General Comments September 2016

Comments that are not specific to a certain post should go here, for the month of September 2016. Contributions should relate to the cause and goals of this organization and please, keep it courteous and civil.

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Can someone find the exact penal code for the following two questions:

1. What is the exact statute that says a registrant has to keep his/her registration receipt with oneself or he/she can go to jail?

-AND-

2. A registrant has to identify him/herself to law enforcement as 290 if a registrant ever stopped by police?

It’s for my cousin (for a project he has).

Thanks

great suggestion anonymous ya ill highlight any changes or revisions great fredback….

I apologize moderator for not staying on topic in the other comments sections I hope I will be able to continue my quest for assistance in the general comments section…that being said…since I didn’t receive any negative feedback about my right to reputation argument I am assuming that particular argument is comprehensive and pretty sound correct??? correct me if im wrong… so now I will post my equal protection argument so hopefully I can get assistance finding relevant case law,anymore empirical evidence and any feedback that would strengthen that particular argument..once again thank you all who are contributing to this…I will be using what information you have already giving me on here and am researching what ms.carpenter has produced also anything else would be great…

I believe all I need to add to my right to reputation arguments is more documented evidence on the collateral damages caused by the registry from respected news outlets such as the New York times, Washington post, USA today, Wall Street Journal, BBC, NPR, PBS or any other respected sources.. I need a link to each article and a brief description…..

Since following this forum over a year, I’ve read many comments by Californian registrants & their experiences regarding 290. This is what I concluded about California law. Compared to many states, California is more light in the incarceration area when it comes to sex crimes which will get you prison time in many Midwestern & southern states. Maybe Californians learned their lesson from 3 strikes your out, bad drug laws, and overcrowded prisons drawing costly lawsuits. Whatever the reason, and from comments I’ve read on this forum, a lot of people convicted of sex crimes in California are getting light jail time or probation.

HOWEVER, the state of California makes up lenient incarceration policies with severe statues & regulations revolving around 290. Number 1 is lifetime registration regardless of the offense. Other annoyances include registering on your birthday, not being able to go near your kids’ school….now the state wants registrant usernames, email accounts, gotta post no candy here signs on Halloween, and most importantly, the state authorizes a law enforcement brigade to check up on registrants anytime, anywhere, any chance they get. And I’m sure there’s host of other things that can be added to this laundry list of 290 rules & regulations.

Now don’t get me wrong. California has come a long way in knocking down other barriers (like residency restrictions) thru the efforts of Janice who is a godsend. And I believe things will continue to get better for California registrants, but I have to give it to you guys for having the patience to put up with all rritating stuff thrown your way by state lawmakers.

Would I be willing to do more prison time in place of less time & loosened restrictions on the registry? As bad as the registry is, I’m afraid my answer still would be no. Especially if time is done in a Californian prison which are among the worst of the worst in the nation. And kudos to the ones on this forum who survived both prison & 290.

I guess my main point is (and Brock Turner you may heed this advice) that Californian registrants may at first believe state prosecutors & judges are giving them a good deal by not sending them to the cooler. But wait til you get on 290 for life. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Thank God Californians have Janice & her team and their tremendous dedication directed toward keeping the scales of justice in balance

I did 3years in the pen and I would gladly done twice that instead of the hellllll parole supervision I had to go through because of the sex offender designation and the subsequent registration and notification laws….

hey this is great even steve one of the guys that was bashing me before contributed to my cause with a positive and useful comment…seriously Steve thank you for your comment and support keep it coming….

ya no more i did get a response from janice telling me she couldn’t assist me I’ve even offered to pay to format and revise it. NO is what I was told un no uncertain terms…

hey moderator I hope your not going to censor my post in general comments now… I’ll repeat here is issue #2 in its current form before I revise it to include what you guys have contributed so far…I will only post it once untill I revise it with any suggestions you may have to strengthen this argument…empirical evidence,case law, or suggestions on how to strengthen this argument or improve the articulation in it..any help is greatly appreciated…thanks…

2) The sex offender registration and notification laws are discriminating irrationally among classes of ex-offenders which violates the equal protection clauses.

