A state law takes effect that day prohibiting sex offenders from being near places where children “frequently congregate” – including schools, parks, arcades and day care centers – when minors are present.

Robin Vanderwall, president of N.C. Reform Sex Offender Laws, calls the legislation more restrictive to sex offenders than any in the country, except Alabama.

“Even Walmart and McDonald’s will be shut down to them,” said Vanderwall, whose organization opposes the new law.

Gov. Pat McCrory signed the bill into law in July. It is meant to replace portions of a 2008 law that a U.S. District Court judge ruled earlier this year to be unconstitutionally vague and overly broad.

On Dec. 7, Judge James Beaty struck down a segment of the former state law that prohibited registered sex offenders from entering places where a portion of the premises is intended for the use, care or supervision of children. Those places could include churches with day care centers.

Four months later, Beaty struck down another subsection of the law that restricts registered sex offenders from being within 300 feet of locations where children gather.

Beaty, of the Middle District of North Carolina, left intact a provision that bars registered sex offenders from entering schools, daycare centers and other places used exclusively by children.

Beaty noted in his December ruling that nothing in it “prevents the General Assembly from amending the statute or enacting entirely new restrictions that comply with constitutional requirements.”

The state appealed Beaty’s rulings to the N.C. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The appeal is pending. Shortly after it was filed, the General Assembly approved the new law.

Under it, Brandon Michael Wiggins will be arrested if he continues to work at the car repair shop after Aug. 31, said Ronnie Mitchell, the lawyer for the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office.

Mitchell said Wiggins – who came to the Observer’s attention because of a resident’s complaint – will be told about the law and its consequences before the deadline. He said the more than 650 people on Cumberland County’s sex offender registry will be notified of the new law by mail.

Wiggins, 30, was convicted of second-degree sexual exploitation of a minor in March 2015. He was put on probation for 2 1/2 years.

“I got into something I shouldn’t have two years ago,” Wiggins said. “I learned from it. I’m trying to make a living, you know. I’m trying to move on from it.”

Wiggins said he has worked at the repair shop for about a month. He said he understands concerns about the shop being close to the Boys & Girls Club and a daycare.

“I understand that being an issue or a problem, but I don’t have any interest in doing anything but my job, which is to serve customers and work on cars,” he said.

Wiggins said he worries that his name in the newspaper will make it difficult to get another job.

North Carolina has had a sex offender registry since Jan. 1, 1996. Sex offenders who commit heinous crimes, such as rape of a child, are required to remain on the registry for life. Lesser offenses had required offenders to be on the registry for 10 years. The legislature amended the law in 2006, requiring many offenders to remain on the registry for 30 years.

The latest lawsuit was filed on behalf of five registered sex offenders – named as John Does – against McCrory and Attorney General Roy Cooper.

Among the five was a man convicted in 1995 of receiving material involving the sexual exploitation of a minor. The man served five years in federal prison, where he completed a sex offender treatment program. He later completed terms of his probation.

He had been attending his local church, which contained a child-care center within 300 feet of the main congregation hall. He was arrested in 2011 for violating the sex offender law when an anonymous caller reported him. The charge was later dropped.

According to the lawsuit, all five people who sued the state “have expressed concern and confusion regarding precisely where they are prohibited from going. Many times when the Plaintiffs have asked for clarification, they have received conflicting answers, noncommittal answers, or no answer at all.”

The Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office is responsible for keeping track of the sex offenders on the county’s registry – making sure they follow all of the rules, including registering as a sex offender and notifying the office when they move.

Mitchell said changes in the law are needed. He said he wants to see sex offenders who abuse children under age 13 treated more harshly than others.

“The ones who do deliberate acts and engage in deliberate forcible acts and deliberate sexual acts against minors have committed acts that are reprehensible, that should have both direct and collateral consequences,” Mitchell said, adding that people who commit those acts are most likely to be repeat offenders. (Read full story in The Fayetteville Observer)

Turner was only sentenced to six months in jail; the leniency of the sentence has led to an effort to recall the judge. Being placed on a list seems like a small punishment in comparison to a prison term. But sex offender registries were never meant to be a punishment—and since they were introduced in the mid-1990s, they have proven to be both ineffective and often unjust.

The original goal of registries was not to provide restitution, but to protect communities. Reading the victim’s statement, it’s easy to see why sex offender registries seem like a reasonable and necessary response to crimes like Turner’s. Following a party, Turner dragged the victim behind a dumpster and penetrated her with his fingers. He was only stopped when two Swedish students physically chased him away, and then captured him. In response to his conviction, he has blamed a culture of drinking and partying on campus, rather than taking responsibility for his own violence.

