Source: scholarworks.waldenu.edu 8/23/23
Abstract
The Adam Walsh Act created sex offender notification and registration requirements to encourage state compliance toward federal guidelines and assigned threat levels to registered sex offenders using mandated assessment processes. Researchers have pointed out that the transition by states using tiered assessment processes to the federally mandated guidelines has led to operational changes to state registration procedures.
The purpose of this quantitative study was to understand the effects and impacts on jurisdictions transitioning the designation of registered sex offenders’ threat assessment levels from a formal risk-based assessment process to the mandated Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act conviction-based assessment tool on all currently registered offenders.
The innovation and diffusion model was used to relate state policy, practice, and process transition to similar federal guidelines. Data obtained from sex offender registration data sets were analyzed using pairwise comparisons to establish the preferred entity, which pair possessed more quantitative property, or whether the two entities were identical.
The results indicated varying degrees of changes in registration requirements between high-, moderate-, and low-level offenders, including major increases in areas of moderate to high offender categories. The positive social change implications of the study include limiting the overassessment and related mandated periods of registration for registered offenders and ensuring equal and fair treatment across states and jurisdictional boundaries for assessed offenders.
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This might be an interesting read. I skimmed through it, but it is very lengthy with a lot of jargon. It is strange that under Federal Law, my fiancé’s offense is not even registrable, yet under California’s new law, he is now a Tier 3 when even before the new law, he was never publicly listed. How do they justify deeming him a serious threat now when for decades he was not, and under Federal Law, he would not even have to register at all. That is how idiotic this whole system is.
Can someone please explain 🤷♂️
It’s an academic paper that compares the classification tiers between North Dakota’s system against SORNA. Both have three tiers: Tier 1 is 15 years, Tier 2 is 25 years, and Tier 3 is Lifetime. ND tier system is based upon risk assessment and priors. SORNA tier system is conviction based.
Query: What happens when ND registry transitions to SORNA registry tier classification?
Result: There was a 61.5% increase into Tier 3 classification from ND to SORNA reclassification.
Conclusion: The reclassification to SORNA’s conviction based model identifies a huge flaw as significant population of Tier 1 and Tier 2 were reclassified into Tier 3. This ballooning of Tier 3 draws more attention to the public into believing there are a huge mass of highly dangerous registrants. And because there are far more Tier 3, more money is needed to fund monitoring and registering.
Apparently, using SORNA’s conviction based tiered system is abhorrent because it falsely identifies 61.5% of the low (Tier 1) and moderate (Tier 2) risk registrants as high risk (Tier 3). The underlying culprit is state funding will be denied if a state doesn’t fully encapsulate the federal SORNA requirements.
I don’t know all the evidence that was presented in the Michigan Does v. Whitmer case but this study seems to be something that might have been missing when arguing for risk assessments that was then denied by that court. The court said:
“But Michigan SORA 2021, unlike South Carolina SORA, only imposes lifetime registration on Tier III’s… — there is a degree of tailoring imbedded in the statute. This ameliorates the Powell court’s concern that “there is no evidence in the record that current statistics indicate all… generally pose a high risk of re-offending.”
But this study clearly shows that all tier 3’s do not have even close to the same risks of reoffending otherwise why would low and moderate risk classified under risk-based be reclassified as high risk under an offense-based classification system as in this study? Clearly an offense based classification can not be properly reconciled with a risk-based classification based on this evidence. Offense Based compared to risk-based doesn’t even provide something even acceptably close to the same result. Therefore the Michigan SORA no longer ameliorates the Powell court’s concern with this study presented, at least in my opinion. At the very least this study should have given the court pause to make a ruling about how Michigan SORA lifetime was somehow different from that in Powell.
For those who are allowed to access Megan’s Law, why has the Static-99R OFFENSE FREE time not been taken into consideration when someone was placed in Tier 3 solely due to a static, never changing score? Especially when that person was never publicly listed prior to the new law. The Static 99R was used in CA since 2006, and my fiance had the same score prior to the new law. What made them decide to use the score to place someone in the highest Tier when prior to the new law, they were not deemed a risk and were by law not publicly listed? Even on Megan’s Law, it states that after just 5 years of offense free time, the score roughly halves. Here is a link to the part on Megan’s Law that discusses the Static 99R offense free time, and the graph shows the decline in risk based on years offense free. At the bottom, it also mentions the following ** Note: Each-99R point increases risk by .329 and each year sex offense free decreases risk by .130. Individuals were deemed to have transitioned to a lower risk category when their time-adjusted risk for that year was below the yearly hazard at release for individuals at the top of the next lower category. The figure stops at Static-99R scores of 10 because higher scores were rare: 0.08% had a score of 11 or 12 (6 out of 7,225). (See Hanson, R.K. et al., “Reductions in risk based on time offense free in the community…” Psychology, Public Policy and Law, 2017.)
I would love for an attorney to chime in on how someone can get their Tier reduced if they are in Tier 3 only due to a score of 6+. The offense free time can NOT be ignored.