All articles about HR 515 in one place…
Read MoreCategory: General News
Congress votes to stigmatize and surveil the travel of second-class US citizens
Can second-class US citizens be required to carry second-class US passports with a conspicuous stigmatizing “scarlet letter” label? Congress has now said yes. Do DHS pre-cogs have the omniscience and infallibility of angels at predicting and protecting the US and the world against future crimes? Congress has now said yes. Full Article
Read MoreObama Could Still Stop ‘Megan’s Law’ From Making Sex Offenders Get Special Passports
Both the U.S. House and Senate have signed off on a bill to brand registered sex offenders as such on their passports and require federal officials to notify foreign governments whenever certain offenders intend to travel there. The bill is now on its way to President Obama; it’s unclear whether he’ll sign. If he does, it will be “the first time in U.S. history that any such special designation will appear on the passports of any U.S. citizens,” writes lawyer and New America Foundation Senior Fellow David Post at The Volokh Conspiracy, “and I…
Read MoreCongress Acts to Mark Passports of Sex Offenders
Target of legislation is sex-traffickers; critics call it a ‘scarlet letter.’ Legislation requiring the State Department to identify registered sex offenders with a special mark on their passports received final passage in the House of Representatives on Monday night and went to President Obama’s desk. The White House has not indicated whether President Obama plans to sign the bill. Full Article
Read MoreThis is how to pass a bill with no facts to support it
The discussion in the U.S. House pertinent to International Megan’s Law has ended with a vote to pass the resolution under suspension of the rules. Ten legislators spoke in favor of the bill. They all threw out a lot of numbers, sometimes in conflict with each other, all designed to draw conclusions that cannot be concluded with any degree of logic. Remember that the bill is named International Megan’s Law to Prevent Child Exploitation and Other Sexual Crimes Through Advanced Notification of Traveling Sex Offenders. Child exploitation and other sexual…
Read MoreShould a 9-year-old Be Branded a Sex Offender for Life? [Opinion]
Southwestern Law School professor Catherine Carpenter put it bluntly in her new research paper, “Throwaway Children: The Tragic Consequences of a False Narrative.” “Truth be told,” she wrote, “we are afraid for our children and we are afraid of our children.” Full Article
Read MoreJudge Gives Man 5 Days for Child Porn, Rails Against Harsh Sentences
A Brooklyn man who faced 10 years for downloading child pornography was sentenced to five days by a federal judge who sharply criticized punishment guidelines for failing to distinguish between dangerous offenders and those who pose little threat. Full Article
Read MoreCongress Reschedules HR 515 Vote for February 1 [updated with media]
The U.S. House of Representatives has rescheduled its vote on HR 515, International Megan’s Law, for Monday, February 1. As originally scheduled, the vote will be under a “suspension of the rules” and therefore debate will be limited to no more than 40 minutes and require a 2/3 vote of those present regardless of how many members are in attendance. “There is still time to send E-mails this weekend and to make phone calls on Monday,” stated CA RSOL president Janice Bellucci. “The vote on this and seven other bills…
Read MoreAre We All Sex Offenders? Galen Baughman – TEDxCUNY
Galen works alongside many others in reforming the criminal justice system, but his angle might surprise you. Join him as he shares his crusade for equal justice, which has led him to the courtroom, advocacy, and beyond. https://youtu.be/pYt-3fai-PI View on youtube
Read MoreWhy Some Young Sex Offenders Are Held Indefinitely
On the afternoon of ___ ___’s 18th birthday, three parole officers showed up at his home in West New York, N.J. Sanchez was in his slippers and shorts, and when his mother asked if she could grab her son something else to wear, an officer assured her that ___ would be gone only for a little while. That was five years ago. ____ is behind bars, but he is not in a regular prison. He is considered a resident, one who is detained involuntarily and indefinitely at the Special Treatment…
Read MoreThe Myth of Super Bowl Sex Trafficking Obscures Real Issues
East Bay rapper Joshua “Five Hunnet” Durham had a busy August. He forced an underage runaway girl into paid sex with him and others, according to law enforcement, keeping her addled with a drug cocktail of weed, cocaine and meth. He advertised her services on social media next to boasts about opening for hip-hop mega-couple Meek Mill and Nicki Minaj, a show that would be stopped after a pepper spray fight between fans. Sex trafficking, Durham’s alleged crime, has become a major focus of Bay Area law enforcement agencies in…
