MONTREAL – The Crown wants a six-year prison sentence for a 21-year-old man who killed a Montreal father with a single punch. The victim, Iqbal Ahmed, was simply trying to bring his wayward teen daughter home but other teens attacked him, thinking he was a pedophile. A judge will decide Francis Belanger’s fate in December following sentencing hearings that ended this week. Full Article
Read MoreMonth: October 2013
VA: Sex Offender Fears Force Church to Close Homeless Shelter
A Virginia church will close its homeless shelter this fall due to fears that the site was housing sex offenders. “This was a rough decision for us because we looked at the overflow shelters as an extension of our ministry,” Reverend Tyrone Nelson, who pastors Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church, told WTVR News. Nelson added that it appeared that sex offenders were not only spending the night at the church but that they were “actually using our address. They were using the shelter and probably had been using the shelter on…
Read MoreMI: ACLU – Day care bills place ‘nearly impossible burden’ on sex offenders, police
LANSING, MI — Senate-approved legislation that would prohibit registered sex offenders from loitering near day care centers in Michigan appears to have hit a speed bump on the House side. Shelly Weisberg with the ACLU of Michigan, testifying before the House Criminal Justice Committee on Wednesday, warned that Senate Bills 76 and 77 would create “a nearly impossible burden on listed offenders and on law enforcement.” Full Article
Read MoreNew law targets sex offenders who disarm tracking devices
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown cracked down on sex offenders who disarm their electronic trackers while on parole, signing legislation Saturday requiring that they stay in jail once they are caught. Some counties with severely crowded jails have freed such offenders almost immediately after detaining them for tampering with the GPS devices, a Times investigation found this year. The bill Brown approved requires that the offenders be sentenced to 180 days and serve their entire parole revocation in jail. Full Article
Read MoreLouisiana is the world’s prison capital
Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly five times Iran’s, 13 times China’s and 20 times Germany’s. Full Article
Read MoreCA RSOL Meeting on November 16 – Los Angeles
California RSOL will hold its next monthly meeting on Saturday November 16 at the usual location, the ACLU building at 1313 W. 8th Street in Los Angeles. The meeting will start at 10 am and cover general topics of interest, as well as specific issues pertinent at meeting time, in addition to offering invaluable opportunities to network with others affected by this issue, as well as activists and professionals. One topic already on the agenda is the expected decision on the “Godinez” case, which prohibits 290 Registrants from entering Orange County…
Read MorePavley Bill Hiking Penalties for Kiddie Porn is Law
Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 145 by Sen. Fran Pavley on Saturday, raising the maximum penalty for the most serious child pornography offenses.The bill was sponsored by Ventura County District Attorney Greg Totten and strongly supported by the California District Attorneys Association. SB 145 received the unanimous support of both the Assembly and the Senate because it addresses problems with existing California law. Full Article
Read MoreAL: Lawmaker lobs bill to castrate sex offenders
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) – An Alabama lawmaker is proposing a bill for the 2014 legislative session to further punish convicted child predators before they’re released from prison. The Florence Times Daily (http://bit.ly/1fuBdgI) reports Republican Rep. Steve Hurst of Munford is trying again to pass a bill requiring sex offenders over the age of 21 whose victims were 12 or younger to be surgically castrated before being released from prison. Under Hurst’s bill, the castration would be financed by the sex offender. A version of the same bill Hurst tried passing last…
Read MoreBrown vetoes bill giving sex abuse victims more time to file lawsuits
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that would have given some childhood sex abuse victims more time to file lawsuits, after a heated opposition campaign led by the Catholic Church that stretched from Capitol hallways to Los Angeles church pews. In an unusually detailed three-page veto message released Saturday, the Democratic governor, a former Jesuit seminarian, said the bill raised questions of equal treatment of public and private employers. Pointing to a centuries-long tradition of limiting the period when legal claims can be filed, Brown said institutions should…
Read MoreHow Many More Children Will Die?
