter needs. Now is the time to call your state leaders and make your voice heard. Also, make your voice heard on election day. Vote, and vote for those that listen to your needs and concerns.

The bottom line is that the Governor, Legislature, and Attorney General since elected in 2017 could have addressed this issue, but didn’t. By the looks of things doesn’t seem interested in working hard for the people of North Carolina.

At least 21 states are creating laws to deal with consensual sexting between teens so they’re not dealing with felony charges.

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If passed into law the bill would require all registered sex offenders residing in North Carolina to pay an initial registration fee of ninety dollars and additional ninety dollars thereafter on the offender’s annual registration date. A provision in the bill allows county sheriffs to report delinquent accounts to the State Attorney General for civil collection actions. Additionally, requests for termination from the registry would be contingent upon registration fees are paid in full on time.

House Republicans overwhelmingly supported the bill while six Republican voted against. House Democrats added a substantial majority of support while eighteen Democrats voted no. If passed by the state Senate and onto the Governors desk for approval will undoubtedly create insufferable conditions for many registered sex offenders that are unemployed.

So much for the usefulness of verification checks, right?

Predictably enough, Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison doesn’t see it that way. In a July interview with CBS17, and in response to the incident in Halifax County, Sheriff Harrison announced that his office intended to perform verification checks at least six-times-a-year, and possibly more.

The Wake County Sheriff Department’s website states that “[b]y going above and beyond what the law requires, the Wake County Sheriff’s Office wants to use every means possible to better protect and serve the citizens of Wake County.”

But Sheriff Harrison isn’t merely going “above and beyond the law,” he’s deliberately operating outside the law and in flagrant violation of what NCGS 14-208.9A lawfully allows.

In North Carolina, registered citizens are notified by certified mail about their registration obligation every six months. If a registered citizen fails to verify his address by visiting the sheriff’s office within three days of receiving his notification, he is subject to arrest.

On paper, this is a sensible process for verifying the current address of a registered citizen because it minimizes the intrusion of law enforcement officers into the lives of people who are already subjected to an overwhelmingly invasive sex offender registration scheme exposing them to public ridicule and harassment 24-hours-a-day.

However, NCGS 14-208.9A also provides local sheriff departments the needed flexibility to physically investigate the “address last registered by [an] offender” in the event that the state’s prescribed mechanism for address verification is frustrated (owing to a registered citizen’s failure to respond to a rather expensive notification process).

But Sheriff Harrison is going well beyond the legislative intent and has decided to use sub-section (b) as a means to render virtually all of subsection (a) little more than a perfunctory inconvenience to citizens who will receive the exact same treatment by obeying the law as citizens who do not.

If Donnie’s deputies are going to violate the law and physically verify all the registered addresses in Wake County 6-times-a-year (by abusing the legislative intent for § 14-208.9A(b)), then why should my time be frittered away by following the law (§ 14-208.9A(a)), waiting for my official notification, and visiting the Sheriff’s office twice a year? What’s the point of it all?

No more onerous than the requirement to register one’s vehicle? I don’t think so! If I fail to register my vehicle, Donnie doesn’t send a deputy to my door in the first place.

I successfully performed my biannual duty to register on March 5. Ten days later, I left for a weekend of training in New York City from which I returned on Sunday, March 18. The next day, while walking back from my mailbox, I noticed a piece of trash at the edge of my lawn.

As I approached this piece of trash to retrieve it, I immediately noticed a sheriff’s badge printed on the letterhead. Two and two flashed in my head, and I was soon able to confirm that Investigator J. Moore (the Volksgemeinschaft never have first names, you know) had attempted to verify my home address on March 15, merely ten days AFTER I had done so myself!

That was a windy weekend in North Carolina and I doubt “J” Moore’s leaflet lasted too long nestled under the open ended arch of the storm door’s handle. But, I’m not entirely certain that he ever intended it to stay there for very long. In fact, I’m pretty confident that “J” Moore hoped in his joyful, little heart that the wind might somehow carry his missive throughout the entire neighborhood.

After all, printed on the back side of this screed of intimidation and inducement to fear was something for the neighbors to read. The good sheriff, in his devotion to service and duty to office, wants all his subjects to know that they, too, can be arrested and convicted of a felony offense for withholding or concealing information about a person required to register.

So much for the right to remain silent, huh? Oh, and by the way, the folks responsible for passing this law will soon be in television ads proclaiming their dedication to freedom and liberty and upholding the Constitutional rights of all American citizens. Don’t be fooled!

Even old Donnie (and he’s really starting to show his age at this point) will be on your ballot since it’s time for his re-election. My suspicion is that he’s going to run strong on a platform of making the public safe by hounding registered sex offenders AND their neighbors.

But here’s a few reasonable questions to ask: Is the public made safer when deputized officers are sidetracked with a duty to verify what’s already been verified? Is the public made safer when elected officials enforce laws that do not exist? Is the public made safer when neighbors are encouraged to rat on neighbors?

So much for the Golden Rule, huh?

