NY: Social media accounts raise complexities for sex offender registry

The law that went on the books 24 years ago has had updates and spawned a number of requirements for sex offenders. One of them is that they must disclose to the state Division of Criminal Justice Services the “internet identifiers” that they use when they go online. The rationale for that is simple to understand since it is so easy for people to use social media accounts to pretend they are someone they are not and attempt to initiate communications with an unsuspecting person. But how much information must…

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How the Use of Improper Statistics and Unverified Data Corrupts the Judicial Process in Sex Offender Cases

We begin this Article by sharing something about our past legal practice careers, as we believe that is so relevant to the topic that we focus on in this Article. When Michael L. Perlin was a rookie Public Defender in Trenton, New Jersey, in the early 1970s, he regularly visited the Menlo Park Diagnostic Center where some of his clients—those who had been found, in the phrase used then, to be “repetitive and compulsive” sex offenders—were housed. When Heather Ellis Cucolo was a rookie Public Defender in Newark, New Jersey,…

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