Sex offender registries endanger the lives they’re meant to protect

Our communities deserve effective public-safety measures that are based on facts and sound research, not wasteful and counterproductive measures born of fear. We all want to be safe. We have to demand our legislators pass laws that work and actually keep us safe. That’s especially true when it comes to sexual offenses. http://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/357096-sex-offender-registries-endanger-the-lives-theyre-meant-to-protect?amp

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Simi Valley Formally Notifies Registrants of Repealed Halloween Ordinance

The City of Simi Valley has formally notified registrants in that city that they are no longer required to post a sign on the front door of their home on Halloween and are allowed to decorate their homes as well as answer their door to children. According to the letter dated October 18, these changes are the result of a decision made on October 16 by the Simi Valley City Council to repeal its Halloween ordinance which was adopted in 2012. The Simi Valley letter did not make reference to…

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MO: Vicki Henry Is Fighting to Reform the Way Missouri Treats Sex Offenders

[riverfronttimes.com] Four hours into the armed standoff, the narrow residential street in Arnold is crowded with police cruisers, ambulances and SWAT trucks. Two TV news crews set up in someone’s front lawn, training their camera lenses on a boxy armored personnel carrier parked outside a one-floor duplex on West Highview Drive. A TV reporter relays in a breaking news update that federal officials would not release any information about the suspect, only that the man is believed to be armed and that FBI agents arrived at the home around 7…

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Blind Injustice: How ‘Tunnel Vision’ Convicts the Innocent

[thecrimereport.org] In 1991, soon after he was sentenced to 56 years in an Ohio prison for a crime he did not commit, Roger Dean Gillispie began pestering fellow inmates to save the tinfoil from their tobacco pouches. He also gathered discarded teabags and cassette tapes—anything he could get his hands on to serve as makeshift building materials. Then each evening, after he returned to his cell from one of his prison jobs, he devoted countless hours to creating a model of a shiny, vintage Airstream camper. It was, for him,…

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