The Alliance for Constitutional Sex Offense Laws (ACSOL) is dedicated to protecting the Constitution by restoring the civil rights of registrants and their families. In order to achieve that objective, ACSOL will educate and litigate as well as support or oppose legislation. The ACSOL website and recordings are provided as a service to registrants, registrants’ families, and others for general information only. The information on the website and in the recordings are not designed to provide legal or other advice or to create an attorney-client relationship. You should not take, or refrain from taking, action based on their content. Prior results and case studies do not guarantee a similar outcome in future representations. ACSOL accepts no responsibility for any loss or damages that may result from accessing or reliance on content on the ACSOL website and recordings and disclaim, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, any and all liability with respect to acts or omissions made by registrants, registrants’ families and others on the basis of content on the ACSOL website.
Important News / Announcements
Janice's Journal
General News Feed
Florida City to Consider Significant Increase Residency Restrictions
The City of Westlake, Florida, is scheduled to consider tomorrow a significant increase in its residency restrictions from 1,000 feet to 2,500 feet. If the city ordinance is adopted, most individuals convicted of a sex offense involving a minor who is 15 years or younger would be prohibited from living near schools, libraries, day care centers, parks, playgrounds, community centers, day camps or any...
CA: Man died in San Diego jail after deputies wrongly placed him in cell with violent offender, outside review finds
Source: msn.com 7/13/24 San Diego sheriff’s deputies failed to take reasonable measures to protect a low-level sex offender when they put him in a jail cell with a high-level violent offender, the county’s civilian oversight board has ruled. The low-level sex offender, a 56-year-old man named Derek Thomas Baker who was sent to jail for failing to properly register, was beaten to death in...
CA: Montgomery County man gets $431,000 for time wrongly listed on sex offender registry
Source: wsls.com 7/13/24 MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Va. – A Montgomery County man is finally getting closure after he was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. Closure in the amount of nearly half a million dollars. David Kingrea received over $55,000 last year from the Commonwealth for the time he spent in jail in 2014 for a crime he didn’t commit. But that’s not where...
Out of Step: U.S. Policy on Voting Rights in Global Perspective
Source: sentencingproject.org 6/27/24 The United States is an outlier nation in that it strips voting rights from millions of citizens solely on the basis of a criminal conviction. As of 2022, over 4.4 million people in the United States were disenfranchised due to a felony conviction. This is due in part to over 50 years of U.S. mass incarceration, wherein the U.S. incarcerated population...
Convicted child rapist to represent Netherlands at Paris Olympics
Source: mlive.com 6/8/24 A convicted child rapist will compete at the Olympics in Paris. Steven van de Velde, 29, who was named to the Dutch beach volleyball team last month, was sentenced to four years in prison in Great Britain in 2016 following the rape of a 12-year-old girl two years earlier when he was 19, Reuters reported. Much like in the U.S. statutory...
ID: ‘What is the relevance?’ Idaho sheriff’s office post about sex offender irks Satanists
Source: eastidahonews.com 8/8/24 [ACSOL note: this article makes an important point about the lack of relevance about a persons religion] CASCADE (Idaho Statesman) — The Valley County Sheriff’s Office included an intriguing detail recently when it announced that a suspect pleaded guilty to possessing or accessing sexually exploitative material of a child. The result was a lot of online chatter and controversy. In a...
TN: Death penalty for child rapists does more harm than good. Tennessee erred on new law
Source: tennessean.com 7/7/24 If you expand the pool of potential capital defendants to include non-lethal child rape, you substantially increase the potential for wrongful convictions. Against the advice of child service providers and experts, the legislature recently passed a bill to expand the death penalty to individuals who sexually abuse children. As the mother of three young children, I understand the desire to punish...
CA Democrats ‘Water Down’ Sex Trafficking Bill. Good. The original version was overly punitive.
By: ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN California Democrats are taking heat for "water[ing] down" a "child sex trafficking bill." But—as anyone whose brain isn't completely broken by politics might imagine—this isn't a case of lawmakers trying to make life easy for people who abuse and exploit children. They're just trying to insert a smidge of sanity into the bill's punishment schemes. The scorn with which this has been...
MS: Mississippi’s sodomy law cost taxpayers nearly half a million dollars, but remains on the books
Source: dailykos.com 7/6/24 Mississippi coughed up more than $400,000 this year to attorneys who sued the state over an unconstitutional sodomy law that criminalizes oral and anal sex, and if a similar suit is filed in the future, it could pay even more money. The Legislature appropriated and paid the fees to civil rights attorneys from multiple legal organizations after Mississippi Attorneys General Jim...
