On Wednesday, Massachusetts criminal prosecutors dropped their case against actor Kevin Spacey. Spacey had faced a criminal charge of indecent assault and battery in connection with a reported July 2016 incident at the Club Car restaurant/bar in Nantucket. His accuser, an 18 yr. old busboy at the restaurant, had accused Spacey of groping him. The accuser’s mother, a former TV anchor, filed the complaint more than a year after the alleged incident supposedly occurred. Spacey pled “not guilty” and faced up to five years in prison if convicted. The alleged…
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The Inequity of Sex Offender Registries
There are more than 900,000 people on the sex offenders registry and growing, but studies show that the sex offender registries do not reduce recidivism and prevent sex crimes and laws restricting where offenders can find housing and employment make it almost impossible for many on the registry to reintegrate into society, ostracizing them and essentially creating a life sentence for those who have already paid for their crimes and in some cases, first time offenders. Guy Hamilton-Smith, a legal fellow for the Sex Offense Litigation and Policy Resource Center…
Read MoreWhen autistic people commit sexual crimes
[spectrumnews.org – 7/17/19] Many first-time sex offenders on the spectrum may not understand the laws they break. How should their crimes be treated? For years, Nick Dubin couldn’t bring himself to say the word ‘gay,’ but part of him wondered: Was he gay? Dubin has autism. And growing up in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, he had been mercilessly taunted by his peers, some of whom had called him gay simply because he was different. But what if he actually was homosexual? As an adult, Dubin found some men attractive,…
Read MoreSex Offender Registries Don’t Keep Kids Safe, But Politicians Keep Expanding Them Anyway
The first time ____ ____ got evicted was in 2015. He was living with his wife and two sons in suburban Nashville when his probation officer called his landlord and informed him that Winters was a registered sex offender. The previous year, when he was 24 years old, ____ had been arrested for downloading a three-minute porn clip. The file description said the girl in the video was 16; the prosecutor said she was 14. He was charged with attempted sexual exploitation of a minor and, because he had used…
Read MoreNew Survey: Understanding the role of trauma and later sexual offending
[floridaactioncommittee.org – 7/15/19] My name is Melissa Grady and I a faculty member at the Catholic University of America’s National Catholic School of Social Service. I along with my colleague Jill Levenson, professor at Barry University in Florida, are conducting a study aimed at understanding the role of trauma and later sexual offending. There are two surveys associated with this study. The first is one for practitioners who work with individuals who have sexually offended (ISOs). The second survey is for ISOs and have received treatment focused on this issue.…
Read MoreGeneral Comments July 2019
Comments that are not specific to a certain post should go here, for the month of July 2019. Contributions should relate to the cause and goals of this organization and please, keep it courteous and civil. This section is not intended for posting links to news articles without additional relevant comment.
Read MoreSUCCESS! Your calls worked! ACSOL supports SB 145 again because residency restrictions are removed! But still come July 9!
Newly Revised SB 145 Deletes References to Residency Restrictions! Senate Bill 145 was revised today by deleting all references in that bill to both residency restrictions and Jessica’s Law. Specifically, Sections 5, 6 and 7 of the earlier version of the bill have been removed. The newly revised version of SB 145 will be considered on July 9 by the Assembly’s Public Safety Committee. “This is a significant victory for registrants and their families,” stated ACSOL Executive Director Janice Bellucci. “This victory came about due to the efforts of individuals…
Read MoreKat’s Blog: The Media Loves To Hate “Sex Offenders”
The manner in which news about sexual offenses is reported by the media affects public opinion and perception of “sex offenders”. Registrants seldom receive good press and it seems too often that “as the media goes, so goes the law.” While re-offense rates for registrants are on the decline compared to other types of offenses, news media ignores and fails to report these facts. Positive facts about registrants just don’t make for eye-catching headlines, they don’t create the hype and moral panic that media relies on to sustain its self.…
Read MoreKat’s Blog: Registrants and a Defeatist Attitude
Recently I read some comments on another advocacy website pertaining to TN’s new law effective July 1, 2019, in which adult registrants may not reside overnight in a home with a minor in it. The comments that caught my attention weren’t the “we’ve got to fight and do something about this” comments, but instead, the number of defeatist comments, “nothing is changing, we’re only fooling ourselves, we’re not winning, little wins mean nothing”. One person even went so far as to say something to the effect that they felt like…
Read MoreSCOTUS: Justices Nix Heavy Sentences for Repeat Sex Offenders
In an opinion that aligns Justice Neil Gorsuch with his liberal colleagues, the Supreme Court overturned a law that imposes heightened punishments on sex offenders who are caught with child pornography. “Only a jury, acting on proof beyond a reasonable doubt, may take a person’s liberty. That promise stands as one of the Constitution’s most vital protections against arbitrary government,” Gorsuch wrote for the plurality Wednesday. “Yet in this case a congressional statute compelled a federal judge to send a man to prison for a minimum of five years without empaneling a…
Read MoreKat’s Blog: Where Does the Burden of Proof Lie?
