So it’s no surprise that people search the sex offender registration website to make sure that no one convicted of a sexual offense lives near them or more worrisome, their children’s school, day care or neighborhood park. The premise is simple: to make people feel safer in their community. But are they truly safer? Have we been relying on the wrong system?

Long before the world was introduced to the predatory behavior of people like Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, lawmakers across the nation worked to deter victimization and protect citizens from sexual assault. They enacted policies governing individuals convicted of sexual offenses — known as sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws. These policies allow for law enforcement to maintain a list to track and monitor sex offenders, and registry websites provide the public with registrants’ addresses and identifying information.

But do registration and notification policies actually deter individuals inclined to commit sexual offenses and protect citizens?

A new study of ours shows that these policies are not effective in deterring crime or protecting citizens. We summarized 25 years of research and 474,640 formerly incarcerated sex offenders. We found that such policies do not reduce sexual or non-sexual recidivism.

No reduction. At all.

If the policies are ineffective, then why do we have them?

These policies exist as a governmental response to community fear and outrage. There is political pressure to increase public safety. The problem is that these laws were enacted very quickly after child murder cases and became wide-reaching governmental mandates without research to back their existence and effectiveness. Fast forward 25 years, and the public and politicians are relying on window-dressing to feel safe.

This false sense of safety comes with real consequences.

First, sex offender registration and notification policies have had a net-widening effect, making more registrants eligible and for considerably longer periods of time even though individuals convicted of sexual offenses age out of crime, as do others.

Second, these policies use a “one size fits all” approach and misallocate resources and supervision to offenders with lower risk levels. The ever-growing registry has become a fiscal burden for states.

Finally, sex offender registration and notification policies continue to label and stigmatize individuals after they have served their time. Subsequent dehumanization disrupts any meager attempts to reintegrate the person back into society. Despite what seems like common sense, these policies create obstacles to the factors that promote law-abiding behavior: jobs, secure housing and social support.

There are better ways. We need to educate the public, law enforcement and policy makers that governmental oversight of registrants is not a feasible solution to protecting potential sexual abuse victims. This is not a call to “go soft” on crime, it is an encouragement to “go smart” on crime and use data to make informed decisions. This reimagining requires us as a society to confront the uncomfortable truth that those who commit sexual offenses are usually not strangers — they are more likely to be the most trusted figures around us — our loved ones, our babysitters, coaches, teachers and close family friends.

In the end, parents, community members, and potential home buyers and renters will continue to frequent the sex offender registration website, gathering a false sense of safety — potentially at their own peril — until we as a society are willing to address who the perpetrators of sexual violence are and accept the fact that sex offender registration and notification policies demonstrate little value in making a meaningful impact. Tough-on-crime policies are not always smart policies. It is time to do better.

Meghan M. Mitchell (mmitchell@ucf.edu; @MeghanMMitchell) is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Central Florida. Kristen M. Zgoba (kzgoba@fiu.edu) is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida International University. Alex R. Piquero (axp1954@miami.edu; @DrAlexPiquero) is chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminology and Arts & Sciences Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami.

Source: Tampa Bay Times

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?

For reasons that these three crime-fighting quill-smiths either overlooked or cautiously avoided, such a law, if ever passed (and that’s dubious, at best), would have to be written in such a way that it only applied to a registered citizen’s prior residences. And, as time passed, these residences would grow in number and ubiquity as registered citizens move here and yon. Fast forward 20 or 30 years and there would likely be registered addresses all over the state, and lots of unregistered people living in the former addresses of registered citizens. These innocent people would have no idea why and no legal remedy to free themselves, or their property, from the stigma of registration.

Or let’s think of another “hypothetical” that is more likely to suffer from the stupendous and absurdly moronic opinion that has issued from the mind of not one, but THREE, “educated” journalists in Halifax County. My registered address was once the same as my mother’s. Now that I have moved, her home address is no longer associated with my registration. That’s the way it should be.

But I do occasionally visit my mother. And I typically stay the night in her home at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and sometimes even for the New Year holiday. It would be tremendously burdensome for me to track down a legitimate law enforcement agency on Christmas Eve just for the ridiculous purpose of letting them know (and ostensibly the entire population of the planet) that I was planning to spend the night at my former registered residence which just also happens to be my mom’s, a home built by her dad and sitting on property that has been home to the family since the 1820s.

The Herald‘s suggested fix to this newly discovered “loophole” would not serve any legitimate public safety purpose but WOULD merely expose an elderly citizen of North Carolina to potential threats and harassment by the very people the editorial staff is likely to inflame: gun totin’ sycophants who remain whipped into a psychotic frenzy by the constant drumbeat of sex offender paranoia that has gripped the nation for more than two decades (beginning with the now laughable histrionics of alleged satanic rituals involving children in the late 1980s).

There is not a great deal to worry about here. Not only is the Daily Herald‘s readership abysmally low, but the suggested fix would likely find its way to the first garbage receptacle in legislative bill drafting after staff attorneys got done with it. But what is most disturbing is how far out of touch the media increasingly seems amidst a growing consensus among legal and academic experts that our nation’s policies regarding people formerly convicted of a sex offense are based on false statistical data and an unreasonable (and unsupported) level of fear among rank and file Americans.

But it’s that very fear that the editorial staff intends on fostering. Fear sells newspapers. And boy do they ever need to sell a few!

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