All sex offenders fall into the classification of felons and felons are a group or classification. The question is, are sex offenders being treated the same as all other felons, do other felons have to register or have the community notified of their presence after they have completed their sentence, are they being denied state and government services, are other felons restricted where they can live, work and recreate, do other felons face criminal prosecution, a felony offense which is punishable by three or more years in state prison, not for engaging in any type of criminal conduct but simply for not providing personal information to the government within a certain time frame? The answer is, no they are not. The courts have found that a distinction among members of the class of offenders is irrational regardless of the importance of public safety consideration underlying the regulations or relevance of prior convictions simply discerning any regulatory reason, however plausible, will not serve to satisfy the rational basis requirement of equal protection; relevant inquiry more properly focuses on whether the means utilized to carry out the regulatory purpose substantially furthers that end.

These laws do not substantially further the regulatory purpose or the legislative objectives of increasing public safety, reducing sexual abuse or preventing recidivism as evidenced in the following reports and actual facts from the leading authorities on this subject.

California Sex Offender Management Board (CASOMB) End of Year Report 2014. (page 13)

Under the current system many local registering agencies are challenged just keeping up with registration paperwork. It takes an hour or more to process each registrant, the majority of whom are low risk offenders. As a result law enforcement cannot monitor higher risk offenders more intensively in the community due to the sheer numbers on the registry. Some of the consequences of lengthy and unnecessary registration requirements actually destabilize the life’s of registrants and those -such as families- whose lives are often substantially impacted. Such consequences are thought to raise levels of known risk factors while providing no discernible benefit in terms of community safety.

The full report is available online at. http://www.casomb.org/index.cfm?pid=231

National Institute of Justice (NIJ) US Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs United States of America.

The overall conclusion is that Megan’s law has had no demonstrated effect on sexual offenses in New Jersey, calling into question the justification for start-up and operational costs. Megan’s Law has had no effect on time to first rearrest for known sex offenders and has not reduced sexual re offending. Neither has it had an impact on the type of sexual re offense or first-time sexual offense. The study also found that the law had not reduced the number of victims of sexual offenses.

The full report is available online at. https://www.ncjrs.gov/app/publications/abstract.aspx?ID=247350

The University of Chicago Press for The Booth School of Business of the University of Chicago and The University of Chicago Law School Article DOI: 10.1086/658483

Conclusion.
The data in these three data sets do not strongly support the effectiveness of sex offender registries. The national panel data do not show a significant decrease in the rate of rape or the arrest rate for sexual abuse after implementation of a registry via the Internet. The BJS data that tracked individual sex offenders after their release in 1994 did not show that registration had a significantly negative effect on recidivism. And the D.C. crime data do not show that knowing the location of sex offenders by census block can help protect the locations of sexual abuse. This pattern of ineffectiveness across the data sets does not support the conclusion that sex offender registries are successful in meeting their objectives of increasing public safety and lowering recidivism rates.

The full report is available online at. http://www.jstor.org/stable/full/10.

From Justice Policy Institute.
Estimated cost to implement SORNA
Here are some of the estimates made in 2009 expressed in 2014 current dollars: California, $66M; Florida, $34M; Illinois, $24M; New York, $35M; Pennsylvania, $22M; Texas, $44M. In 2014 dollars, Virginia’s estimate for implementation was $14M, and the annual operating cost after that would be $10M.

For the US, the total is $547M. That’s over half a billion dollars – every year – for something that doesn’t work.

http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/08-08_FAC_SORNACosts_JJ.pdf

These conclusions are virtually the same in the majority of conclusions and reports on this subject from multiple government agencies and throughout the academic community.

thank you moderator…

Moderator: I have been getting some of my posts nixed as “spam” — so my comments are lost forever. Not a single one has been spam, they have been direct responses to someone else’s post. I e-mailed you about this a few days ago, but here it is still happening today. In fact, I see my latest post, in the few moments between hitting the button to post and it being posted, the last paragraph where I said this to you was nixed from it — you censored it!

Stop censoring posts!

If this is a technical glitch, get it fixed. But never censor posts. I have never seen a spam post at this Website.

Mike R, I see in the “Halloween” post where you asked Janice about pushing to overturn Smith V Doe (2003) and she stated she is pushing for that.

That would affect the retroactive application of registry and also expose it to future challenges of cruel and unusual punishment and other challenges…so that is true that it is needed to be challenged.

However, wouldn’t it be prudent to also challenge “Connecticut Department of Public Safety v. Doe” 2003 since that relates to “requirement which required public disclosure of information on sex offenders after they had been released from incarceration”?

I think that would be the challenge to the overall registry and not just the retroactive application.

