America is wrongly jailing far too many people for viewing child pornography, the best-selling legal novelist John Grisham has told The Telegraph in a wide-ranging attack on the US judicial system and the country’s sky-high prison rates. Mr Grisham, 59, argued America’s judges had “gone crazy” over the past 30 years, locking up far too many people, from white collar criminals like the businesswoman Martha Stewart, to black teenagers on minor drugs charges and – he added – those who had viewed child porn online. Full Article Update: A STATEMENT FROM…
Read MoreCategory: General News
We Need to Make It Easier for Pedophiles To Seek Help
All too often, our attention, resources and shock are focused on what happens after a crime is committed—we need to be asking how we can prevent child sex abuse. Full Op-Ed Piece
Read MoreTricks-Not-Treats: Halloween Predator Panic Laws
I remember coming home from “trick-or-treating” as a child and turning over my bag of candy to my mother for inspection. After all, one of our neighbors could have slipped rat poison in our Tootsie Rolls or razor blades in our apples. Aside from certain choice pieces missing as a result of mom’s ingestion… er, “inspection” process, my mother never found any razor blades or rat poison in our Halloween Candy. Despite virtually no confirmed cases of Halloween poisonings, the myth has remained a constant in our culture [1]. Full…
Read MoreMistaking My Dad for a Predator
My late father’s occupation, and love, was teaching mobility to blind students. He was employed by the school district and taught blind, k-12 students how to move about in the community. The “classroom” consisted of busy intersections, the mall, the post office, and many other places. He had been doing the work for 35 years and had seen society change so much. Full Article
Read MorePedophilia: A Disorder, Not a Crime (Opinion)
THINK back to your first childhood crush. Maybe it was a classmate or a friend next door. Most likely, through school and into adulthood, your affections continued to focus on others in your approximate age group. But imagine if they did not. By some estimates, 1 percent of the male population continues, long after puberty, to find themselves attracted to prepubescent children. These people are living with pedophilia, a sexual attraction to prepubescents that often constitutes a mental illness. Unfortunately, our laws are failing them and, consequently, ignoring opportunities to…
Read MoreOur criminal justice system is making it really hard for people to find jobs
Although the American economy has rebounded from the Great Recession, many people still struggle to find jobs. Politicians blame taxation, trade policies and automation. Some have even singled out the current welfare system. Often overlooked? The many punitive effects of the criminal justice system. Nearly 65 million Americans have a criminal record. This black mark carries with it potentially mandatory restrictions on jobs, housing, education and public assistance. As detailed in a National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers study, the federal government and every state imposes some sort of “collateral…
Read MoreCITY OF COMMERCE ORDINANCE CHALLENGED IN FEDERAL DISTRICT COURT
A sex offender ordinance adopted by the City of Commerce has been challenged in a lawsuit filed today in federal district court on behalf of a registered sex offender (“registered citizen”). “This lawsuit was filed because the City of Commerce prohibits registered citizens from visiting the public library, parks, bus stops and commercial establishments that provide a children’s playground,” stated California RSOL president Janice Bellucci. “The City has failed to revise or repeal its ordinance despite recent court decisions that determined such ordinances are preempted by state law.” This is…
Read MoreGeneral Comments October 2014
Comments that are not specific to a certain post should go here, for the month of October 2014. Contributions should relate to the cause and goals of this organization and please, keep it courteous and civil.
Read MoreDo Residency Bans Drive Sex Offenders Underground?
