A proposed Wyoming law geared toward making fewer sex offenders able to get their names off the sex offender registry died in the Senate Judiciary Committee  after lawmakers said the bill’s language confused, rather than clarified, the issue.

Committee Chairman Sen. Bill Landen, R-Casper, said he wants to resurrect a better version of the bill in time for next year’s legislative session.

Bill sponsor Rep. Christopher Knapp, R-Gillette, said he intended for House Bill 90 to broaden the category of sex offenders in Wyoming who cannot petition a judge to be removed from the sex offender registry.

Knapp told the Senate Judiciary Committee during its Monday meeting that he brought the bill after hearing a constituent’s story of a family member who committed suicide after enduring sexual assault.

“Some (victims) don’t make it out from their childhood memories, or teen-hood memories, or adulthood memories,” said Knapp. “Some succumb to their attack.”

He said he’d like to see moms of young children especially have lifetime access to sex offense data on more offenders.

Despite the bill’s goal, the language contained what Cara Chambers, director of the Wyoming Division of Victim Services, called “loopholes.”

Chambers said the bill would change portions of the state Sex Offender Registry Act without conforming the rest of the act, such as parts of the law addressing out-of-state offenders.

“We’re not capturing everybody,” said Chambers.

She said the bill’s exceptions allowing some offenders to apply to be de-registered after 25 years would not apply to people who’d committed sex crimes outside Wyoming, then moved to the state.

“So we’re missing a swath of folks,” she said.

Knapp said he’d be pleased to fix any loopholes and would like to see the bill advance after that.

Judges ‘May’  

Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, who voted against the bill while voicing concerns that it didn’t capture the entire issue, said there’s already a provision in law that judges may – but don’t have to – deregister certain people after a time period of clean living outside of prison or jail.

“Do courts take that very seriously?” asked Case. “I would imagine they do … make a considered analysis of whether this person shall be relieved of registration or not. It’s not entered into lightly.”

Case said he’d like to see the committee explore whether, and to what extent, people who have been removed from the registry go on to commit sex crimes.

“That’s a stat I would like to know,” he said.

‘Too Important’  

Landen agreed with Case, saying that the Judiciary Committee in the interim between legislative sessions should explore further the rates at which people reoffend and find ways to tighten the de-listing petition categories.

Sen. Ed Cooper, R-Ten Sleep, said he’s in favor of the concept but has concerns about the bill’s language.

“This is too important not to get right,” said Cooper.

Recidivism  

Both Chambers and Knapp said recidivism, or re-offense rates, for the sex offender population are not encouraging.

Chambers said sex criminals reoffend at a rate of about 25%, but those are only the ones who get caught. Sex crimes, she said, are troublingly underreported. She said she sympathized with the intent of the bill, despite finding its language incongruent with the law.

Knapp, quoting a global study performed by the Quebec government, said sex offenders reoffend more often as time passes.

“None of us can understand (it), but typically it’s premeditated and it’s a constant thought,” he said.    

Here’s Who Can’t Petition   

Under Wyoming law now, convicted sex offenders can not apply to be taken off the sex offender registry if they:

• Have kidnapped a child

• Have raped or committed other kinds of sexual assault against someone younger than 14

• Had sex with someone younger than 13 over whom they held authority

• Had sex with someone younger than 13 when they were younger than 16, but the victim was at least three years younger than the perpetrator

• Have committed incest.

Less-severe categorized sex offenders, such as sexual abusers of older teens, can apply under current law to be deregistered from the sex offender registry after 10 or 25 years, depending on the severity of their offenses.

They would have retained that ability under HB 90, unless they’d been convicted of sexual assault. Sexual assault usually denotes rape: forced sex, sex with someone who’s been drugged, sex with someone with a mental illness; sex with someone who is incarcerated, who has been threatened or who is physically helpless.

Sexual abuse, however, typically involves age differentials and minors, but not the elements of force and coercion tied to sexual assault.

https://cowboystatedaily.com/

JACOB SULLUM — This Sunday marks the 20th anniversary of Smith v. Doe, a Supreme Court decision that approved the retroactive application of Alaska’s sex offender registry, deeming it preventive rather than punitive. That ruling helped propagate several pernicious myths underlying a policy that every state has adopted without regard to its justice or effectiveness.

