In the 28 years since the law has passed, sex offender registries have become a tool for the public to identify offenders and find out where they live. Now one national organization is working to eliminate those registries altogether. Robin Vander Wall serves as the chair of the National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws, or NARSOL.

“Our vision has always been that this is a bad tool,” Robin Vander Wall says.

Vander Wall is calling for an end to sex offender registries nationwide, saying it prevents former offenders from moving on with their lives. Vander Wall said that NARSOL feels the constant exposure from the internet isn’t fair and only fuels violence and discrimination.

Others say that the sex offender registry is a vital tool designed to help people protect themselves. Some sexual assault convictions can lead to a sentence of life in prison. Some who advocate for keeping the registries consider serious sex offenses as malicious and evil as murder, such as Executive Director of Standing Together Against Rape — or STAR Alaska — Keely Olson.

“Child sexual assault, kidnapping, those kinds of things; they’re unclassified felonies and they’re going to be treated akin to a homicide,” Olson said.

STAR Alaska provides free services to survivors of sexual trauma, which they say is a critical component of their recovery. Olson feels sex offender registries are especially important in Alaska. . . .

Sex offender registries were created before the internet exploded, and Vander Wall says since that happened it has created chaos and fear, virtually casting offenders out of society. He says the public has a misconception that sex offenders are more likely to reoffend. . . .

“If we really live in a culture that believes in second chances, is committed to restoration and restorative justice, then there’s just no place in that culture for a sex offender registry, period,” Vander Wall says.

Watch the video on KTUU.   

Sex offenders in particular are seldom given the nuance and rehabilitation we afford to other people with criminal histories. Their lives are forever affected by the convictions they carry, just like other people convicted of crimes. But unlike some others, they face additional punishment at the hands of the state, even after they’ve served their time. In North Carolina, residents who are registered sex offenders . . .  are not allowed to attend any agricultural fair, including the N.C. State Fair underway in Raleigh. . . . .

Laws like this come from an understandable desire to protect people, particularly children. The reality is that it’s a difficult law to enforce that does not differentiate between varying degrees of sex crimes, or take into consideration the everyday situations that are most responsible for childhood sexual abuse. Advocates for sex offenders see it as an extra burden that is not applied to other offenders with criminal records of violence. “It’s egregious and outrageous. It’s overkill,” Robin Vander Wall, president of North Carolina Association for Rational Sex Offense Law, said in a press release. “This is a matter of fundamental fairness and equal protection under both the state and federal constitutions.”   . . .

[U]nder the law, people convicted of crimes must serve their punishments. Once those punishments are fulfilled, they should be allowed to re-enter society. That’s how it works for other criminal offenses, and it’s the best way to reduce the number of people who re-offend. Even people convicted of manslaughter or assault are allowed to return to society and try to be better people. We don’t ban them from the fair.

Read the full  piece here at the News and Observer.

Each year, JustLeadershipUSA (JLUSA) identifies effective and successful advocate leaders throughout the United States and invites them to apply for acceptance into a Cohort of formerly incarcerated individuals in order to participate in a year-long program of training and instruction intended to enhance their skill and capacity to lead others in the movement to drastically reduce our nation’s addiction to prisons.

JLUSA focuses exclusively on leaders who are already engaged in impactful criminal justice advocacy work and who have demonstrated the potential to become more successful reform advocates through exposure to training, new networks of reform, and additional resources from which to draw strength and endurance for the battles ahead.

Robin traveled to New York City in mid-January for the first of four intensive training sessions facilitated by David K. Mensah of DKBWAVE Training and Consulting, an organization that provides leadership training and executive coaching to for-profit and non-profit corporations throughout the United States.

“It was an incredible experience, and I’m still trying to get my head around it. I’m enthused about what JLUSA is attempting to achieve, and I am really thrilled that its leaders understand the importance of including registered citizens in the work of reforming our nation’s burgeoning prison problem,” Robin said.

“It’s really important for everyone to know that I was among friends who understand the terrible harm caused by sex offender registries. These people get it! They want the same thing we want: An end to unreasonable punishment and an opportunity for full and complete restoration of citizens into their communities. I am proud to be included in JLUSA’s 2018 Cohort of leaders.”

Robin W. Vander Wall was active as a campaign manager and consultant on a number of competitive municipal, state, and federal level campaigns prior to his arrest in 2003. At the time of his arrest, Robin was a third-year law student at Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach and was scheduled to receive joint degrees in Law (J.D.) and Political Management (M.A.) the following Spring. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from The Citadel. From 1993 to 1997, Robin was president and publisher of The Citizen, a weekly tabloid on politics and culture published in Raleigh, NC. Since 2009, Robin has devoted much of his time as an advocate for citizens required to register as sex offenders. He presently serves as vice-chair for NARSOL and is the founder and president of NARSOL’s coordinating foundation, Vivante Espero.

Molnar and her allies have considered lobbying the Legislature to ban these ordinances, but they’ve found lawmakers unreceptive in the past to any bill perceived to benefit sex offenders. So she decided to go to court.

Molnar enlisted a small army of parents and siblings of sex offenders to compile a list of towns with such ordinances, and assembled research showing that the rules can actually make the public less safe. She enlisted Denton lawyer Richard Gladden. He was already representing Taylor Rice, who as a 20 year-old had sex with a 14 year-old he met online and now, after his conviction for sexual assault, was legally barred from living with his parents because their house was too close to a high school’s baseball field. Gladden had found a 2007 opinion by then-attorney general (now governor) Greg Abbott saying that towns with fewer than 5,000 residents — which fall into a particular legal category in Texas — are not authorized by the state to enact such restrictions on their own.

Gladden sent letters threatening lawsuits to 46 city councils. Within two months, half of them had repealed their ordinances. Gladden and Molnar are currently suing 11 of the remaining towns.

Restrictions on where registered sex offenders can work, live, and visit vary widely from state to state and city to city. Over the last few years, Molnar and her counterparts in other states have come to the same conclusion: Politicians aren’t going to help them. “Who wants to risk being called a pedophile-lover?” says Robin van der Wall, a North Carolina registrant on the board of the national group Reform Sex Offender Laws.

So the activists have taken the route favored by other politically unpopular groups and turned to the legal system, where they are more likely to encounter judges insulated from electoral concerns. Their legal claims vary, but in numerous cases, reformers have argued that these restrictions associated with registration add up to a sort of second sentence, and that they are defined in a vague way that makes them difficult to abide by. In some cases, the plaintiffs have argued that individual towns have enacted restrictions above and beyond what states allow them to impose. (Please continue reading at The Marshall Project)

This article was published in collaboration with The Texas Observer.