Category: Commentary

Does Banning People With Felonies From Dating Apps Actually Make Anyone Safer?

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[themarshallproject.org – 5/20/21] Jason Hernandez got out of prison in 2015 and started making up for lost time. He’d done nearly 18 years on federal drug conspiracy charges, and only escaped life behind bars because then-President Barack Obama granted him clemency. He settled down near Dallas, began volunteering in schools, visited the White House and wrote a book. Then he decided to start dating, so he downloaded Tinder. He was open about his past, and at first, it was fine. But a couple months ago, he got a notification: “Your…

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What makes school zones “safe” for children?

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[floridaactioncommittee.org – 5/11/21] Dear Members and Advocates, What makes school zones “safe” for children? Residency restrictions and proximity ordinances preventing persons required to register as sex offenders from living or even entering within thousands of feet of a school somehow create the illusion that once inside the exclusion zone, our children will be safe from sexual assault. Nothing can be further from the truth. We see this example over and over again, most recently in the case of a Tampa, Florida teacher who was sentenced to 15 years in prison…

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OR: Senate Bill 499 should become law

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[eastoregonian.com – 5/8/21] Earl Bain was wrongfully convicted in Malheur County in 2009 and spent six years in prison. After the complaining witness in his case recanted her story, with the help of the Oregon Innocence Project he was pardoned on the grounds of innocence by Gov. Kate Brown in August 2020. For over six years of my life, I was wrongfully incarcerated in an Oregon prison. I was convicted in Malheur County of a crime I did not commit and falsely labeled as having abused my own child. I…

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Understanding Child Sexual Abusers

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[themamabeareffect.org – 4/26/21] Addressing the misconception that all child sexual offenders are pedophiles and the reasons why people commit abuse against children. Introducing the typologies of abusers to help protective adults understand that there is no set stereotype for offenders and why we need to involve all the adults and adolescents we know and trust around our children, to be educated on the issues of child sexual abuse and actively working together to empower children and reduce risk of abuse. Watch the YouTube video “Understanding Child Sexual Abusers” The Mama…

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Jury is out — no matter the verdict, Congress must act

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[cnn.com – 4/19/21] Van Jones is an attorney who has spent 25 years working for police accountability and criminal justice reform.   (CNN) -America is bracing for a verdict. … The time has come for us to pressure our US senators to take up the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Authored by Rep. Karen Bass of California, the act has already passed the US House of Representatives. It just needs a debate and a vote in the US Senate. By making the call, we can ask our senators to…

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The Dobbs Wire: Flashback to 1996

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[The Dobbs Wire (@TheDobbsWire) / Twitter  – 4/19/21] A Massachusetts father writes about his young son — an important matter requiring a trip to the police station.  It’s a powerful, poignant story that the Chicago Tribune published on Dec. 1, 1996.  The father inquires, “What will be done with this information?”  He asked that question shortly after the Massachusetts sex offense registry got rolling, on Oct. 1, 1996.  Massachusetts was the last of the states to create an official blacklist.  This year marks 25 years that every state has had…

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ACSOL Board Member Ira Ellman Publishes Scholarly Work Claiming Registry Regime Is Motivated by Animus, Should Be Stricken

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[ACSOL] ACSOL Board Member Ira Ellman has published a scholarly work that claims the registry regime is motivated by animus and should be stricken.  This conclusion is based upon an analysis of four relevant U.S. Supreme Court decisions in which the Court determined what constitutes animus and struck down existing laws on that basis. According to Ellman’s work, “(n)o similar regime has ever been imposed on any other group of law-abiding former felons who have fully served the sentence for the crime they committed years earlier”.  The work also concludes…

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Pornography Addiction an Unspoken ILL

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[laprogressive.com – 4/9/21] Like a lot of teens of my generation, I discovered the novels of Kurt Vonnegut like a breath of fresh air apart from the assigned readings in my school. Vonnegut wrote what even he described as “trash” fiction, but he peppered his books with matter of fact recounting of historical events, some of which were based on facts and a lot of which were just snarky imagination. The book that made him famous was Slaughterhouse 5 which was full of both dark humor and bits of hope, as well…

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ND: Shouldn’t we ask if ‘bias crime’ legislation actually works?

