Imagine not being able to land a job because you have the same name and birth date as a convicted sex offender. A Buffalo man is facing that very tough situation right now. It is an indescribable frustration facing John Lamar Johnson, a North Buffalo man with family to provide for, who says he’s not giving up until his name is cleared. When your name is John Johnson, you know you’re not the only one out there. “I told my mom I wanted to change it. She said no, I gave you…
Read MoreMonth: February 2014
IN: Frigid temperatures leave ex-offenders out in the cold
There’s controversy in Muncie over where convicted sex offenders should be allowed to live and the issue is becoming more heated because of the bitter cold. Mark called the city’s Jackson Street bridge home after his release from prison, where he served time for a sex offense involving a minor. When temperatures turn dangerously cold, Mark and four to eight other child sex offenders came to Christian Ministry Shelter, until the director got the news they must all leave. Full Article
Read MoreIL: Sex Offenders May Be Banned From Illinois County Fairs
A bill under consideration would ban registered sex offenders from going to county fairs. “There is a loophole in the current sex offender law that says you can’t work at the county fairs or you can’t be a vendor at the county fairs, but you can attend them,” Illinois State Representative Mike Smiddy told News 8′s Angie Sharp on Wednesday, February 12th, 2014. State Rep. Smiddy heard about the loophole following the 2013 Whiteside County Fair. The State’s Attorney for Whiteside County called him and explained an instance where a…
Read MoreOur misguided child porn laws do little to protect children
In the letter he wrote on the day he hanged himself last month, Ryan Loskarn talked about the shame and guilt he felt after he was caught with child pornography. Loskarn, former chief of staff to Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), did not mention fear of prison, perhaps because he had already resolved to end his life. But for anyone in his position who planned to stay alive, the prospect of spending years behind bars would loom large. The legal treatment of people caught with child pornography is so harsh that they can end up…
Read More6 Million Americans Without a Voice
The right to vote is the foundation of any democracy, yet nearly six million Americans are denied that right, in many cases for life, because they have been convicted of a crime. Some states disenfranchise more than 7 percent of their adult citizens. In an unflinching speech before a civil rights conference Tuesday morning, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. described this shameful aspect of our justice system for what it is: a “profoundly outdated” practice that is unjust and counterproductive. Full Editorial
Read MoreThoughts to Share…
Here are a few thoughts I had to share. Practice self reliance and personal accountability (behave yourself or get help) because any mistake will reflect on the whole registry. If you have a business, hire a registrant. If you’re an employee, recommend a local registrant. Be the best person you can be at all times so when your registration slips out society will have to reassess their view of who is registered. Then the politicians won’t be able to scare them into voting for some stupid law. Contribute to CA…
Read MoreTX: Dallas man says he was wrongly included in sex offender database
DALLAS — ____ ____ says the City of Dallas wrongfully made him register as a sex offender for 13 years. Now he wants the city to pay up. “I just feel like I deserve to be recompensed for what’s done happen in all this,” said ____, 43. “I just feel like it’s wrong.” ____ filed a $3 million federal lawsuit early last month, saying police violated his civil rights by refusing to recognize that he did not have a legal obligation to register. He filed the lawsuit after the city ultimately agreed…
Read MoreReport Describes Financial ‘Abuses’ of Private Probation
More than 1,000 courts in several states allow private companies to oversee probation, often with little oversight or regulation, according to a new report from the non-profit Human Rights Watch. The report describes “abusive” financial practices inflicted by the “offender-funded” model of privatized probation. The findings are primarily derived from more than 75 interviews conducted with people in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Private probation companies supervise people who are on probation for minor offenses, collecting outstanding debts and court costs. They often add on their own fees — for items such…
Read MoreTwisting Sexual-Assault Statistics
It is estimated that one in five women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there — one in five,” President Obama said on Wednesday. The occasion for this lecture: He was announcing the creation of a White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. It’s a startlingly high number that figured prominently in the leads of media reports on the announcement. As NRO contributor Heather Mac Donald pointed out the last time the administration bandied it about, if it were true it would mean that women at…
