Year: 2022

FL: ‘Groomer’ debate inflames GOP fight over Florida law

R H

Source: thehill.com 4/8/22 “Groomer” is the new favorite term being used by far-right commentators and activists to describe opponents of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, sparking outrage among LBGTQ advocates who say that it is a smear that feeds into a trope casting members of the community as pedophiles. The Florida bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis week, which opponents have decried as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, prohibits instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade. “Groomer” started to gain traction as…

Read More

LGBT People on Sex Offender Registries: Results from a National Survey [5/10/22 Webinar]

R H

Source: williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu May 10, 2022 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM Pacific Time, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM Eastern Time Sex offense registries have operated in the United States since 1947 but have been challenged since their inception on legal, efficacy, and ethical grounds. Sex offense registries ought to be subject to close examination. LGBT people are more likely than cisgender straight people to be incarcerated due to sex offenses. In this webinar, researchers will describe results from a large national survey of people required to register on sex offender registries…

Read More

UK: Laughing council worker goes to pub moments after dodging jail for leaking sex offender’s address to paedo hunter mob

R H

Source: thesun.co.uk 4/9/22 A COUNCIL worker headed straight to the pub just moments after dodging jail for leaking a sex offender’s address to a paedophile hunter mob. Customer services assistant Chloe Carr, 23, was seen laughing and joking with two friends after she was fined in Hull Crown Court for sharing the confidential information. Hull City Council Worker Carr told a paedophile hunter Facebook group that the man is “bloody awful” and “disgusting” – but asked them not to reveal that she had passed on the confidential information. The group…

Read More

Restorative Justice for Sex Offenses? A Conversation About Possibilities [4/13/22 Webinar]

R H

Webinar Topic: Restorative Justice for Sex Offenses? A Conversation About Possibilities Featuring Author Judith Levine & Social Worker Susannah Karlin Sponsored by the St. Francis College Departments of Sociology and Criminal Justice, and Women’s & Gender Studies April 13, 2022 at 9:20 AM PST, 12:20 pm EST You may attend online Zoom Livestream or You may attend in-person at: Maroney Theater St. Francis College 180 Remsen Street Brooklyn, NY 11201 Reception to Follow You must sign up to attend. Click here to sign up and to choose Zoom or in-person. About the…

Read More

Wayne Logan: Card Carrying Sex Offenders

R H

Source: Wayne A. Logan (Florida State University – College of Law) 3/22/22 Americans, it is commonly believed, have never been required to carry and show upon demand personal identification documents; the belief, however, is incorrect. Over time, select sub-populations have in fact been subject to such a requirement, including free-born and emancipated African-Americans until after the Civil War. This article examines the targeting of yet another disfavored sub-population: individuals convicted of sex offenses, who are required to register with government authorities. Today, roughly a dozen states require that registrants obtain…

Read More

CA: Court Grants Contested Tiered Registry Petition

R H

Source: ACSOL In the first known case involving a contested petition, California Placer County Superior Court granted the petition of a registrant convicted of PC 288(a) who had registered for more than 25 years.  The Placer County District Attorney asked the court to deny the petition in order to significantly enhance public safety. In this case, the court ruled that the DA’s office “failed to meet their burden that the community safety would be significantly enhanced by the petitioner’s continued registration.”  The court went on to explain that its decision…

Read More

FL: Pennsylvania tourist to stay on Florida’s sex-offense registry

R H

Source: orlandosentinel.com 4/4/22 TALLAHASSEE — A Leon circuit judge has dismissed a Pennsylvania man’s challenge to a Florida law that kept him on a sexual-offense registry after a 10-day family vacation to Disney World in 2015. Circuit Judge Angela Dempsey dismissed the case last week, in part finding that a statute of limitations had expired. The man, identified in court documents as John Doe, reported to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office when he came to Florida because he was on a Pennsylvania registry at the time as a result of…

Read More

ACSOL April 16, 2022 Meeting

R H

Please join ACSOL Executive Director and civil rights attorney Janice Bellucci as well as ACSOL President and criminal defense attorney Chance Oberstein for our next meeting.  The meeting will be held on Saturday, April 16, on Zoom beginning at 10 a.m. Pacific time, 1:00 PM Eastern, and will last at least two hours. You can use the Zoom app or call in using a Zoom phone number. There is no registration needed for this meeting. You can use the Zoom app to see Janice and Chance and choose to show…

Read More

OR: Oregon to join most states in compensating the wrongfully convicted

R H

Source: oregoncapitalchronicle.com 4/1/22 Wrongfully convicted Oregonians will now be eligible for financial compensation for time of false imprisonment.  … The act will pay $65,000 for each year of wrongful conviction and $25,000 per year of parole and supervision and each year an individual was wrongfully put on the sex offender registry.  Read the full article  

