Category: Commentary

Fear in the Heartland

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Source: slate.com 8/9/21 How the case of the kidnapped paperboys accelerated the “stranger danger” panic of the 1980s. By Paul M. Renfro In the early morning hours of Sunday, Sept. 5, 1982, 12-year-old Johnny Gosch vanished while delivering copies of the Des Moines Register. Two years later, 13-year-old paperboy Eugene Wade Martin disappeared under virtually identical circumstances on the south side of Des Moines. These cases terrified residents of Des Moines and Iowa, many of whom believed that the Midwest—a “safe,” and implicitly white, place—ought to be immune from “this…

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Jim Cegielski, publisher of Leader-Call.com, wants victims to report abuse directly into the registry anonymously

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Source: leader-call.com 7/30/21 By Jim Cegielski publisher Last week, we ran a front page story with the headline “Toddler Torture.” The headline was about as accurate of a description for what two small children had to endure as we could come up with. In his story, Mark Thornton wrote that those children had been taped to a wall and forced to watch their mother and her boyfriend have sex and were punched if they turned and looked away. Sadly, the rest of the details about what those kids went through…

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Federal Sentencing of Child Pornography: Non-Production Offenses

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Source: ussc.gov 6/29/21 Overview (Published June 29, 2021)  This report updates and expands upon the Commission’s 2012 Report to the Congress: Federal Child Pornography Offenses. In this report, the Commission provides data from fiscal year 2019 regarding: the content of the offender’s child pornography collection and nature of the offender’s collecting behavior; the offender’s degree of involvement with other offenders, particularly in an internet community devoted to child pornography and child sexual exploitation; and the offender’s engagement in sexually abusive or exploitative conduct in addition to the child pornography offense. The report…

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The Punishment Economy: Winners and Losers in the Business of Mass Incarceration

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Source: prisonlegalnews.org 5/1/21 by Daniel A. Rosen “This is an industry that profits from human suffering.” —David Fathi, Director, ACLU’s National Prison Project Starting with math may be a bad idea, but numbers help tell this story: In Virginia, keeping the average prisoner behind bars costs taxpayers about $30,000 per year; in some states like New York or California it’s twice that much. Prisoners over 50 years old with chronic health problems cost taxpayers as much as $150,000 a year. Yet experts have long agreed that most criminals “age out”…

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Emily Horowitz on the Failure of the Sex Offense Registry (Audio)

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The Unspeakable Podcast w/Meghan Daum 6/13/2021 One sure way to lose a popularity contest is to fight for the rights of people convicted of a sex offense. But The National Sex Offense Registry, which was established during an era of panic over crime and child danger, has come with a host of unintended consequences. Sociologist Emily Horowitz is one of a handful of academics and researchers who speaking out against the registry, showing how it’s yet another blunt instrument of “tough on crime” 1990s legislation and ultimately does more to…

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South Carolina Supreme Court Declares Lifetime Registration Without Court Assessment to be Unconstitutional

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[ACSOL] The Supreme Court of South Carolina issued a decision today that declared unconstitutional lifetime registration in that state because the state does not provide registrants “any opportunity for judicial review to assess the risk of re-offending.”  Specifically, the Court ruled that lifetime registration violates the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. “Because of this decision, registrants in South Carolina will no longer be required to register for life unless and until a court assesses their risk of re-offending,” stated ACSOL Executive Director Janice Bellucci.  “This is a big…

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American Law Institute Adopts Revisions to Model Penal Code That Include Major Changes to Sex Offense Registries

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[Ira Ellman of ACSOL – 6/9/21, UPDATED 6/11/21] On June 8, 2021 the membership of the American Law Institute gave its final approval to a revision of the Model Penal Code’s chapter on Sexual Assault and Related Offenses. This project was initially authorized by the ALI Council in 2012.  The appointed Reporters, Professors Stephen Schulhofer and Erin Murphy of the New York University School of Law, began work immediately, preparing drafts for discussion with the appointed project Advisors and the Members’ Consultative Group. As is normal with ALI projects, these…

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Legal Scholars to Consider Elimination of Public Registry Next Week

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[ACSOL] Members of the American Law Institute (ALI), the most important and prestigious organization of legal scholars and prominent attorneys in the nation, will consider a proposal next week that could significantly change the nation’s sex offender laws.  The most significant of those changes would be the elimination of public registries in all 50 state.  The proposal also includes, but is not limited to, recommendations to abolish all public notification laws as well as most residency restrictions, internet restrictions and GPS location monitoring. “The ALI drafts model laws that often…

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India: Can rehab for people convicted of a sex offense help combat sexual violence?

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[theweek.in] Sexual violence and the fear of sexual abuse has a profound and devastating effect on not only individuals, but entire communities. According to the 2019 annual report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 32,033 rape cases were registered across India; that is an average of 88 cases every day. Since the Nirbhaya gang rape in 2012, public outrage has led to more punitive measures to combat sexual violence, and keeping people convicted of a sex offense in prison for longer seems like an appealing resolve. However, in reality,…

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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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