Early last year, Los Angeles set aside a sliver of land in its Harbor Gateway neighborhood for the city’s newest and smallest park: two jungle gyms on a fifth of an acre. The project was more than just an effort to increase the city’s green space. City Council members made clear that one of the park’s principal reasons for existence was to force 33 people on the California sex offender registry who were living in a nearby apartment building to move out. State law bars those on its registry from living within…
Read MoreJustice Department Announces $17.6 Million in Awards to Support Sex Offender Registration, Intervention and Treatment
The U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of Justice Programs (OJP) today announced more than $17 million in Fiscal Year 2014 grant assistance for states, territories, tribal governments and other entities to use to implement, enhance and maintain sex offender programming throughout the United States. “These awards provide a wide range of assistance to help states, communities, tribes, and even institutions of higher learning manage sex offenders,” said Dawn Doran, Acting Director of the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering and Tracking (SMART). “They will give jurisdictions the tools…
Read MoreWhat I Want You To Know About Being The Sister Of A Convicted Sex Offender
I used to believe in monsters. Until my brother became one. Three years ago, I got a call that my brother had been arrested for molesting his step-daughter. Certain there had been a mistake, I was obviously dumbfounded. Until he confessed. Through slurred words, drunken ramblings and tears that, yes, he had, and on more than one occasion. The arrest was just the very first drop in a roller coaster of emotion. This event has single handedly shaken my world like nothing before it. It has transformed my family in…
Read MoreEver have Your Fortune Told.
Human beings have the habit of wanting somebody to be omniscient In powers to predict the future. When you think of a fortuneteller you think of a Gypsy type woman in a dark room with a turbine on her head in front of a crystal ball. We know in our hearts that these people are charlatans, whether they use a crystal ball, tarot cards, numerology or our astrological signs. Why then should we put any more faith into forensic psychologists who disregard the limits of science by overstating the accuracy…
Read MoreCT: Norm Pattis – Courts create special rules for sexual misconduct cases
A future historian might one day write the following of our time: “Despite a generally permissive culture in which sexually suggestive photographs were used to advertise products ranging from toothpaste to cars, 21st century Americans nonetheless harbored draconian and puritanical laws involving sexual misconduct. It is almost as though they were afraid of the very desire they relied upon to entertain and to titillate themselves.” Full Op-Ed Piece
Read MoreJurors Beware: State Crime Labs Incentivized to Help Falsely Convict
Many jurors are led to believe that evidence and results provided to them through state crime labs are objective data on which they can rely in determining the fate of the defendant. Earlier this year, we discussed the crime lab scandal at the Hinton Lab in Jamaica Plain in Massachusetts, in which a chemist who was socially wooed by prosecutors falsified lab results in favor of conviction for years, calling 40,000 convictions into question. Jurors should be aware that there are even stronger incentives for state crime labs across the country to…
Read MoreSexual Offender Residence Restrictions
ATSA supports evidence-based public policy and practice. Research consistently shows that residence restrictions do not reduce sexual reoffending or increas community safety. In fact, these laws often create more problems than they solve, including homelessness, transience, and clustering of disproportionate numbers of offenders in areas outside of restricted zones. Full Report (pdf)
Read MoreFBI launches a face recognition system
The FBI’s new facial recognition system lets local police easily identify you. It will one day spot you from your iris, voice and the way you walk. It’s called the FBI’s Next Generation Identification system, and the agency said it became fully operational Monday. The government expects the system’s database to house 51 million photographs by next year — and keep growing. But it’s not just for the FBI. Police everywhere will be able to tap into the system. They’ll quickly ID fingerprints during a routine traffic stop — or look up…
Read MoreThe Supreme Court Renders Another Decision Interpreting the Ex Post Facto Clause
June 2013 – The national drive to identify and punish child predators took a step backward this week. While on its surface, the Supreme Court’s decision this week in Peugh v. United States does not deal with sex offenders, its impact will surely be felt in the sex-offender cases. As with the Court’s decision ten years ago in Stogner v. California, the Ex Post Facto Clause has once again been interpreted to make it more difficult to incarcerate criminals, and particularly sex offenders, as I will explain below. Full Article
Read MoreThe Promise (and Perils) of Predicting Sex Crimes
Attorney-General Eric Holder’s August 1 speech criticizing the use of risk assessment in sentencing decisions may not lever the issue to the top of the policy agenda. But a new paper could revive the debate about the effectiveness of risk tools in evaluating the chances of recidivism among those convicted of sex crimes. A forthcoming article in the Arizona State Law Journal argues that state criminal justice systems which use risk assessment tools may overestimate sex offenders’ likelihood of committing another crime. That message may complicate the efforts of those…
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