Given the horrific nature of his actions, and his effort to shift blame, some might argue there’s a risk he could victimize others. Placing him on the sex offender registry, in theory, should warn communities of a potential threat. As one recent pro-registry editorial argued, “the rights of the victims, and the protection thereof, outweigh any perceived infringement of the rights of the criminals.”

The truth, though, is that there’s very little evidence that sex offender registries increase safety in any material way. A 2014 study conducted by Purdue University economics professor Jillian B. Carr of people on the North Carolina sex offender registry found that being on the registry had no effect on recidivism. That’s consistent with a 2007 report by Human Rights Watch, which looked at various studies and concluded that sex offender registries did little to prevent sexual violence. (Read the rest of the article online at Quartz)

In an apparently unprecedented series of events, the Kansas Supreme Court on Friday overruled three of its own opinions, also released Friday, regarding the state’s sex offender registration laws.

In three separate opinions issued Friday, the court found 2011 changes to the sex offender registry law cannot be applied retroactively to offenders convicted before the law took effect.

But then in a fourth opinion, also released Friday, the court found that those rulings were incorrect.

Attorneys across the state said they couldn’t recall a situation where the court reversed itself in rulings issued on the same day.

“We continue to study today’s peculiar group of Kansas Supreme Court decisions involving the offender registration act,” Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt said in a written statement. “In the coming days, we will endeavor to discern what the court actually has done and will assess all options for next steps.”

The highly unusual circumstance appear to be the result of a one-justice change in the makeup of the court.

The panel that decided the three cases concerning the 2011 changes included a senior district court judge, who sided with the majority in the 4-3 decisions. That interim judge was serving on the court while there was a vacancy.

But for the fourth case, the newest Supreme Court justice, Caleb Stegall, replaced the district court judge. That case also was decided 4-3, with Stegall casting the deciding vote.

The three justices who were part of the majority in the first three opinions became the minority in the fourth opinion.

The upshot was a finding that the Kansas law requiring lifetime registration for convicted sex offenders did not constitute additional punishment for a crime.

Therefore, the law does not violate federal or Kansas constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment, the court ruled in that fourth case.

In the three other cases, the court ruled that the law did constitute an additional punishment and said offenders convicted of crimes before 2011 could not have their 10-year registration periods extended to 25 years because the 25-year law took effect after they committed their crimes.

But those rulings apparently apply only to those three offenders.

Others will be governed by the fourth ruling Friday.

“While I’m happy that my client may get relief, it’s unfortunate that others similarly situated will not,” said attorney Meryl Carver-Allmond, who represented one of the men covered by the rulings on the 2011 law change.

She said it was “ludicrous” to say that the offender registry requirement is not punishment.

“The court had it right in the first instance,” said Carver-Allmond. “And it’s disappointing that the recent change in personnel steered them off course.”

Jeff Dazey, the attorney for one of the other men covered by the opinions in the 2011 law change, said he was “pleased, disappointed and somewhat perplexed” by the rulings.

“Virtually every year the Kansas legislature has modified the law to make registration more difficult and more expensive, while simultaneously increasing the penalties for failing to register and increasing the time that a person has to register,” Dazey said. “I firmly believe that applying these draconian terms and conditions on people whose initial registration duties expired is unconstitutional.”

Christopher Joseph, attorney for the third man covered by the 2011 change in the law, said it was an area of the law that is evolving.

Joseph said he “has little doubt” that courts across the country, including the U.S. Supreme Court, will ultimately agree that offender registration laws are “punitive.”

Source: The Kansas City Star

This was written as a rebuttal to an editorial in the Longview, WA Daily News:

In response to your March 13 editorial, “Laws help keep children safe,” I would first like to thank you for your condemnation of vigilante activity. Fully agreeing with the title of your op-ed, I too want laws that help keep children safe, and there is nothing about vengeance-motivated activity that works toward that goal.

The organization you criticize, WAR, or Women Against Registry, is one of several organizations that advocate for laws that do just that — keep children safe. Another is SOSEN, Sex Offender Solutions and Education Network. And yet another is RSOL, Reform Sex Offender Laws, Inc. These organizations agree with what research studies show: laws that keep children — and indeed everyone — safe must, in order to do that, be based on facts and empirical evidence.

