This Sunday marks the 20th anniversary of Smith v. Doe, a Supreme Court decision that approved the retroactive application of Alaska’s sex offender registry, deeming it preventive rather than punitive. That ruling helped propagate several pernicious myths underlying a policy that every state has adopted without regard to its justice or effectiveness.
Writing for the majority in Smith, Justice Anthony Kennedy took it for granted that collecting and disseminating information about people convicted of sex offenses made sense as a public safety measure. But that premise was always doubtful.
The vast majority of sexual assaults, especially against children, are committed by relatives, friends, or acquaintances, and the perpetrators typically do not have prior sex-offense convictions. That means they would not show up on a registry even if someone bothered to check.
It is therefore not surprising that research finds little evidence to support Kennedy’s assumption that publicly accessible registries protect potential victims. Summarizing the evidence in a 2016 National Affairs article, Eli Lehrer noted that “virtually no well-controlled study shows any quantifiable benefit from the practice of notifying communities of sex offenders living in their midst.”
Good article, good timing! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
Someone should put together a birthday gift for CJ Roberts (and AJ Thomas) to annotate this with all the negative stats related to it that have happened since this opinion came down to remind them of what they’re a part of and how it reflects poorly on them and the court.
Here is the 2002 NYT article on the court time spent on the case in general: Court Looks at Sex-Offender Lists
*CJ = Chief Justice
*AJ = Assoc Justice
(official titles)
The most pernicious concept being the database driven infrastructure could be used to circumvent crimes of attack before they occur. Now every online threat, real or suggested, is a concern for authority and the public. Those fools didn’t secure America, they opened to door to Pandora’s box. Hell they had to amend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, simply because it made repair impossible.
And created a monster of a government bureaucracy, e.g., SMART, Angel Watch, SO registries, local registration compliance units within PDs, etc., not to mention all the vendor contracts for GPS monitoring, webpage service for the posting of SO info, etc. where our tax dollars are hard at work to “protect the public” but that in fact as academic studies have shown over and over again does nothing to deter future sexual offenses but rather shames and harms PFRs and their families, which I believe is the true and pernicious intent behind these laws. Imagine if SCOTUS overturns this bad, misled, and ill informed decision, what an uproar it will cause. Basically, it’ll turn this massive, SORNA industrial complex on its head! So those who work in government as an employee and contractor alike will either lose their jobs/contracts or at least be reassigned (for employees) per their labor organization’s MOU. I’m not trying to sound like a pessimist and I wish SORNA to be a shameful bygone era like Jim Crow, Japanese Internment, Chinese Exclusion Act, and a host of other shameful deeds done by good ‘ol Uncle Sam, but this SORNA industrial complex has its heels dug in so deep that it’ll only take a miracle for SCOTUS to correct Smith v Doe.