Just by virtue of being on the registry comes the erroneous assumption that all registrants are a danger to the public. With some of what I’ll call, the lesser offenses, public urination, skinny dipping, sexting, etc. it doesn’t really seem that the state or federal courts “prove” that a registrant is a threat to the community. In the eyes of the law, a “sex offender is a sex offender” and the same registrant label is slapped on everyone for 10yrs. to life. Who bears the burden of proof that a…
Read MoreSCOTUS: Gundy v. United States – Affirmed
Judgment: Affirmed, 5-3, in an opinion by Justice Kagan on June 20, 2019. Justice Kagan announced the judgment of the Court and delivered an opinion, in which Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor joined. Justice Alito filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. Justice Gorsuch filed a dissenting opinion, in which Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas joined. Justice Kavanaugh took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. Issue: Whether the federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act’s delegation of authority to the attorney general to issue regulations…
Read MoreHow the Use of Improper Statistics and Unverified Data Corrupts the Judicial Process in Sex Offender Cases
We begin this Article by sharing something about our past legal practice careers, as we believe that is so relevant to the topic that we focus on in this Article. When Michael L. Perlin was a rookie Public Defender in Trenton, New Jersey, in the early 1970s, he regularly visited the Menlo Park Diagnostic Center where some of his clients—those who had been found, in the phrase used then, to be “repetitive and compulsive” sex offenders—were housed. When Heather Ellis Cucolo was a rookie Public Defender in Newark, New Jersey,…
Read MoreKat’s Blog: Tennessee’s New Law: A Form of Birth Control for Registrants
Several months ago several TN Senators and Representatives were hell-bent on passing a two-fold law aimed at further punishment against registrants. The first part of the law would have increased the boundary restrictions for registrants from 1,000 ft. to 2,000 ft., thankfully, this portion of the law was abandoned. However, the second part of the law was passed and it is already bringing in to question the amount of “functioning gray matter” that these legislators actually have. Here’s the new law as it is written: State of TN /Senate…
Read MoreGundy v. United States could signal a major change in the Supreme Court’s separation of powers jurisprudence
Gundy v. United States is not listed in most media accounts of important matters now before the Supreme Court, yet this case could profoundly change how courts intervene to preserve the constitutional separation of powers in the future. Full Commentary Related How a Sex Offender’s Case Before the Supreme Court Could Bring Down the Administrative State (June 2)
Read MoreGeneral Comments June 2019
Comments that are not specific to a certain post should go here, for the month of June 2019. Contributions should relate to the cause and goals of this organization and please, keep it courteous and civil. This section is not intended for posting links to news articles without additional relevant comment.
Read MoreHow a Sex Offender’s Case Before the Supreme Court Could Bring Down the Administrative State
___________ was out on supervised release in 2004 from a 1996 crack distribution conviction when he met an 11-year-old girl. He served her cocaine and raped her. As soon as Monday, the Supreme Court will rule on his fate. While court-watchers have been focused on other headline issues the court may decide this term—including cases on abortion, citizenship questions on the Census, and partisan gerrymandering—the ______case could mark a watershed of its own. At issue isn’t the lurid crime itself, but just how much power Congress can delegate to the executive…
Read MoreKat’s Blog: Accusations
A recent story out of Logan, Utah got me thinking about how those who are wrongly accused, whether a registrant or not a registrant, are treated so vastly different in the eyes of the world. On April 23, 62 yr. old Michael Fife (not a registrant) was killed after being accused of a sexual assault aboard a Cache Valley Transit District bus. A 16 yr. old female called her 17 yr. old brother and told him that she had been sexually assault by Fife. A few minutes later, the brother…
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