Writing for the majority in Smith, Justice Anthony Kennedy took it for granted that collecting and disseminating information about people convicted of sex offenses made sense as a public safety measure. But that premise was always doubtful.

The vast majority of sexual assaults, especially against children, are committed by relatives, friends, or acquaintances, and the perpetrators typically do not have prior sex-offense convictions. That means they would not show up on a registry even if someone bothered to check.

It is therefore not surprising that research finds little evidence to support Kennedy’s assumption that publicly accessible registries protect potential victims. Summarizing the evidence in a 2016 National Affairs article, Eli Lehrer noted that “virtually no well-controlled study shows any quantifiable benefit from the practice of notifying communities of sex offenders living in their midst.”

To reinforce the logic of registries, Kennedy averred that “the risk of recidivism posed by sex offenders is ‘frightening and high.'” He was quoting his own opinion in an earlier case, which in turn relied on an unsubstantiated estimate from a source who has publicly and repeatedly disavowed it.

According to Kennedy’s paraphrase, “the rate of recidivism of untreated offenders has been estimated to be as high as 80%.” By contrast, a 2003 Bureau of Justice Statistics study found that the three-year recidivism rate for sex offenders was 3.5 percent.

Studies covering longer periods find higher recidivism rates but still nothing remotely like 80 percent, even for high-risk offenders. Despite its empirical emptiness, Kennedy’s “frightening and high” claim has been quoted again and again in legal briefs and judicial opinions across the country.

Although registries are ostensibly based on the risk of recidivism, they apply indiscriminately to broad classes of people, even when there is little reason to think they pose an ongoing danger. Dissenting in Smith, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that Alaska’s law “applies to all convicted sex offenders, without regard to their future dangerousness.”

One of the men who challenged Alaska’s law, Ginsburg pointed out, “successfully completed a treatment program” and “gained early release on supervised probation in part because of his compliance with the program’s requirements and his apparent low risk of reoffense.” A court determined that “he had been successfully rehabilitated,” based partly on “psychiatric evaluations” indicating that he had “a very low risk of re-offending” and was “not a pedophile.”

That man nevertheless was required to renew his registration four times a year for the rest of his life. The online registry included his name, photograph, criminal record, address, physical description, date of birth, and place of employment, along with the license plate numbers of vehicles he used.

I occasionally write articles about things that are hitting me at the moment.  I found that as I made my daily commute to work, so many things would enter my mind.  I would literally hold my phone, hit the record button, and just talk out my thoughts.  These thoughts eventually became an article.  This was so therapeutic to me.  2020 is a year unlike any other.  I am no longer making my commute and have spent more time inside my house in the last ten months than I have in the last 15 years!

Does that mean the things of the world aren’t bothering me?  No.  Does that mean I am any less annoyed with the absurd laws and treatment of people on the registry?  Heck-to-the-NO!  Does that mean I have no complaints about the registry?  Absolutely not.  I have no idea why my thoughts aren’t stirring me up, getting me fired up to write and convince you to talk actions.  I have turned off the television far more than I used to.  I am sick to death of the news – and I’m pretty sure they are highly responsible for the reasons I get so wound up.  I just needed a break.

But as I sit here today thinking about the break I “needed,” I realize I can’t really afford to take that break.  If we stop pushing for positive change, if we all stop to take breaks, the lawmakers will continue making unconstitutional laws.  Those decisions usually have far more serious impacts than our lawmakers realize at the time they are clicking in their Yes /No votes before moving on to the next issue so they can close out their legislative session quickly.

Let’s be clear.  Supporting changes to the laws to help registrants and their families is NOT a popular campaign strategy.  It takes BOLDNESS to do what’s right rather than what gets you votes.  It takes BOLDNESS to slow down and learn the impacts of the registry.  It takes BOLDNESS to talk to colleagues and fellow lawmakers about taboo topics. It takes BOLDNESS to make common sense laws rather than quick-attention-getting laws.

What can you do right now, even a state of blah-ness like I am at the moment?  At a time when your motivation has waned?  At a time when you feel like all you can do is sit at home and wish 2020 away?  I’m starting my list….