It would be tougher since that was a unanimous SCOTUS decision, but it was still based on the same false information that Smith V Doe was. Somehow, it has to be shown that the registry being public is not just the government posting true information with “no determination that any individual included in the registry is currently dangerous”, but that they do actually infer dangerousness with all of the laws and restrictions passed after this SCOTUS decision on a local, state, and national level.

excellent Chris I will have to research that issue more and if there’s any chance of the court rejecting dismissing the studies and reports then I will have to dig deeper and find case law that will force them to allow it or at least force them to hold an evidentiary hearing to determine validity of the studies and reports…like you said I think it would be really difficult to dismiss all the government studies and reports but I will dig deeper….thanks man
..now see that is exactly the kind of feedback I need…that was a totally obvious issue that could of jeopardized my entire case if not addressed and it never crossed my mind that the Court might treat that empirical evidence as hearsay….kept it coming…

Regarding the assessments in our tier proposals in California, I saw some information in a couple different stories in today’s newspaper that provided some tidbits against these assessments, which I strongly oppose other than to lower your tier. (Tiers should be set by offense, with the option for the registrant to apply for an assessment to have their tier lowered.)

One case focused on the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services’ use of assessments to determine risk of child abuse. They call that system Structured Decision Making. Well, there have been quite a few reports in the news for years now, always following another tragedy, about how the system failed to properly assess the situation and deal with it. I’m sure at least some of this assessment structure would be used for the registrant tier assessments.

Now, in the wake of another seriously tragic case, the county Board of Supervisors is so alarmed that the assessments keep failing that they are now reviewing them for changes. In this atmosphere, you know the changes are only going in one direction: much harsher. I’m sure a lot of the details in these harsher assessments will end up in our tier assessments.

But the point is, these assessments are always presented as scientific and of great accuracy and the perfect solution and absolutely necessary. But they never are, as shown by the long list of failures of this child abuse risk assessment system. The really dangerous ones get by, but much lesser circumstances get overrated and find the kids being taken from their parents and sent to foster care. Its just a disaster, it has no bearing on reality of any risk, no matter what all their studies and reviews say about its accuracy.

We should not let such inaccurate assessments be imposed on us. We should not let any assessments be imposed on us, they should all be presumed to be inaccurate, but more importantly, completely unnecessary.

And we should realize they will be put in relatively gently, and later, they will be stiffened, as Los Angeles County is about to do, and more and more people will find themselves in longer and longer tiers. And just wait until they decide you should be reassessed because of new assessment standards, and then put in an even longer tier.

That story is at:

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-supervisors-yonatan-aguilar-death-20160919-snap-story.html

The other story was about the prisons generally and mentioned how they have an assessment program for new arrivals to determine their security threat. Great, more assessments of risk. That’s all it said, but it just brought to mind the reality. How many sex offenders in this forum who were sent to prison think they were put in a safe place in there because of their assessment as being the number 1 prime target? Would you really agree that those assessments kept you safe and away from people who would love to hurt you? Do you even think they were honest and intended for the best purposes, or were they simply bureaucracy? Did they land you someplace without other types of offenders wanting you punked, beaten or dead?

NIX these assessments from the tier proposal. Doing so even would be wildly cheaper for the state. Not doing so will only build a HUGE bureaucracy that will be our worst enemy and will lobby and make political contributions against us as their jobs will depend on our longevity of registration and more and more assessments and changes in assessments. I often have said the devil is in the details, and those assessments are a major detail spawned by and loaded up with the devil.

If we must have tiers, at least set them by offense (and yes, allow application to be put into a lower tier), and do not be afraid of breaking the tiers up into even many more than three, as we would not want someone who would be lowest level in a tier stuck at a longer time frame because of the highest level registrant in the tier.

And for god’s sake, make the lowest tiers a LOT shorter than 10 years! That is an insanely long time for what in that tier will be the lowest level offenders, even low level misdemeanants who certainly should not have to register at all much less than for 10 years — and notice, even as these tiers are mimicking the time frames for a COR, 7 years is the time frame for a COR for some misdemeanors, not 10 years, yet we have no 7-year tier. But even 7 years is insane. And notice, the time-frame tiers for a COR are set by the offense, not by some BS assessment.

Someone backing a minimum of 10 years for tiers is someone who has completely missed the point of the complaints about registration, simply does not understand or fully appreciate! If you have some expert proposing tiers and they way 10 years should be the minimum, you should know that is not someone you want to listen to! You should know that is not someone you want assessing anyone or setting any standards.