If you have any compassion for your fellow man, or any concern for civil rights, human rights and justice, it behooves you to read David Feige’s well-timed op-ed column (New York Times, Sept. 12, 2017) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/opinion/when-junk-science-about-sex-offenders-infects-the-supreme-court.html and to view the accompanying eight minute video which addresses the distorted stereotyping of citizens labeled as sex offenders as well as the concomitant explosion of sex offender legislation https://narsol.org/2017/09/breaking-the-frightening-and-high-myth/. 

It is unfathomable that the highest Court in our nation relied on false information by which to support sex offender legislation. Support of such legislation, based on fear and inaccurate information over and above actual facts, is an affront to human rights, human decency, and to the livelihoods of our nation’s registered citizens and their families.

Mr. Feige emphasizes that in the coming months new cases before our highest court provide ample opportunity for re-examination of real evidence and real data. It follows that our state (and others) should do the same. Reliance by our highest Court on the falsehoods of an article published in a 1986 edition of Psychology Today (e.g. that recidivism rates of sex offenders are “frightening and high”), and to base laws on this falsehood is, by itself, perverse and ominous. There is numerous reputable research indicating that sex offender recidivism rates are quite low; on average about 3%. To base our nation’s laws on this “junk science,” to devastate a person’s ability to live in the community, to hold a job, and to provide a livelihood for himself and family, all these things are an affront to human decency, and no less our Constitution.

In re-examining sex offender registration laws, the Supreme Court and North Carolina must ask: What evidence exists to support them as valid and effective? Who are they for? Do they really keep children safer? What impact do they have on our citizens, our communities, and our businesses? Is there a political agenda here? Anyone who professes to legislate on behalf of our children’s safety is likely to get a vote, but fear-based laws based on false information, steeped in hysteria and ignorance, do more harm than good. We have only to look at Japanese internment camps during World War II for an example of how hysteria corrupts sound, constitutional law.

North Carolina doesn’t really have to wait for the Supreme Court to rights its wrong. It’s time our state set a good example for the nation to follow. We don’t need another HB2, another Packingham, or another Does v. Cooper to force us to do the right thing. North Carolina can reform its image, and, more importantly, take the higher ground by deciding to set a precedence of inclusiveness, by respecting the rights of all its citizens, and by allowing people who have committed crimes the opportunity to reintegrate and rejoin our communities as they demonstrate adherence to just and rational laws. Ostracization and exclusion only serve to breed more crime and dependence, not growth or productivity.

It’s my fervent hope that next September, the North Carolina Mountain State Fair will welcome ALL the citizens of North Carolina to celebrate the wondrous bounties of its state. As abundant flowers draw the honey bee, laws that promote civil rights and human dignity foster growth and resilience.

Our Opinion: Sex offenders’ social media ban needs a rewrite

Not all sex offenders are created equal.

A well-intentioned but overreaching state law barring registered sex offenders from using Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media — whether or not their crimes involved either children or the internet — is headed for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Durham resident Lester Gerard Packingham appealed his 2012 conviction of maintaining a social media profile as a sex offender, arguing that the state law is unconstitutional. The N.C. Court of Appeals agreed with Packingham in August 2013, but the state Supreme Court upheld the statute last year in a 4-2 ruling.

The federal high court agreed last month to let Packingham plead his case that the law violates the First Amendment by squelching ex-convicts’ online speech.

Under N.C. General Statute 14-202.5, sex offenders are prohibited from accessing commercial social networking websites that extend membership to minors. That sounds reasonable and necessary for pedophiles, but it’s a head-scratcher for offenders who have groped or sexually assaulted other adults.

Writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, Court of Appeals Judge Rick Elmore wrote in 2013 that the vague law “fails to target the ‘evil’ it is intended to rectify” — namely, child sexual predators trolling the internet for their next victim.

The state Supreme Court reversed the appellate panel, finding that the law regulated conduct rather than speech and that its definition of verboten websites left offenders with “ample alternative channels for communication.” Justices even provided examples, including recipe-sharing sites, job boards and a television news station’s website.

There’s likely to be a lot of legal hairsplitting over the state court’s “ample alternative channels” language, which is also the focal point of a friend-of-the-court brief filed by First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh.

Rather than getting into the weeds of that technical argument, we’ll appeal instead to common sense. What good does it do to arbitrarily ban all sex offenders from Facebook when most of those convicts have no interest in scoping out young users?

Registered sex offenders are about as reviled as any category of criminal. But the same label applied to rapists and child molesters is also used to tag teenagers who share racy photos or are punished for sexual relationships with slightly younger classmates.

Not only is North Carolina able to distinguish the former from the latter, it already does. The state applies the term “sexually violent predator” to those convicted of certain crimes and “recidivist” to those who reoffend. Those designations are included on the publicly searchable sex offender registry.

Instead of wasting taxpayer money to defend a carelessly crafted law in the nation’s highest court, why not revise the statute to exclude only child sexual predators from social networking sites?

Lawmakers have two choices: Stand behind sloppy work and risk a ruling that could open the floodgates to all sex offenders or fix their mistake and protect children by shutting out those who pose a genuine danger.  (Source)