1. Find the names of your Senator and House of Representative.
Email them – frequently.
Tell them stories.  Tell them what it is like to be on the Registry or a family member of the Registry.  Tell them your constitutional rights are impacted.  Tell them how this is double punishment (after serving time, after probation, and still on the registry).  Tell them the length of time on the registry.  Trust me – most have NO idea of these things.
2.  Join NCRSOL.  Read the newsletter.  Read the articles.
3.  Find 1 friend or family member to join NCRSOL and start reading the articles.  This isn’t just about membership drive – it’s about educating people with real-life examples of how the laws impact us.  We need people to stay current with the laws and the temperament of our legislators.
4.  Be bold!  Report situations to NCRSOL if you are being treated unfairly by employees, law enforcement, law makers, educators, etc.  We need to know about situations that are happening with people if they seem outside the boundaries of enforcement.  We need evidence of these situations.

You may be a registrant, but you are also a person.  You deserve fair treatment.  I will always, always, always say that if you are guilty of your charges, you must first focus on rehabilitation.  You CANNOT REOFFEND.  Period.  Make sure you’re working through treatment programs and dealing with that first.  Reoffending is the very issue any person in our society will latch on to.  If even ONE person is a recidivist (reoffender), then the assumption is that the thousands of registrants must be also.  That’s simply not the case.  Our lawmakers don’t know the statistics.  The public doesn’t know the statistics.  The media doesn’t know the statistics.  We do, and the recidivism rate is extremely low.  But it’s all about PERCEPTION.  The one reoffender WILL be published on the news and papers.  It will blow up into a big stink.  It will hurt every registrant and every family member by sheer perception of guilt.  So there’s my sermon, people.  DO. NOT. REOFFEND. EVER.

We must change the misconceptions about offenders.  We must educate people.  We must work towards fair treatment and reintegration into society.  The few volunteer leaders of NCRSOL cannot do it alone.  We need YOU.  We have seen so much growth in this organization in just a few years, but we can’t know what’s happening if you don’t share your stories with us.

Be the change you wish to see in the world. Be a Change Agent.  BE BOLD.
– Phoebe

By MICHAEL HOBBES . . . The first time Damian Winters got evicted was in 2015. He was living with his wife and two sons in suburban Nashville when his probation officer called his landlord and informed him that Winters was a registered sex offender.

Congratulations, Mr. Moore, et al: it would appear that you are truly doing your share to keep people safe, but let’s just look at the science: A Dept. of Justice study of all released sexual offenders in 1994, almost 10,000 persons, shows that 96.5% did not recidivate. 3.5% were convicted for committing another sexual crime.

Since child victims are normally the greatest concern with this issue, I have tried to find a study giving some indication of what percentage of sexually molested children were victims of repeat offenders. It appears those studies haven’t been done. Instead, I find statements by law enforcement personnel that in years of dealing with child sexual abuse cases, not one, or maybe one or two out of hundreds, was committed by a repeat offender.

What I find are studies showing that virtually all of those who sexually abuse children, as high as over 98% for young children, are those close to the children in their everyday lives and people highly unlikely to be on a sex offender registry. And what I find is that, as horrible as it is, sexual abuse of children accounts for only 7.6% of the abuse that children suffer, almost always at the hands of those who claim to love them.

She justified this by saying that there is “such a high rate of recidivism” for those who commit these types of offenses, and when another program regular indicated that she didn’t know what that meant, Ms. Hostin said, “He’ll reoffend; he’ll do it over and over again.” She stated it as fact, much the same way she would have said that the earth is round. No one blinked; no one questioned.

There is absolutely NO “high rate of recidivism” among registered sex offenders, and not a single academically-vetted study of recidivism that has ever demonstrated an across-the-board rate higher than 10% in more than twenty years of published statistical data.

In fact, what more recent and reliable studies (such as here, here, and here) DO demonstrate is that the average rate of recidivism among sex offenders nationwide hovers comfortably somewhere between 3 and 6 percent.

The ladies of “The View” should stop lying to the public by repeating false data as scientific truth.

Those in the scientific community as well as those, such as NARSOL, who advocate for truth and facts in legislation, must take every opportunity to challenge the Hollywood-type media when such false information is spoken as truth.

This is by no means the first popular talk-television program to throw out false figures and information about those who are labeled sexual offenders as though they were written in stone. And it almost certainly will not be the last.