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[thedickinsonpress.com – 3/23/21] Fargo-area politicians and activists will no doubt have a lot of success milking this issue for notoriety, and donations, but even if they’re successful in implementing a policy, and even if that local policy withstands legal scrutiny under state law, it isn’t likely to change much of anything. MINOT, N.D. — Bias crime laws, the new lingo for hate crime laws, are, from the perspective of public policy, not all that unlike policies the death penalty or sex offender laws. They’re all great for politicians who want…

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Patty Wetterling

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[floridaactioncommittee.org – 3/17/21] Dear Florida Action Committee Members and Advocates, So much respect is deserved by Patty Wetterling. In 1989, Patty’s son Jacob was abducted and killed near their home in Minnesota. Three years after Jacob’s abduction, Minnesota enacted a registry in his memory and a couple years after that, the federal government did the same. In fact, the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act was the federal law that proceeded the Adam Walsh Act and was the original federal law that required states to…

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Use science, not stigma, to determine the next steps for Nushawn Williams (Commentary)

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[syracuse.com – 3/16/21] Dr. William M. Valenti is a New York state-licensed physician in practice in Rochester. He has worked in HIV medicine, research and HIV health policy since 1981. Anne Kelsey is a staff attorney at the Center for HIV Law and Policy, in Brooklyn. In 1999, Nushawn Williams pleaded guilty to two counts of statutory rape and two counts of reckless endangerment for having sex while HIV positive at the age of 19 and 20 years old. He served the full sentence of 12 years, but days before…

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Letter: Sex offenders are redeemable

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[inforum.com – 3/4/21] The idea that sex offenders are irredeemable is a myth. Reason (magazine) reports that a repeat offense within a period of five years occurs only 7% of the time. About 100 U.S. teachers, mostly women, are charged with sex crimes each year, although many others go unreported. Affairs between teachers and students are becoming more common in both the U.S. and Europe, probably because the rise of social media has made communication easier and more private. In most of Europe, the age of consent is 14, while…

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“WWJD”: What Would Janice Do?

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[floridaactioncommittee.org – 3/3/21] WWJD? I know many of you know a different acronym for that, but in the case of tomorrow’s monthly member call, it’s “What Would Janice Do?”. And by Janice, we are talking about Janice Bellucci. Janice is the Executive Director of the Alliance for Constitutional Sex Offense Laws (ACSOL) and for the persons required to register in California, she’s a savior in her own right. In the beginning, Florida and California were both in the running for ‘worst state’ for those on the registry. At one point,…

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Book Review: Justice Perverted: Sex Offense Law, Psychology, and Public Policy

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[littlefieldtccc.com – 1/13/21] Book review by Charles Patrick Ewing [The author is a first rate attorney who has worked with registrants for decades] Over the past quarter century Congress, state legislatures and the courts have radically reshaped America’s laws dealing with sex offenders in an effort to reduce the prevalence of sex offenses. Most convicted sex offenders must now register with the authorities, who then make information about them available to the public. Possession of child pornography has been made an extremely serious crime often punishable by prison sentences that…

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MN: Civil Commitment of Sex Offenders Pretends Prisoners Are Patients

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[reason.com – 2/10/21] The practice evades constitutional constraints by casting punishment and preventive detention as treatment. Jacob Sullum | 2.10.2021 12:01 AM “It was my understanding that I was to do the treatment, then be released,” says Mike Whipple, who recently participated in a 14-day hunger strike at the Minnesota Sex Offender Program’s facility in Moose Lake. “Twelve years later, I’m still here, doing the same thing, over and over and over.” So far the civil commitment program has incarcerated Whipple three times longer than the prison sentence he served.…

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American Law Institute To Consider Recommending Elimination of Public Registry, Other Significant Reforms

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[ali.org – 1/25/21] The Council of the American Law Institute (ALI) agreed on January 22 to recommend that its membership adopt new provisions in the Model Penal Code (MPC) that would significantly limit sexual offender registries. The draft approved by the Council includes new MPC provisions under which: Many offenses now registrable would not require registration (e.g., possession of child pornography, but also less serious contact offenses). There would be no public notification that individuals are on the registry, and no public website or other public  access to the registry,…

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