Read MoreOppose HR 515 Online Today at Change.Org
Please sign an online petition at Change.Org regarding your opposition to HR 515, International Megan’s Law. It takes less than 5 minutes and it is a way to express your opinion regarding this terrible bill. The link to the petition is below and once you sign the petition, be sure to ask others to do it, too. There are more than 800,000 registrants and each person has at least one family member or friend. With those numbers, the voices of more than 1 million people could be heard. http://www.change.org/p/u-s-house-of-representatives-vote-against-hr-515
Read MoreIML Set for Concurrence Vote Tuesday, 26th We Must Act Now! [updated with postponement of vote]
The U.S. House of Representatives will not vote on legislation on Tuesday and Wednesday because of the severe winter storm that hit the country’s capital city over the weekend, according to Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s office. The next vote by the congressional chamber is expected on Feb. 1. THIS MEANS ONE EXTRA WEEK TO CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVE TO RECORD YOUR OPPOSITION TO HR 515. ACTION ALERT! Contact YOUR national HOUSE representatives TODAY via email, and then CALL their office again on Monday. Here is a link to locate YOUR representative:…
Read MoreInternational Megan’s Law, A Law That Fails Miserably To Make Its Case (But Which Is About To Be Enacted, Even So)
The erosion of the rights of the Registered Sex Offender to travel despite no evidence that they are committing crimes We are assured, both by the media, who have mastered the art of feeding a credulous (and hungry) public, as well as by our government minders who continue to whittle away our few remaining rights that, on the strength of their pervasive hunches, sex offender registrants are surely committing waves of sex crimes in their travels abroad and must be stopped with the broadest strokes possible. Since, in their estimation,…
Read MoreA Government Which Simultaneously Murders Children Abroad While Barring U.S. Citizens From International Travel
Let’s put the whole sex-offender-as-existential-threat-to-children trope in perspective, shall we? While our government, the U.S., has made it difficult-to-impossible for “sex offender registrants” to travel to foreign countries due to its implementation of an alert system to notify foreign governments of the sex offender status of U.S. citizens (and is about to make that system even more egregious through the anticipated passage of the current International Megan’s Law bill) it has killed thousands of children in the Middle East in its ongoing, and massively failed, military adventures which we, the…
Read MoreFBI ran website sharing thousands of child porn images
WASHINGTON — For nearly two weeks last year, the FBI operated what it described as one of the Internet’s largest child pornography websites, allowing users to download thousands of illicit images and videos from a government site in the Washington suburbs. The operation — whose details remain largely secret — was at least the third time in recent years that FBI agents took control of a child pornography site but left it online in an attempt to catch users who officials said would otherwise remain hidden behind an encrypted and…
Read MoreKids As Young As 9 Are on the Sex Offender Registry…for Life
Southwestern Law School Professor Catherine L.Carpenter puts it bluntly in her new research paper, Throwaway Children: The Tragic Consequences of a False Narrative. “Truth be told,” she writes, “we are afraid for our children and we are afraid of our children.” Being afraid for our kids has lead us to create ever harsher sex offender registration laws. We want to protect our kids from creeps. But this protection plan of ours has backfired. And now, Carpenter writes, whenever we arrest a minor for a sex crime, our fear “of our children…
Read MoreThe Relationship Between Juvenile Sex Offender Registration and Depression in Adulthood
Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies – Abstract: Accounts of sexual abuse appear daily in the media. Rightfully, this issue demands attention. Juveniles may be victims; they may also be offenders who are subject to sex offender registration and notification (SORN) policies. Growing research finds that SORN policies fail to achieve intended public policy outcomes. Little is known, however, about the unintended consequences of SORN for juvenile offenders. This study contributed to a more comprehensive understanding of the effects of these policies on this population. Merton’s concept of manifest and latent…
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