The consumers of such programs do not know such remarks are made out of complete ignorance. It is possible that very few of them read, for example, the Washington Post, where they might encounter academic pieces filled with the actual facts about those who have been adjudicated for a previous sexual offense.

It is even less likely that they will have read actual research by learned scholars, experts in the field, or any of the huge body of evidence accumulated for the past twenty-plus years showing the very low reoffense rate for previously convicted sexual offenders.

The general American public gets its information from shows such as The View, Dr. Phil, and even Law and Order. This information shapes their views and beliefs. In reliance on those views and beliefs, they elect representatives who, often no more knowledgeable, create laws. When laws are created that are grounded on lies and myths rather than facts and evidence, everyone loses.

Not only do we end up with dysfunctional public policy —the public sex offender registry–and several million needlessly destroyed lives, but we totally fail to address the actual causes and possible remedies of the very real issue of sexual violence throughout our culture.

“This court has recognized that they have a high rate of recidivism and are very likely to do this again,” said the lawyer, Robert C. Montgomery, who was defending a North Carolina statute that bars sex offenders from using Facebook, Twitter and other social media services.

The Supreme Court has indeed said the risk that sex offenders will commit new crimes is “frightening and high.” That phrase, in a 2003 decision upholding Alaska’s sex offender registration law, has been exceptionally influential. It has appeared in more than 100 lower-court opinions, and it has helped justify laws that effectively banish registered sex offenders from many aspects of everyday life.

But there is vanishingly little evidence for the Supreme Court’s assertion that convicted sex offenders commit new offenses at very high rates. The story behind the notion, it turns out, starts with a throwaway line in a glossy magazine.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion in the 2003 case, Smith v. Doe, cited one of his own earlier opinions for support, and that opinion did include a startling statistic. “The rate of recidivism of untreated offenders has been estimated to be as high as 80 percent,” Justice Kennedy wrote in the earlier case, McKune v. Lile.

He cited what seemed to be a good source for the statistic: “A Practitioner’s Guide to Treating the Incarcerated Male Sex Offender,” published in 1988 by the Justice Department.

The guide, a compendium of papers from outside experts, is 231 pages long, and it contains lots of statistics on sex offender recidivism rates. Many of them were in the single digits, some a little higher. Only one source claimed an 80 percent rate, and the guide itself said that number might be exaggerated.

The source of the 80 percent figure was a 1986 article in Psychology Today, a magazine written for a general audience. The article was about a counseling program run by the authors, and they made a statement that could be good for business. “Most untreated sex offenders released from prison go on to commit more offenses — indeed, as many as 80 percent do,” the article said, without evidence or elaboration.

That’s it. The basis for much of American jurisprudence and legislation about sex offenders was rooted in an offhand and unsupported statement in a mass-market magazine, not a peer-reviewed journal.

“Unfortunately,” Melissa Hamilton wrote in a new article in The Boston College Law Review, “the Supreme Court’s scientifically dubious guidance on the actual risk of recidivism that sex offenders pose has been unquestionably repeated by almost all other lower courts that have upheld the public safety need for targeted sex offender restrictions.”

The most detailed examination of how all of this came to pass was in a 2015 article in Constitutional Commentary by Ira Mark Ellman and Tara Ellman, who were harshly critical of the Supreme Court.

Please read the remainder of this article in the New York Times.

Editor’s note: Melissa Hamilton (quoted above) will be a featured speaker at NARSOL’s June conference.

The specific program he entered, how he performed and whether he was seen as a high risk for re-offending, though, are all confidential under Ohio law.

Whatever treatment Golsby received, police say it didn’t stop him from the Feb. 8 abduction, rape and slaying of Reagan Tokes, a 21-year-old Ohio State University student. Golsby has been linked to the crime through DNA that was on file from his previous conviction.

Tokes’ death occurred three months after Golsby, 29, was released from prison for that 2011 attack, in which he was accused of forcing a woman to perform oral sex at knifepoint in a Grove City parking lot.

The Golsby case represents the public’s worst fears about convicted sex offenders — that they don’t respond to treatment and will strike again if released.

But those are myths, reinforced whenever such cases get extensive media coverage, said Melissa Hamilton, a law professor who has written extensively about sex offenders.

