Source: cornwalllive.com 11/27/22 Contains extracts of a story first published in November 2020 I’ve been Truro Crown Court’s resident court reporter for quite some years now and I like to think I’ve seen it all, from the grotesque, to the disturbing, to the shocking, to the at time humorous. I try to stay away from our comment sections, but I appreciate everyone has an opinion and a right to air it on Facebook or elsewhere online – unless proceedings are active of course. But that said, sometimes I do venture…
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How can sex offender registries be constitutional?
Source: quora.com There are two short answers: (1) For the most part, the courts have found them to be constitutional because a) they weren’t created with the intent of inflicting punishment and b) they are not punitive enough in effect to override the government’s “legitimate interests.” I would argue substantively that both of these contentions are false. It wouldn’t require a monumental effort. Generally, though, the registries are considered “civil, regulatory” measures. Except that practically no “real” regulatory, civil requirement is so intrusive or stringent while carrying the threat of…
Read More“Panicked Legislation”: Read ACSOL board member Professor Catherine Carpenter’s newest law review article
Professor Carpenter makes a groundbreaking and innovative argument against the registry. She presents a compelling case for how judges could utilize the “Irrebuttable Presumption Doctrine” to challenge the registry on the basis that it is grounded in false and discredited junk science. Click here to download the free “Panicked Legislation” article Abstract of the paper: We are in the throes of a moral panic. It is not the first time, nor will it likely be the last, but it is among the most enduring. Dubbed the sex panic, it has…
Read MoreEmily Horowitz: 18-Year-Old Faces Possible 70 Years in Federal Prison for Snapchat Sexting Crime
Source: reason.com 9/14/22 by ACSOL board member Emily Horowitz “I’m not saying my kid should get nothing,” says Eric Beyer Jr.’s mother. “But to take an 18-year-old kid and put him in jail for longer than he’s been alive?” Teens using Snapchat. (Franviser | Dreamstime.com) Let’s say you’re a 17-year-old boy asking two 16-year-old girls to sext you on Snapchat—well, that’s pretty normal these days, right? Let’s agree that it is. Now, let’s say that you possibly paid the girls for their sexts, and then allegedly threatened to expose them…
Read MoreFor People Just Leaving Prison, a Novel Kind of Support: Cash
Source: news.yahoo.com 7/9/22 Alwin Jacob Smith became a free man last summer after being locked up for 21 years because of what he calls “my little old rocky past” — most notably, robbery and drug possession. He worked hard while incarcerated, getting an associate degree in ministry, attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and substance abuse support groups, and eventually leading those groups as a peer mentor. Smith’s release, which he celebrated with a steak-and-eggs breakfast, came about through a California law that allows prosecutors to reevaluate sentences to determine whether they…
Read MoreWhy the U.S. Marshals Spend Millions on Sex-Offense Registrant Sweeps
Source: theappeal.org 7/8/22 The real aim of these operations might be to boost support for cops. Gary, a 62-year-old on Texas’s sex-offender registry, dates the problems with his neighbors to a visit by police in 2018. After a successful real estate career he lives in a relatively safe neighborhood outside Dallas, identifies as a conservative, and has friends on the police force. He’s donated to police charities, once giving $10,000 to the family of an officer killed on duty, he tells The Appeal. He was convicted of child pornography possession…
Read MoreCongress can’t punt its lawmaking responsibility to the attorney general
Source: thehill.com 6/6/22 Congress makes the law; you are innocent until proven guilty; and everyone is entitled to due process of law. These are elementary principles of American government that we all learn in grade school. But they are threatened when Congress gives the U.S. attorney general unilateral power to write the criminal laws his office is charged with enforcing. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that someone must not go to prison unless he broke a law written by Congress (or a state legislature). But Attorney General Merrick Garland…
Read MoreEmily Horowitz: The Real Monsters – Sex offender registries don’t make us any safer. Abolishing them would.
Source: inquest.org 6/3/22 Watching the Senate hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, I was struck by how Republican senators pounced on the judge’s thoughtful, considered, and mainstream sex offense sentencing. My research examines why our sex offense policies are based on fear-driven myths and how excessive criminal-legal responses do not genuinely and effectively address sexual violence — and do create new harm. And at the time, based on this knowledge, I wrote about the spectacle, where politicians like Josh Hawley accused Jackson of “endangering our children” and not…
Read MoreThe Supreme Court Won’t Dismantle the Administrative State Quite Yet
Source: barrons.com 4/19/21 Progressives, conservatives, investors and Supreme Court-watchers are all anxiously awaiting the court’s decisions later this spring in two cases—American Hospital Association v. Becerra and West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency—which some experts have warned could sound a death knell for the “administrative state.” Not so fast: the authority of regulators is likely to be further limited, but not gutted. That’s the broad takeaway I got from moderating a recent panel for the Brookings Institution of constitutional and administrative law experts—Professors Anne Joseph O’Connell, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Ilya Wurman and…
Read MoreMaking Headlines: The criminal legal system is massively punitive toward people who commit sex offenses
Source: inquest.org 4/8/22 The death threats started almost immediately. On April 3, 2020, The New York Post published the story of our case under an impossibly salacious headline: “Child rapist ordered released to keep him safe from coronavirus.” The article was no better, describing the underlying crime in vivid detail while underplaying how its subject’s multiple, severe medical issues made him vulnerable to COVID, and that the sentence being served was not actually for the crime itself, but rather for so-called “technical” violations of probation. The Post had apparently noticed…
Read MoreStranger Dangers: The Right’s History of Turning Child Abuse Into a Political Weapon
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 MoreHawley’s cynical attack on nominee may be misguided
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 MoreChild sexual abuse: Why spend billions on prison, but not prevention?
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 MoreEmily Horowitz: The hollowness of the child porn smear: Ketanji Brown Jackson has been bold and prescient
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 MoreExperts say sex offender registries don’t work. Can they be fixed?
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 MoreThe Trailer: How campaign rhetoric about child porn made it to the Supreme Court hearing
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 MoreIs the Sex Offender Registry Fair?
Source: thecrimereport.org 3/9/22 Sexual offenses are serious crimes. There is no doubt that the intentions behind creating the laws meant to punish and deter sex offenders were noble. However, according to opponents of the sex offender registration laws, such as Human Rights Watch, there is no proof that these laws achieved the purpose they were designed for. As a former sex crimes prosecutor, I share that skepticism. It’s one reason why, after years of serving as Chief of the Sex Unit and Chief of the Child Abuse Unit in Macomb…
Read More9-Year-Olds Are Being Forced to Register as Sex Offenders. That Might Finally Change.
Source: slate.com 2/1/22 It’s hard not to get emotional about child sexual abuse. The thought of anyone hurting a child in this way is so egregious that it’s no wonder society has thrown its support behind a robust criminal justice response, including lengthy prison sentences and the registration and public notification of people convicted of this type of sex crime. But what happens when the perpetrator of child sexual abuse is also a child? This isn’t a thought experiment. In the United States, up to 70 percent of sexual offenses…
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