NH: Public pool can’t ban sex offender

PORTSMOUTH — City Attorney Robert Sullivan confirmed he recently met with a group of people who are concerned because a registered sex offender has been using the Portsmouth Indoor Pool.

The pool, located near the high school, is used by community members and youth and school swim teams.

After the meeting, Sullivan said, he reached out to the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire to get its input.

“The actions which the city might be able to take or which the city might be prevented from taking would be dictated by the particular aspects of the situation,” Sullivan said this week.

Gilles Bissonnette, the legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, said he told Sullivan that it would be “unconstitutional” for the city to bar the registered sex offender from using the pool, just because he’s a sex offender.

“The concern in these types of cases is that there is an equal protection clause problem,” Bissonnette said Tuesday. “That would be the case if regular members of the public are able to access these public facilities but a sex offender is precluded from accessing these facilities. The sex offender would be being treated unequally.”

 

Read more

 

Related posts

Subscribe
Notify of

We welcome a lively discussion with all view points - keeping in mind...

 

  1. Your submission will be reviewed by one of our volunteer moderators. Moderating decisions may be subjective.
  2. Please keep the tone of your comment civil and courteous. This is a public forum.
  3. Swear words should be starred out such as f*k and s*t and a**
  4. Please avoid the use of derogatory labels.  Use person-first language.
  5. Please stay on topic - both in terms of the organization in general and this post in particular.
  6. Please refrain from general political statements in (dis)favor of one of the major parties or their representatives.
  7. Please take personal conversations off this forum.
  8. We will not publish any comments advocating for violent or any illegal action.
  9. We cannot connect participants privately - feel free to leave your contact info here. You may want to create a new / free, readily available email address that are not personally identifiable.
  10. Please refrain from copying and pasting repetitive and lengthy amounts of text.
  11. Please do not post in all Caps.
  12. If you wish to link to a serious and relevant media article, legitimate advocacy group or other pertinent web site / document, please provide the full link. No abbreviated / obfuscated links. Posts that include a URL may take considerably longer to be approved.
  13. We suggest to compose lengthy comments in a desktop text editor and copy and paste them into the comment form
  14. We will not publish any posts containing any names not mentioned in the original article.
  15. Please choose a short user name that does not contain links to other web sites or identify real people.  Do not use your real name.
  16. Please do not solicit funds
  17. No discussions about weapons
  18. If you use any abbreviation such as Failure To Register (FTR), Person Forced to Register (PFR) or any others, the first time you use it in a thread, please expand it for new people to better understand.
  19. All commenters are required to provide a real email address where we can contact them.  It will not be displayed on the site.
  20. Please send any input regarding moderation or other website issues via email to moderator [at] all4consolaws [dot] org
  21. We no longer post articles about arrests or accusations, only selected convictions. If your comment contains a link to an arrest or accusation article we will not approve your comment.
  22. If addressing another commenter, please address them by exactly their full display name, do not modify their name. 
ACSOL, including but not limited to its board members and agents, does not provide legal advice on this website.  In addition, ACSOL warns that those who provide comments on this website may or may not be legal professionals on whose advice one can reasonably rely.  
 

5 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

I think they’ve simplified this too much.

It’s much more than an Equal Protection issue, because equal protection only covers the same people in the same circumstances. A convicted person on the registry is not the same as a person that never committed a crime.

The real issue is that being on the sex offender registry has nothing to do with being dangerous, since you are on it for an arbitrary length of time due to an arbitrary list of charges and there is no requirement that you are deemed dangerous to be on it. Therefore, it’s more of a substantive due process issue because if you’ve never had a process to judge your level of dangerousness and for how long you are dangerous, then the registry is irrelevant and can’t be used to deny you anything that a regular person would have access to. That’s how it becomes an “equal protection” issue with the lack of “substantive due process” to come to any conclusion about you and what needs to be done to protect the public from you.