“These incredibly horrible stories occur, the media picks them up and the public reacts,” she said. “It stokes fears of sex offenders as people who are likely to re-offend. But the statistics don’t support it.”

Hamilton, a visiting criminal-law scholar at the University of Houston Law Center, said one of the most comprehensive studies on sex offenders was issued by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2003. It tracked more than 9,000 sex offenders released from prisons in 15 states, including Ohio, in 1994. Three years after their release, 5.3 percent of the offenders had been arrested for another sex crime.

“I wouldn’t characterize that as high-risk,” Hamilton said.

The sex offenders who were most likely to offend again were men whose victims were boys, not adults, the study found.

Two years ago, Ohio prison statistics showed that 11 percent of released sex offenders returned to prison on sex charges, compared with a recidivism rate of 28.7 percent for all inmates.

The Justice Department study made a similar finding: “Sex offenders in the study had a lower overall re-arrest rate than non-sex offenders.”

Please continue reading in The Columbus Dispatch

[Alert Conspiracy readers will recall that the Supreme Court has agreed to review a decision by the North Carolina Supreme Court that rejected a First Amendment challenge to a different section of the N.C. sex offender regulatory scheme — one that imposes criminal penalties on sex offenders who “access … commercial social networking websites” for any reason. Eugene and I have blogged extensively about this case: See here, here, here, and here].

In this case, the statute in question made it a Class H felony (punishable by “a presumptive term of imprisonment of 20 months) for sex offenders to “knowingly be” at any of the following locations:

(1) On the premises of any place intended primarily for the use, care, or supervision of minors, including, but not limited to, schools, children’s museums, child care centers, nurseries, and playgrounds.
(2) Within 300 feet of any location intended primarily for the use, care, or supervision of minors when the place is located on premises that are not intended primarily for the use, care, or supervision of minors, including, but not limited to, places described in subdivision (1) . . . that are located in malls, shopping centers, or other property open to the general public. [Or]
(3) At any place where minors gather for regularly scheduled educational, recreational, or social programs. NCGS 14-208.18(a).

The court held, first, that the provisions of subsection (3) are unconstitutionally vague; “neither an ordinary citizen nor a law enforcement officer could reasonably determine what activity was criminalized by subsection (a)(3).”

Two principal problems are evident in subsection (a)(3) which compel the conclusion it is unconstitutionally vague. In particular, a reasonable person, whether a restricted sex offender or a law enforcement officer, cannot reasonably determine (1) whether a program for minors is “regularly scheduled” or (2) what places qualify as those “where minors gather.” …

The term “regular” means happening at fixed intervals. Even if a restricted sex offender or law enforcement officer knew precisely how often and where the “scheduled programs” took place, the statute provides no principled standard at all for determining whether such programs are “regularly scheduled.” Notably, subsection (a)(3) provides no examples to guide restricted sex offenders or law enforcement as to how frequently the programs would need to occur in order to be “regularly scheduled.” …

Subsection (a)(3)’s “where minors gather” language is also without defining standards. For example, subsection (a)(3) does not explain how many minors must gather at the place. Subsection (a)(3) also does not explain whether a place where mixed groups of minors and adults gather, such as a community college that has some high school students or a church with a congregation of adults and minors, would be considered a restricted zone under subsection (a)(3).

Additionally, the court found that subsection (a)(2) could not withstand “intermediate scrutiny” under the First Amendment:

To pass intermediate scrutiny, a statute must materially advance[] an important or substantial [government] interest by redressing past harms or preventing future ones. In addition, it must have the right “fit.” That is, it cannot burden substantially more speech than is necessary to further the government’s legitimate interests.

The burden of establishing the required fit is placed “squarely upon the government,” and North Carolina failed to meet it — by a goodly distance, failing to present any evidence whatsoever that the statute advanced the state’s interest in protecting minors in any way. At trial, the district court “put the State on notice that its limited evidence was inadequate to meet its burden of proof, but the State “explicitly declined to introduce any additional evidence.”

[The State’s] decision to not provide expert testimony or statistical reports to the Court was somewhat unexpected. … The State tries to overcome its lack of data, social science or scientific research, legislative findings, or other empirical evidence with an appeal to “logic and common sense.” But neither anecdote, common sense, nor logic, in a vacuum, is sufficient to carry the State’s burden of proof.

