LAKE CHARLES, LA (KPLC) –A Lake Charles man was arrested after he didn’t pay the required $60 state sex offender fee authorities said.
Lake Charles police detectives arrested ____ ____ ____. Wednesday and booked him into the Calcasieu Correctional Center, according to Deputy Chief Mark Kraus. He is charged with failure to register/notify as a sex offender — failure to pay fee. His bail is set at $2,500. Full Article
We’ll make it impossible for you to get a job then we’ll throw you in jail for not being able to pay the asshat fee we created. This is clearly ex post facto punishment!
(Or is it just the standard Price Club membership fee?)
Memory fails me, but I suspect the Nazis required Jews to pay for their own mandatory registration.
I am of mixed feelings about these fees and for the following reason: its imposition, where it is imposed, puts sex offender registration laws in a particularly revealing light, making dramatically clear that they are not about civil regulation but about punishment. A person who clearly does not benefit from fees which they are being compelled to pay (under threat of arrest and imprisonment) is not someone about whom it could be said is simply being “regulated”. Instead, it can only be seen as a “fine” which serves as punishment for simply existing, one without the accrual of any benefit to himself whatsoever.
I think that this documented practice, which seems to be in place in a number of states, would surely be terribly useful evidence for any Supreme Court challenge of sex offender registration laws.
Great to here! The guy is probably homeless, unemployed and hopeless. So, where would he get the money? This is a very disturbing article. The registered people are required to pay to register? If this isn’t punishment, I don’t know what is. You need to sue this State!
What an extremely critical piece of police work (detectives really?) and truly a cornerstone effort to maximize public safety.
This law falls clearly under entrapment. What is in the water there that makes public officials so dumb and hateful?
In the 1971 US Supreme Court case Tate v. Short (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/395/), it was found to be unconstitutional to impose a fine as a sentence and then automatically convert it into “a jail term solely because the defendant is indigent and cannot forthwith pay the fine in full.”
In the 1983 ruling for Bearden v. Georgia the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment bars courts from revoking probation for a failure to pay a fine without first inquiring into a person’s ability to pay and considering whether there are adequate alternatives to imprisonment.
If he didn’t have the money then they can’t legally lock him up per this U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
Maybe it’s a “fee” and not a “fine” as David stated above. Remember people – sex offender registration and sex offender restrictions are supposedly not punishment. They are established civil practices to protect public safety. We all know this is all really punishment disguised as something to protect the public.
It’s crazy that this country can makes laws that are verbatim of the Nazi regime and think its ok. It shouldn’t matter who it applies to its the begining of Nazi Germany all over again