PRESS RELEASE: Women Against Registry (W.A.R.), a group of mothers, sisters, wives and other loved ones of those on the sex offender registry, are asking how many, how many more of our young have to feel so distraught and view their future as so hopeless that they take their lives? Will it take your son or daughter getting ensnared before you demand change before legislators and the Justice Department are made to understand this is too much? On October 2, 2013 Christian Adamek, a 15-year-old from Huntsville, AL, committed suicide after…
Read MorePaedophiles Driven Out By ‘Pocket Parks’
Communities in the US who say their neighbourhoods have been blighted by high concentrations of registered sex offenders have found an unusual way of driving them away. The phenomenon of ‘pocket parks’, which are built on patches of waste land, is spreading across the country and forcing sex offenders to move out. Under Jessica’s Law, which is named in honour of nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford who was abducted and murdered by a convicted sex offender, anyone on the register cannot live within 2,000 feet of a park or school. Because of that,…
Read MoreOK: Sex offenders removed from registry
TAHLEQUAH — Several convicted sex offenders residing in Cherokee County have been removed from the state’s sex offender registry following a ruling from the Oklahoma Supreme Court last June. Cherokee County Sheriff’s Investigator James Brown has received letters from the state indicating two offenders of the 100-plus living here have been removed from the Department of Corrections registry, so far. Full Article
Read MoreProsecution Is Not the Way to Save a 10-Year-Old Child
When children under 12 engage in exploitative sexual behavior, it is often a result of abuse or exposure to sex acts that they themselves have experienced. These children need mental health treatment and family interventions, not probation and blacklists. Why then is the U.S. government prosecuting a young boy in federal court for behavior he engaged in when he was just 10 years old? The child, one of the youngest defendants ever pursued by the U.S. Department of Justice, is accused of engaging in sex acts with other young boys on a U.S.…
Read MorePayment Providers And Google Will Kill The Mug-Shot Extortion Industry Faster Than Lawmakers Can
‘A picture lasts forever’ is likely not the thought going through a person’s head when he or she is being booked at the clink (well, unless that person is Lindsay Lohan). Yet mugshots have over the last few years taken on an Internet permanence thanks to a host of sites that use liberal public records laws to get their hands on mugshots and make them part of people’s Google footprints. The industry first started getting scrutiny two years ago when Wired highlighted a Florida mugshot site that made its money…
Read More2007: How Can You Distinguish a Budding Pedophile From a Kid With Real Boundary Problems?
From 2007: In the early 1980s, a therapist named Robert Longo was treating adolescent boys who had committed sex offenses. Their offenses ranged from fondling girls a few years younger than they were to outright rape of young children. As part of their treatment, the boys had to keep journals — which Longo read — in which they detailed their sexual fantasies and logged how frequently they masturbated to those fantasies. They created “relapse-prevention plans,” based on the idea that sex-offending is like an addiction and that teenagers need to…
Read MoreNC: Sex offender pleaded to living near day cares
GRAHAM — A registered sex offender pleaded guilty Monday to violating the state’s sex offender laws by living within 1,000 feet of two child-care centers. Before he was charged in April, Alamance County Sheriff’s deputies told ____ ____ ____, 52, that he couldn’t live at his residence on Morningside Drive in Burlington. In warrants, deputies stated that ____’s residence was within 747 feet of Unique Ventures Child Care Services and 638 feet from Gospel Tabernacle day care. … He pleaded guilty Monday to two counts of sex offender residence violation and one…
Read MoreFederal Youth Case on Trial
Two years ago federal prosecutors won a delinquency finding against a boy accused of engaging in sex acts when he was 10 years old with other young boys on an Army base in Arizona—one of the youngest defendants ever pursued by the U.S. Justice Department. The case, now being reviewed by the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, could open a new front in a long-running debate about how to handle juvenile sex offenders, whose cases generally have been tried in state, not federal, courts. The records are sealed because…
Read MoreCity of Orange Gives Final Approval to Repeal of Sex Offender Ordinance
The City Council of the City of Orange, in a vote of 4 to 1, gave final approval on October 8 to repeal a city law that required registered citizens to post a sign in front of their residence on Halloween. The City’s first vote on this issue took place on September 24, only six days after a lawsuit was filed in federal district court challenging the ordinance. Prior to filing the lawsuit, the City was asked on September 3 to repeal the ordinance, but failed to consider the issue…
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