The public registry system is not based on empirical evidence, and, in your defense of it, you say that the murder of Adam Walsh is “not uncommon.” Actually, it is very rare. Whether or not Adam’s kidnapping and subsequent murder were sexually motivated will never be known, but it was a heinous crime as was the murder of Megan Kanka and another handful of horrific child murders at the hands of murderers.

Your statement that WAR grew out of murders such as these is untrue. WAR, SOSEN, and RSOL grew out of a realization, based on research, that public registration of those who had previously committed a sexual offense — not murdered, not decapitated, but committed an offense ranging from the trivial to the serious — actually was not deterring sexual crimes against children at all. It was in some cases increasing the risk for re-offense, and it was and is creating conditions that seriously interfere with mandated rehabilitative efforts.

It was and does negatively impact the lives of family members, especially the children of registrants. This is well documented through research studies.

According to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health, “[t]hese policies have led to multiple collateral consequences, creating an ominous environment that inhibits successful reintegration and may contribute to an increasing risk for recidivism. In fact, evidence on the effectiveness of these laws suggests that they may not prevent recidivism or sexual violence and result in more harm than good.”

Reform organizations do not defend the actions that have triggered registration, and we recognize appropriate punishment as desirable and necessary, but it is difficult to claim that, in all cases, the children suffer through the actions of the registrant family member rather than the effects of public registration. Many situations exist where the offense was committed when the registrant was a child or juvenile himself. A number of cases involve premarital sex where the offender and “victim” later married and had a family, yet the offender remains on a public registry, often for life, and his children suffer greatly due to it. This continuation of punishment long after a sentence has been completed is but another form of vengeance and amounts to legalized, governmental vigilante action, exacting punishment far beyond what the courts assessed.

The impotency of the public registry to deter re-offense and to protect children is well documented also. Dr. Bill O’Leary is a forensic psychologist and longtime critic of public notification and tracking. He notes, “95 percent of sexual abuse occurs between a victim and a known acquaintance, not a stranger living down the street. One of the most unethical pieces of the situation has been saying that we need to do this to prevent sexual abuse when we know statistically that this has nothing to do with preventing sexual abuse.”

According to the United States Department of Justice, from 1992 to 2010 there was a steep decline in all major crime. There is no evidence that a decrease in sexual crime is due to our current policies, and that theory is actually negated by research.

Many people and organizations advocate every day for policies that will keep children safe, but we know that until the focus is put on the victims and the actual facts about child sexual abuse, that is highly unlikely to occur.

Source at Daily News, Longview, Washington.

The justices sided with Lester Nichols, a Kansas man who moved to the Philippines in 2012 after his release from prison without telling authorities.

Nichols was arrested in Manila and brought back to the United States, where he was convicted of failing to update his sex-offender registration. A federal appeals court upheld his conviction, but the Supreme Court reversed that.

Writing for the court, Justice Samuel Alito said a straightforward reading of the 2006 Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act does not require registry updates after a sex offender moves out of the United States.

The justices took up the case to resolve an unusual split between appeals courts that had reached different outcomes in the cases of two men who lived within a few miles of each other – one in Kansas City, Kansas, the other in Kansas City, Missouri.

The federal appeals court in Denver upheld Nichols’ conviction, but the federal appeals court in St. Louis said a convicted sex offender from Missouri did not have to register after he also moved to the Philippines.

Alito said the high court’s ruling on Monday does not allow sex offenders to escape any punishment for leaving the country without notice. Congress recently criminalized the failure of sex offenders to provide information about “travel in foreign commerce.” Alito said the new law would apply to Nichols’ conduct and noted that Nichols’ actions also violated state law in Kansas.

“We are thus reassured that our holding today is not likely to create loopholes and deficiencies,” in the federal legislation designed to keep track of sex offenders, Alito said.

The case is Nichols v. United States, 15-5238.
(from CBSNews)

“I actually met with a group of people in New Jersey and sat across from Megan Kanka’s grandfather,” Longo said.

The 1994 murder of 7-year-old Kanka gave rise to the public disclosure of sexual offender registries through what are commonly known as Megan’s laws.

“I told the grandfather of the young girl, Megan Kanka, who was raped and murdered, that I appreciate what happened to his granddaughter but this law is not going to make people safe,” Longo added. “Those laws did nothing. It didn’t prevent anything.”

That has not stopped an article he co-wrote in Psychology Today 30 years ago from being used to uphold and provide evidence for the “public’s need” for the registries.

“I just think it’s unfortunate,” Longo said. “What can I say?

“People use statistics and they will twist statistics,” he added. “People are going to take anything that works to their advantage, or twist a quote, to make it work to their advantage and I just think it’s unfortunate.”