Read More

Stranger Dangers: The Right’s History of Turning Child Abuse Into a Political Weapon

R H

Source: motherjones.com 3/28/22 Josh Hawley’s attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are part of a long, sad tradition. At some point between the ’80s and now, leaving children unattended in public became unthinkable. To let children as old as, say, 10 walk by themselves became grounds to investigate parents for neglect. As a child of the late ’90s and early 2000s, I knew latchkey kids existed, but nearly exclusively from the aging 1980s children’s paperbacks in my elementary school’s library. My friends whose parents worked too late to pick them up…

Read More

CA: Please tell us your experience working with an America’s Job Center of California to gain employment

R H

Source: Friends Outside of Los Angeles County Friends Outside of Los Angeles County would like to talk with persons who have a sex offense and who are working with an America’s Job Center of California (AJCC) to gain employment. The purpose is to gain information about your job-seeking experience through a 60-75 minute phone or zoom interview. All information is confidential and anonymous. Our overall purpose is to conduct research about promising practices for helping registrants obtain employment. You will be given $500 gift card for your time. Contact Arthur…

Read More

Hawley’s cynical attack on nominee may be misguided

R H

Source: ocregister.com 3/28/22 In a 1996 Harvard Law Review article, Ketanji Brown Jackson, then a law school student, noted the “climate of fear, hatred, and revenge” in which policies dealing with sex offenders are formulated. Before Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing began this week, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, objected to that observation, then proceeded to demonstrate its accuracy. Hawley’s misrepresentation of Jackson’s record in this area was typical of the criticism leveled at Supreme Court nominees, which often involves inflammatory, acontextual citations of a candidate’s statements and decisions. But it…

Read More

Child sexual abuse: Why spend billions on prison, but not prevention?

R H

Source: futurity.org 3/28/22 Download the report The United States government spent an estimated $5.4 billion last year at the state and federal level to incarcerate adults convicted of sex crimes against children under age 18, according to a new study. The study calculated annual spending on incarcerated adults convicted of sex crimes against children under age 18 in US federal and state prisons and sex offender civil commitment facilities. The findings, which appear in the journal Sexual Abuse, highlight the cost of what is considered a preventable public health problem.…

Read More

Emily Horowitz: The hollowness of the child porn smear: Ketanji Brown Jackson has been bold and prescient

R H

Source: nydailynews.com 3/24/22 Soon after her nomination, it was reported that as a law student in 1996, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a Harvard Law Review note analyzing the constitutionality of sex offense registries and that during her judicial career she did not always give the maximum sentence in child pornography cases. Unsurprisingly, she was immediately accused by Sen. Josh Hawley of “endangering our children” and not “protecting the most vulnerable.” These entirely meritless allegations show the extreme risks of speaking the truth about our disastrous and cruel sex offense…

Read More

FL: [1970’s Teen] convicted in 2000 of molesting Boy Scout ordered to move out of home near family pool in The Villages

R H

Source: villages-news.com 3/24/22 A [1970’s teen] convicted of molesting a[nother] Boy Scout has been ordered to move out of his parents’ home located near a family pool in The Villages. [His alleged victim in the mid 1970s claimed that an older boy had molested him. Siegfried Hepp Jr who was born in 1961 took a plea deal 30 years later as he was obviously unable to prove he had not abused the younger boy scout in the mid 1970s, when he himself was just a teenager.  When sentenced, his sentence…

Read More

Experts say sex offender registries don’t work. Can they be fixed?

R H

Source: news.yahoo.com 3/24/22 What’s happening During confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Republicans hammered away at her record in cases involving sex offenders. Much of that centered around misleading claims about sentences she handed out to people convicted of possessing child pornography. But GOP senators also repeatedly questioned Jackson on her views on sex offender registries, a topic she wrote about as a law student in the 1990s. In 1994, Congress enacted a law mandating that all states create registries of people convicted of sex offenses and crimes against children. Two years later, it passed…

Read More

The Trailer: How campaign rhetoric about child porn made it to the Supreme Court hearing

R H

Source: washingtonpost.com 3/22/22 In this edition: Why Republicans are talking about pedophilia this week, how contempt is shaping Ohio’s U.S. Senate primary, and what’s happening in the race to replace Don Young. Treat a senator: Print out your favorite part of the newsletter and turn it into a big, scary poster. This is The Trailer. The White House dismissed it with a joke. A National Review columnist called it a “smear.” And the paid media campaigns against Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court have ignored it completely. And…

Read More