FARMINGTON — A Farmington therapist stands by her belief that young people who commit sex offenses are worthy of a second chance at a healthy, normal life. Full Article
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A Senseless Policy – Take kids off the sex-offender registries.
At age 10, Maya R. did something that would disturb just about anyone: “Me and my step-brothers, who were ages 8 and 5, ‘flashed’ each other and play-acted sex while fully clothed,” she told Human Rights Watch researcher Nicole Pittman. After copping to the incident in juvenile court, Maya’s punishment was an 18-month sentence in a detention center, mandatory counseling, and a quarter-century of registration as a sex offender. Full Article
Read MoreDC: Court Denies Challenge to Sex Offender’s Website on Registry Officials
A website that “registers” and posts photos of government employees who work in the District of Columbia’s sex offender registration office is protected by the First Amendment, a D.C. Superior Court held in a February 14, 2014 memorandum opinion. Dennis Sobin, a convicted sex offender, is required to register every three months with the D.C. Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency (CSOSA), and his picture is posted on the District’s sex offender registry. Sobin, 70, spent over ten years in prison for using a minor while filming a pornographic movie,…
Read MoreDon’t confuse sex addicts, offenders
Recent local stories – of a financial aid director abusing his power against women, of a serial child molester, of an alleged rapist – have the disturbing sex offender in mind. We’re told such behavior generally repeats itself; are these offenders addicts? Does it matter? Labeling people as “monsters” is easy. Do we care about the root of their behaviors? Regardless of the answer, North Idaho expert and counselor Ed Dudding says it’s important to distinguish between sex offenders – who may be addicted to sex (71 percent of child…
Read MoreCollateral damage: Harsh sex offender laws may put whole families at risk
Research says that registries and residency bans leave children of sex offenders vulnerable to bullying, homelessness. When ____ ____, 38, bolts from his desk around 5:30 most weeknights, he’s up against his most important deadline of the day. ____ is an audiovisual editor and social media manager at a Christian television studio in St. Petersburg, Florida. By the time he gets home, he and ____ , his wife of nine years, have just over three hours to make dinner for their three children, squeeze in a half-hour of playtime, get…
Read MoreNational RSOL: International Travel Group
If you or someone you know was denied entry into another country as a consequence of registration, we want to hear from you. A new group, supported by RSOL National, is examining the issues related to registered citizens traveling, including the practice of the US Government notifying receiving countries that a registrant is traveling there. A representative of FAC will serve on the board of this new group. We want to make sure that your experiences areincluded in our efforts to enable registrants to travel freely and unmolested. Please send…
Read MoreCourts are giving reduced terms to many child-porn defendants
U.S. District Judge James S. Gwin of the Northern District of Ohio polled a jury in February about what jurors thought a suitable sentence would be for ____ ____, a child pornography defendant who was found guilty of having 19 videos and 93 still images on his computer. The jury recommended, on average, a 14-month sentence. Gwin then sentenced ____ to serve five years—longer than the jury recommendation yet significantly shorter than the government’s 20-year recommendation. Full Article
Read MoreHow a dubious statistic convinced U.S. courts to approve of indefinite detention [Opinion]
In the 2002 case McKune v. Lile, the Supreme Court upheld a Kansas law that imposed harsher sentences on sex offenders who declined to participate in a prison rehab program. The substance of the Kansas law the court upheld isn’t as important as the language the court used to uphold it. In his opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy reasoned that they pose “such a frightening and high risk of recidivism” which he wrote “has been estimated to be as high as 80%.” Five year earlier, in Kansas v. Hendricks, the court…
Read MoreMore fuel for the movement to reform sex offender laws
I’ve written before about the appalling (and unconstitutional) state of our laws regarding prohibitions and restrictions on the activities of convicted sex offenders — restrictions on where they can live, whom they can associate with, the Internet sites they can visit, the jobs they can hold and the places to which they can travel — to which they are subject after they have served whatever sentences were imposed upon them for their crimes. Commenting recently on a decision by the federal district court in Minnesota striking down Minnesota’s egregious post-conviction…
Read MoreThe system for punishing sex offenders is broken (Opinion)
Think “sex offender,” and you probably picture a creepy guy who likes to lure children to his van with candy. But that’s not the whole picture. The sex offender registry, which currently stands at over 850,000 registered sex offenders, is comprised of many people who should not be lumped into the same category as violent sex offenders and pedophiles. People like teenager Zach Anderson. The 19-year-old had sex with a teenage girl he met through a dating app. The girl said she was 17 – above the age of consent –…
Read MoreOnline Petition: Justice for Zachery Anderson
When my son Zach met a girl through an online dating app, she said she was 17 years old and lived about twenty minutes away. The two decided to meet up and had consensual sex. Zach was a typical 19-year-old studying computer science at Community College — until he found out that the girl had lied about her age and was really 14. Though the girl admitted to lying about her age and even her parents agreed the encounter was completely consensual and that Zach didn’t do anything wrong, Zach…
Read MoreFolsom registered sex offenders live near elementary school
FOLSOM, Calif. (KCRA) —While researching nearby schools in Folsom for his 5-year-old daughter, Simon Varley also checked the Megan’s Law website to see where the nearest sex offenders live. Full Article
Read MoreHuman Trafficking in America: Myths and Realities
Are politicians making the same mistakes with sex trafficking as they did with the war on drugs? What effects have stricter laws had on consenting sex workers? Is forced prostitution a growing problem? Video Discussion
Read More“Yes Means Yes” Date-Rape Consent Rule Unconstitutional – Judge
In what may foreshadow the end to a new “yes means yes” standard of consent for date rape, already been adopted in California and New York as well as on many other campuses, a judge has ruled – in a case in which both parties were so drunk they did not even know if sex had actually occurred – that the new standard violated the U.S. Constitution. Full Article
Read MoreA Grandma Reflects on Sex Offender Laws: “My Husband Would Have Gone to Jail”
Following up on the Zach Anderson case — the 19 year old on the Sex Offender Registry for 25 years for having consensual sex with a girl who said she was 17 (but was really 14) — comes this grandma’s letter. The Sex Offender Registry is a Free-Range issue because it grows out of the belief our kids are in constant danger and it perpetuates that belief, by making many non-threatening people like Zach into scary dots on the “maps of local sex offenders.” Full Article (FreeRangeKids)
Read MoreMany sex offenders denied entry into Mexico. But others live here.
Mexico has no national registry of sex offenders, but it’s been able to use an international database to bar entry to more than a thousand known abusers and would-be child sex tourists over the last 22 months. Full Article Related All Posts in International Travel International Travel (Main Post)
Read MoreWhen the sex offender registry goes too far
You may have heard about questionable instances of people being put on a sex offender registry: teenagers having sex with other teenagers, overly curious children touching each other’s private parts, someone urinating in public. These are hardly the pedophiles and violent criminals who abduct and rape the innocent, but oftentimes they are subject to the same stringent restrictions on where to live and shop and the same stigma that makes finding a job very difficult. The case of Zachary Anderson helps to illustrate the failure of this one-size-fits-all punishment. ……
Read MoreGoogle, Facebook, Twitter join crackdown on child porn
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Yahoo will be among the first technology companies to use the Internet Watch Foundation’s “hash list” to identify and remove child abuse images uploaded to their services, the British anti-abuse organization announced Monday. Not to be confused with a hashtag, a hash is a string of code that can serve as the digital fingerprint of an image. Sharing the list of fingerprints with Internet companies will allow victims’ images to be identified and removed more quickly, preventing them from being repeatedly shared. Full Article
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