Article

An anecdotal quip of Longo’s from the March 1986 article, that up to 80 percent of untreated sexual offenders go on to commit more sexual crimes, has helped shape the modern view of these offenders as being immutable. This is a view that Longo opposes, and he has spent roughly four decades treating and rehabilitating these very same offenders.

“With treatment we were getting these people down to recidivism rates of 20 percent and below,” Longo said. “My belief then, as is my belief now, is that treatment should be mandated for these people because we can treat them and treat them successfully, and reduce the amount of sex crimes in America.”

The Psychology Today article was the sole reference in a 1988 U.S. Department of Justice field practitioner’s guide for treating incarcerated sexual offenders cited by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in a 2002 opinion upholding compelled treatment based in part on the “frightening and high” re-offense rate of up to 80 percent for sexual offenders, according to Ira Ellman, a professor of Law at Arizona State University who first noted the connection to Longo’s writing in a recent Constitutional Commentary article.

In the same article, in which Longo touted a treatment program he headed at the time to rehabilitate incarcerated sexual offenders at the Oregon State Hospital, he wrote that re-offense rates for untreated sexual offenders could be anywhere from 35 to 80 percent.

Kennedy again referenced the “frightening and high” re-offense rate a year later when the court upheld an Alaska law that subjected offenders who had been convicted prior to the sexual offender registry’s creation to placement on the registry.

“Alaska could conclude that a conviction for a sex offense provides evidence of substantial risk of recidivism,” Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion for Smith v. Doe. “The legislature’s findings are consistent with grave concerns over the high rate of recidivism among convicted sex offenders and their dangerousness as a class.”

The U.S. Department of Justice now states on its website that the rate at which released sexual offenders are rearrested for new sexual offenses is as low as 3 to 10 percent.

Both of the opinions penned by Kennedy overturned lower court decisions opposing the state laws, according to Ellman.

In the Smith decision, the two individuals bringing suit were released from prison in 1990, remained offense-free for more than a decade, and one had been given custody of his daughter after being deemed rehabilitated by the courts, Ellman wrote.

A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court declined comment, stating only that “as a rule, the Justices do not elaborate upon or discuss the opinions of the Court, which speak for themselves.”

Statistics

As Ellman points out, Psychology Today is not an academic journal and is written for a lay-audience. As such, Longo’s article does not provide any citations regarding where the information came from.

“Anything I would have said would have been based on the science at that time and things that were factual and not my opinion,” Longo said. “… That statistic, at that point in time, was the best statistic we had at that point in time in the history of the field. That recidivism rate is probably higher than we would say today. I don’t think the recidivism rate for untreated sex offenders is necessarily 80 percent. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I would say that’s a very high estimate.”

So, how does this article make its way to be one of the linchpin facts in two Supreme Court cases?

The simplest answer is that the courts just assumed it was true.

“I don’t think (the Supreme Court) knew that’s where it came from,” Ellman said. “The solicitor general filed an amicus brief saying there was an 80 percent re-offense rate and cited a justice department manual. I suspect that Justice Kennedy and the clerks never went beyond that.

“The (solicitor general) has a lot of credibility and he’s citing a justice department manual, which you might assume has credibility,” he added. “I think they just burrowed the reference from the amicus brief.”

Ellman, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, said the court staff likely only looked to see if the information was stated in the cited manual, and never checked the veracity of the underlying claim.

“In this case, if you went to the justice department manual … the justice department manual does say that,” he said. “My guess is a clerk checked it that far, but just because the justice department manual said that, the justice department didn’t do any independent research on its own.”

The editor of the field manual herself, Barbara K. Schwartz, has rebuked the current policies and use of public registries.

In a 2010 essay titled “No More Victims,” which Schwartz used as the preface to an updated “Handbook of Sexual Offender Treatment,” she called the current public policies “very expensive” and “ineffective at preventing sexual assault.”

Schwartz wrote that the policies, like public registries, are counter-intuitive and interfere with the factors known to reduce re-offense rate.

“Having worked in the field of sex offender treatment since 1971, I now feel that I have fallen down the ‘the rabbit hole’ and am watching the Red Queen scream, ‘Off with their head,’” Schwartz wrote. “Is there no end to the counterproductive response to sex offenders and the problem of sexual assault … If individuals who found inappropriate ways to achieve basic human needs before they committed a sexual assault cannot fulfill their needs after they have offended, is that a setup for reoffending?”  (republished from The Sentinel)