AR: Civilian groups responsible for multiple arrests of alleged child predators in Arkansas
Source: 5newsonline.com 7/5/24 BENTON COUNTY, ARKANSAS, Ark. — Multiple different civilian groups have been credited with helping in the arrest of alleged child On June 26, Daniel ____ was arrested and booked in the Sebastian County Detention Center for possession or use of child sexual abuse material. An affidavit says that on May 26, officers responded to Rogers Avenue in Fort Smith for...
Sotomayor Is Right: The Supreme Court Should Reevaluate Absolute Immunity for Prosecutors
Source: reason.com 7/2/24 Consider the following hypothetical: You are jailed for two years as you await trial for murder. You are facing the death penalty. You have cancer, which relapsed during your incarceration without access to adequate treatment. And it turns out you were charged based on a false witness confession, which the local prosecutor allegedly destroyed evidence to obscure. Now imagine suing that...
It’s Time to Sign Up for ACSOL Zoom Conference to be held on September 20 and September 21
It's time to sign up for ACSOL's annual conference that will be held on Friday, September 20, and Saturday, September 21. The conference will be virtual and therefore accessible both by Zoom and by phone. The early bird discount price to attend the conference is $25. "This year's conference will offer a wide range of dynamic speakers that have important information to share," stated...
CA: Committee Agrees SB 1128 Won’t Be Applied Retroactively
The California Assembly Public Safety Committee today voted in favor of Senate Bill 1128 (SB 1128) that would require individuals convicted of PC 261.5, unlawful intercourse, who are at least 10 years older than their alleged victim, to register. During today's hearing, however, the Committee agreed that the bill would not be applied to those previously convicted of this offense. According to a report...
General Comments July 2024
Comments that are not specific to a certain post should go here, for the month of July 2024. Contributions should relate to the cause and goals of this organization and please, keep it courteous and civil. This section is not intended for posting links to news articles without additional relevant comment.
‘American Ninja Warrior’ winner Drew Drechsel sentenced to 10 years for child sex crimes
Source: msn.com 6/28/24 Andrew ‘Drew’ Drechsel, who won Season 11 of NBC’s American Ninja Warrior in 2019, has been sentenced to just over 10 years in prison after being charged with multiple child sex crimes. As reported by People, Drechsel was arrested at his home in Florida back in August 2020 after engaging in a sexual relationship with a teenage girl in 2014 after...
Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal agency power in Chevron case
Source: thehill.com 6/28/24 The Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to executive agencies’ power Friday by overruling a prominent precedent that bolstered their ability to implement regulations in wide areas of American life, including consumer and environmental protections. In an 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority upended a 40-year administrative law precedent that gave agencies across the federal government leeway to...
Janice’s Journal: It’s Time to Show You Care
We are a community. A community that includes people required to register, their families and those who support them. Some members of the community never committed a sex offense but pled guilty anyway. Some members of the community have been convicted of a non-violent, non-contact offense. And some members of the community have been convicted of heinous acts and designated as sexually violent predators....
Appellate Court Rules Everyone Convicted of PC 288.2 Must Register for Life
Source: ACSOL The Third District Court of Appeals in California issued a decision today stating that every person convicted of Penal Code (PC) Section 288.2, providing harmful material to a minor, must register for life including those whose felony conviction has been reduced to a misdemeanor. The Court based its opinion on an interpretation of PC Section 17(e) which states that judges cannot remove from...
Please Call to Oppose CA Senate Bill 1128 that Could Add up to 32,000 People to Registry
It's not too late to call members of the CA Assembly Public Safety Committee and let them know that you oppose Senate Bill 1128. The committee will hear that bill on July 2. Committee members need to know that if this bill is enacted into law, up to 32,000 people could be added to the registry according to the California Department of Justice. People...
ACLU Attorney to Speak at ACSOL Conference
ACLU attorney Kimberly Buddin has agreed to speak at the ACSOL conference on Friday, September 20. Buddin is senior policy counsel for the justice division of national ACLU. "Attorney Buddin is a dynamic speaker who is well informed regarding registrants, the challenges they and their families face as well as solutions to those challenges," stated ACSOL Executive Director Janice Bellucci. "She is a welcome...