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 MoreYear: 2013
Pavley 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…
Read MoreThe Justice Department Prosecuted A 10-Year-Old As A ‘Sex Offender’
A federal appeals court is getting ready to hear the case of a boy who was prosecuted for engaging in sex acts with other boys when he was just 10 years old, The Wall Street Journal reports. Lawyers for the unnamed boy are appealing a court’s ruling that found him “delinquent” — the juvenile equivalent of guilty — for having sex with other young boys on an Arizona Army base. Full Article
Read MoreOrange County Deputies Fired After Brutal Jail Killing Want More Taxpayer Money
While a group of inmates inside “F Barracks” at Orange County’s Theo Lacy Jail beat, kicked, stomped and sodomized another inmate for as long as 40 minutes on October 5, 2006, Deputy Kevin Taylor, the senior ranking officer with oversight responsibilities for the area, sat on the other side of a large window and later claimed he was too busy to hear the victim screaming for his life or to see any hint of the gruesome killing reminiscent of a hyena attack. Though prisoners insisted Taylor informed inmate shot-callers that…
Read MoreLA: Allen Parish considers raising sex offender registration rates [UPDATED with action]
ALLEN PARISH, LA (KPLC) – “I don’t like seeing people leaving an adjacent parish to come here as a sex offender because it’s more affordable, which is what I’m trying to say,” said Allen Parish Chief Deputy Ricky Johnson. It happened first in Lake Charles, then in Sulphur, a raise in sex offender registration rates. And now, Allen Parish officials say they are feeling the effects of those decisions. “It’s not a mass exodus from Calcasieu Parish, but we’ve had a few sex offenders that came to Allen Parish and they basically voiced…
Read MoreAL: Student facing charges for streaking at football game dead of apparent suicide
HARVEST, Alabama – The Sparkman High School community is mourning one of their own after a student apparently took his own life. ____ ____, 15, hanged himself Wednesday and died this morning from his injuries, Madison County Coroner Craig Whisenant said today. ____ death came less than a week after he was arrested for streaking across the Sparkman High football field during the Senators’ Sept. 27 football game against Grissom High School. Full Article Related: WHNT Coverage (since removed – cached page)
Read MoreSex offenders congregate to reform laws they consider too harsh
American Bar Association Journal – More than 700,000 people are now registered sex offenders, and some among that group are fighting to change or overturn laws that they consider too harsh. More than 100 people attended a conference held in Los Angeles a few weeks ago to advocate for reform, the New York Times reports. Those attending the meeting—and other conferences like it—claim the sex offender laws are unconstitutional and ineffective. In California, for example, sex offenders can’t live within 2,000 feet of a school, park or playground. In the state’s Orange…
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