@ Anonymous Nobody, you facetiously said, “these assessments are always presented as scientific and of great accuracy and the perfect solution and absolutely necessary”. So true and sounds exactly like Medieval witchhunts: “Quick, tie her to that post and light the bonfire at her feet! If she burns, she’s a witch!”
A thousand years pass, but humankind remains willfully ignorant, entrenched in endless dark ages. 😩

Just as a reminder, Janice Bellucci, nor any other board member, do not answer any specific legal questions on this website. Of course they monitor the comments, but keep in mind they are working specifically for the lawsuits and other challenges at hand. If you would like to ask your question anyway, make sure that it is not directed to a specific person, unless it’s in a reply to that person. In any case, keep in mind that the advice is NOT to be taken as legal authority!

If you need specific advice, I would advise you to obtain a lawyer. I do recommend Chance Oberstein, who will give a consultation for a reasonable fee, and he probably is the most qualified lawyer in the state for giving such consultation. But keep in mind that the lawyers working for ACSOL, from Janice on down, are not online advice lawyers.

Question:
I’m registered in another state, and have to do a 60 day jail stint in California. Do I have to register there? I’m surrendering day one, doing my time, then leaving the next day.

I have not seen it on the site but I understand that the IML was dismissed. We got a true intellect for a judge.
Very disappointing.

A CALL.TO ACTION
To all fellow RC’s, family, friends and loved ones,

Hear my plea, and let’s act. As Janice and team go to court to fight for our rights and restore our freedom, I think it’s important for us to be active at lower levels of politics. It’s an election year and we’ve already been stripped of any Presidential Candidate who has any consideration of our rights. However, as we ponder which is the lesser evil to cast our ballot for, we need not sit idly by without paying attention to our local elections. Below is a script/letter I’ve draghted to inform those who intend to hold office that, as a public, we want our rights back and we’re watching. I believe this is important for two reasons. 1. These politicians by career will reach for higher and higher offices as opportunity comes and we all want a better political future for our children and nieces and nephews. I want our future politicians to have a firm understanding of rights so my kids and their families don’t have to go through this. 2. It’s real easy to take what you have for granted and while Janice goes to court to perform this emotional and draining work it’s important for her to know we are right beside her, shoulder to shoulder with the team, pushing back against these opposing laws. Join me and contact your local politicians and tell them we want our rights back!

Thank you and have a great day!
Chuck
wethepeopleas1@gmail.com

P.S. Feel free to edit the script/letter as you prefer.

Dear Politician
I’m a citizen concerned about the recent violations by politicians to our Constitution and Bill of Rights. I’m a speaker seeking to educate the public on the qualifications of those running for office based on thier knowledge and utility of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. I’m a rights activist seeking to vote against any incumbent who’s purpose by will or stupidity is to undermine our rights as US citizens. I work with a
mass of like like minded people and we’re sending a message that the people of these United States of America are tired of being deceived and lied to for political gain. We are tired of oppression and corruption. We are present, we are awake and we are standing up for our God given rights as human beings and US citizens.

Sincerely,
We the People as one

??? Conundrum: I have received an invitation to our City’s “Annual Police Chief’s Breakfast”. 😶 The invitation is not altogether surprising since I’m very active in community activities and city government forums. (Furthermore, where I live that has, for many years, had problems with gangs, drugs and prostitution. The police have been done a very good job of addressing these problems and are very responsive to residents’ phone calls requesting action.) The police chief knows me and usually greet me by name with a smile and a handshake at public meetings. I don’t think he realizes that I’m a 290 registrant. (There are approx. 200 registrants in my city.) Should I attend the Police Chief’s Annual Breakfast? What do you think?

A new bill signed this week will make it easier for the wrongfully convicted in California to prove their innocence and be released from prison.

On Wednesday, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 1134 into law:

http://www.lakeconews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=48003:new-bill-makes-it-easier-for-the-wrongfully-convicted-to-prove-their-innocence&catid=1:latest&Itemid=197

I went down to the local cop shop here in San Jose, yesterday to update my annual price club membership. I was told I had to fill out an extra copy for The California Department of Justice, because my case was so old (1988), they need to update my info every 10 years. I never had to do this before, and this is the 29th time I have had to register for this B.S. Has any body else had had to do this?

There should some type of common communique that RCs can be sent out, publish, post and or display stating, ‘that 99+% of Registered Sex Offenders are good and safe people’. We need a PR drive.

Tears for Fears song as lyrics.. ..
“Time to eat all your words
swallow your pride
open your eyes”…
The words fit on the news of new California justice law signed by Govn. Brown and its about time court officials held accountable. Thanks Govn. Brown…!!!
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-prosecutor-misconduct-20161003-snap-story.html