[T]he State cannot rest its case on the conclusory assertion that minors would be “more exposed to harm without [this] prohibition than with it.” Without empirical data or other similar credible evidence, it is not possible to tell whether subsection (a)(2) — and specifically its application to offenders with only adult victims — responds at all to the State’s legitimate interest in protecting minors from sexual assault.”

That might seem an unspectacular point; if the State offers no evidence at all that the statutory prohibition does anything to ameliorate the evils at which it is aimed, it cannot possibly satisfy the State’s burden of demonstrating that the statute “materially advances” the State’s interest. It is noteworthy, however, because so many other courts have meekly accepted the “conclusory assertion,” based on “common sense,” that the statute does more good than harm, and does not burden more speech than necessary to accomplish that good. [In the other North Carolina case referred to above, for example, the state presented no evidence that the ban on accessing social networking sites was, in fact, effective in any way at protecting minors — but the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld it anyway].

So kudos to Judges Motz, Traxler and Agee. This is just what the federal courts are supposed to do when constitutional rights are at stake: hold the government’s feet to the fire, and demand that they demonstrate that have a damned good reason for doing what they’re doing.

(Source:The Volokh Conspiracy of The Washington Post.)

Jacob’s mother, Patty, lobbied Congress to pass the Jacob Wetterling Act in 1994, the same year the S.C. Legislature established a state registry. Since then, lawmakers have added layer upon layer of ever more burdensome requirements.

These laws are almost always trumpeted as “protecting children” and regularly cite the claim that “sex offenders often pose a high risk of re-offending” (S.C. Code of Laws, 23-3-400). However, a steadily growing body of evidence demonstrates that this premise is simply not true and that our sex-offender laws in fact do very little to protect children.

South Carolina now has more than 14,000 citizens on the registry; probably fewer than a thousand of those pose any real risk to the public. But you can’t identify them because the registry is cluttered with thousands of people whose crimes were committed decades ago, teens who had sex with other teens and countless minor offenses. Tier assignments confuse the issue further, giving the illusion of identifying the riskier registrants although they are unrelated to the risk of re-offense.

The fact is that the overwhelming majority of child sexual assaults are not committed by previously convicted sex offenders: 94 percent, according to a 2003 Department of Justice study. Numerous other studies have produced similar results. Turning that number around, it means that for all the expense and effort put into registries, they are, at best, relevant to only about 6 percent of child molesting cases. So we are focusing vast attention and resources on a very small segment of the crimes and doing very little to prevent the other 94 percent.

The Wetterling case provides a good illustration. Even though Jacob’s death provided the impetus to begin this crusade, the sad irony is that if all of today’s laws had been in existence in 1989, they would have done nothing whatsoever to protect Jacob Wetterling. Jacob’s killer had no previous sex crime convictions. He did not choose a victim from his neighborhood; Jacob was kidnapped some 30 miles from the perpetrator’s home.

The Justice Department study also demonstrated that re-offense rates of sex offenders are actually far below other offense groups: Only 3.5 percent of child molesters were convicted of another sex crime during the three-year study period.

South Carolina mandates lifetime registration, but a long-term study released last year by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation revealed that after former offenders remain offense-free for 15 years, the statistical probability of them committing a new sex crime was indistinguishable from the general population. The bottom line is that the state’s registry and related policies are consuming millions of dollars and imposing onerous restrictions on thousands of citizens, but are perilously close to useless.

It is time to change course. Interestingly, Patty Wetterling, who championed the original registry law, now advocates for scaling back registries, recognizing that what they have become has diminished their usefulness and caused untold collateral damage.

As our Legislature reconvenes in January, lawmakers need to take a long, hard look at the sex-offender registry and related laws. Consider what is actually supported by research and contemporary knowledge versus what has been passed as a result of 1980s-era myths and emotional knee-jerk reactions to isolated horrific crimes.

Scaling back the registry would no doubt raise the hackles of some who love to play the label-and-hate game, but doing so would be the most just and economically expedient thing to do. And the citizens of the state would be much better served by a smaller (and cheaper) registry that accurately identifies those who might pose a real risk.

Mr. Thurber is S.C. state advocate for Reform Sex Offender Laws; contact him at dthurber@scrsol.org.

Source: The State, Columbia, SC