Read MoreVA: Judge orders former Stafford teen’s name removed from sex offender registry, vacates sentence
Circuit Judge Jane Marum Roush on Monday ordered former Stafford County teen ____ ____’s name removed from the state’s Sex Offender Registry and vacated the convictions that put him there. The order resulted from Roush’s ruling that court-appointed attorney Denise Rafferty failed to provide effective assistance of counsel to Coker in 2007 as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Since January 2009, a team of attorneys with the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia School of Law, the law school’s Child Advocacy Clinic and JustChildren/Legal Aid of Charlottesville has been working…
Read MoreSexual assaults by US military in Japan unlikely to end in prison
At US military bases in Japan, most service members found culpable in sex crimes in recent years did not go to prison, according to internal Department of Defence documents. Instead, in a review of hundreds of cases filed in America’s largest overseas military installation, offenders were fined, demoted, restricted to their bases or removed from the military. Full Article
Read MoreScalia Says Internment Ruling Could Happen Again
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told law students at the University of Hawaii on Monday that the nation’s highest court was wrong to uphold the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, but he wouldn’t be surprised if the court issued a similar ruling during a future conflict. Scalia was responding to a question about the court’s 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the convictions of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu for violating an order to report to an internment camp. “Well of course Korematsu was…
Read MoreKY: Sex-offender registry misguided thinking
I am a sex offender. I know well the tremendous power of those words. In 2007, I pled guilty to possession of child pornography. Nothing here is meant to defend what I did or to minimize the gravity of my actions. I had a major problem with pornography, and I was far too deep in denial and too scared to reach out to anyone. Full Op-Ed Piece Related: RSO Registered sex offender wants permission to practice law
Read MoreNV: County to charge inmates for food, doctor
ELKO — Between food, services, housing and utilities, taxpayers are footing a bill of about $85 per day for each inmate locked in the Elko County Jail, according to Sheriff Jim Pitts. With a jail population that’s almost constantly at the facility’s 120 inmate capacity, lock-up expenses add up to more than $10,000 per day and millions of dollars each year, according to Pitts’ estimation. But the sheriff has proposed shifting a portion of those costs onto the inmates. The county commission on Wednesday wholly supported the idea, which outlines a $6…
Read MoreEXONERATIONS ON THE RISE IN 2013
This week, the National Registry of Exonerations, housed at the University of Michigan Law School, released new data showing that 2013 was the high-water mark year for exonerations to date , with 87 prisoners freed. This led some legal media, like our colleagues over at Above the Law, to write headlines like “Instance of Known Prosecutor FAILS are on the Rise.” In their words, “More exonerations suggest that more resources are being spent going back over closed cases and freeing people based on new or better evidence. But the report is also chilling proof that…
Read MoreNew Study Finds That State Crime Labs Are Paid Per Conviction
I’ve previously written about the cognitive bias problem in state crime labs. This is the bias that can creep into the work of crime lab analysts when they report to, say, a state police agency, or the state attorney general. If they’re considered part of the state’s “team” — if performance reviews and job assessments are done by police or prosecutors — even the most honest and conscientious of analysts are at risk of cognitive bias. Hence, the countless and continuing crime lab scandals we’ve seen over the last couple…
Read MoreWe Have It All Wrong. Shunning Offenders is Not Working
A Reaction to the Woody Allen Story I’ve been working on an article about caring for the bad dad, the man who molested my sister and tore my family apart, and what it has been to sift through the wake of my father’s life in photos, scrapbooks, and letters. After he suffered a stroke early in 2013, he couldn’t care for himself and I did something I thought I’d never do — I brought him home to live with me. Full Op-Ed Piece
Read MoreWA: Yakima County court hears arguments over releasing sex-offender names
YAKIMA, Wash. — The names of Yakima County’s low-level sex offenders will remain out of public view while a judge reviews arguments on whether they should be released. Yakima County Superior Court Judge Blaine Gibson put off making a decision Thursday in order to read an amended legal brief arguing against releasing the names that was handed to him just before court convened. Also, he said he wanted to review a Benton County ruling blocking Mesa resident Donna Zink’s request for information on low-level sex offenders in that county. Full Article…
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