Category: National

The Justice Department’s Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (SMART) recently announced that Pennsylvania and the U.S. Virgin Islands are the latest jurisdictions to implement the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), Title I of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006. Since the passage of SORNA, which establishes a comprehensive national system for the registration of sex offenders, a total of 16 states, three territories and 36 tribes have met the requirements for implementation. The Act is named in memory of…

OSWEGO — Amy Warner is a mom who says she’ll sleep easier after the city of Oswego voted unanmiously to pass a law which prohibits sex offenders from driving taxi cabs. “Having young kids who aren’t always making the best choices, I don’t think it’s a good idea putting them in any unnecessary danger,” says Warner. Prior to the vote, Jeremy Zielisnki called the law a form of discrimination. “If a person is going to be denied employment it should be based on a rational decision and factual information. It…

“If we had been aware of his record,” says Maureen Kanka, “my daughter would be alive today.” She is referring, in a statement on the website of an anti-crime group she founded, to Jesse Timmendequas, a neighbor in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, who raped and murdered her 7-year-old daughter, Megan, in 1994. Three months later, the state legislature enacted Megan’s Law, which created a publicly accessible registry of sex offenders. Full Article

The Niagara County Legislature has scheduled a public meeting for October 2nd at 6:45pm to discuss plans to repeal the county’s tough sex-offender law. The move comes after recent court rulings said local laws cannot be more strict than the one enacted by New York State. Full Article

Every Halloween night, between 30 and 50 Bernalillo County Sheriff’s deputies spread out all over the county and knock on the doors of registered sex offenders, as a reminder that the county knows where they are and what they’re doing. The Halloween blitz is just one of the tactics the Sheriff’s Department says could be behind the county’s remarkably low sex offender re-offense, or recidivism, rate. Of more than 1,200 registered offenders that include sex offenders as far back as the 1970s, the sex offender registry unit has identified only…

Known Relationships Are the Greater Danger – According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), every year, more than 200,000 children are abducted by family members. An additional 58,000 are taken by nonrelatives with primarily sexual motives. However, only 115 reported abductions represent cases in which strangers abduct and kill children, hold them for ransom, or take them with the intention to keep.1 Media news outlets have portrayed that abductors primarily consist of strangers or registered sex offenders (RSO), which has proven invalid in the past 2…

PORT ANGELES — A man who gunned down two sex offenders on the Olympic Peninsula was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison without possibility of parole, but a judge warned those sympathetic to his cause to back off. Patrick Drum, 34, shot Gary Lee Blanton, 28, on June 2 at a home Drum was renting near Sequim. Blanton was renting a room in the home. Drum then drove to the home of Jerry Wayne Ray, 57, in the Agnew area near Port Angeles where Ray was killed the next morning.  Full Article

Did you know you can request your home address be removed from Google, Yahoo, Bing and other mapping services? Well you can, and we recommend you do it for your own safety, especially if you are wearing the “sex offender” label. Many online registries use these mapping services, and if you request yours be removed, then it will also be unmappable from the many registries as well. Below is a link for Google Maps, but other mapping services have a similar process: http://tinyurl.com/9tsedws Instructions

click image for larger view © S. Meyers, Sunday Maine Telegram

Sex offenders can stir up a lot of fear and anger in a community. But an innovative program from the Department of Corrections (DOC) is preventing new crimes by matching a sex offender about to be released from prison with a group of four to seven volunteer mentors, according to a study that will be published in Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment. Full Article Also see here.

Fairfield Apartments sits in a quiet neighborhood in south Fort Myers. On a recent afternoon, children played on well-groomed lawns as a boy rode his bicycle down a winding street dotted with palm trees. But Julie Evans has a message for her neighbors in the apartment complex down the street. “I got a gun,” she said. “And I will use that gun.” There are 22 registered sex offenders living at Fairfield Apartments and 12 in surrounding homes. Despite hostility from neighbors such as Evans, this neighborhood has offered the warmest…

The city of Franklin has dropped its legal fight to overturn a January court decision that found its ordinance restricting the residency of sex offenders unconstitutional. But the city will try other ways to keep sex offenders from living near schools, parks and other places children congregate, Mayor Ken Merrifield said. The city’s appeal was scheduled to be heard by the state Supreme Court next week. “We have conferred with our legal counsel, and we really had only filed the appeal to keep that door open,” Merrifield said. “It really…

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Fifteen people challenging the constitutionality of the retroactive nature of Maine’s sex offender registry have gone before the state’s highest court. A lawyer for most of the men listed as John Doe in court papers told the Supreme Judicial Court on Thursday they were required to register long after they had served time and gone years without any new offenses. He says they weren’t given hearings or allowed to argue that they were no longer dangerous. He said some of them went decades with no new offenses. Full Article…

INDIANAPOLIS — A federal court appeals ruling may push state legislators into finding a fix for some long-standing problems with Indiana’s sex and violent offender registry. On Tuesday, a federal appeals court ruled the state’s registry was unconstitutional because it violated the due process rights of ex-offenders in the registry who have no way to correct mistaken information. The registry is a publicly accessible database that contains personal information, including the photographs and addresses of sex and violent offenders who live in Indiana. Full Article

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (NBC) — Students and parents are rallying against new ID badges that track student movement on the campuses of two San Antonio, Texas schools. Father Steven Hernandez does not agree with the district’s new pilot program called Radio Frequency Identification System, or RFID. The new identification tags are designed to help the district improve safety by locating students at any time, while on campus, at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School. RFID tags are also supposed to help with attendance by counting students more…

At a last-minute hearing in Clallam County Superior Court Thursday, Patrick Boyd Drum, 34, of Sequim, pleaded guilty to all charges stemming from a June double murder.  Drum shot and killed Gary Lee Blanton Jr., 28, and Jerry Wayne Ray, 55, before fleeing four miles up Blue Mountain Road and eluding law enforcement for several hours June 3. Blanton and Ray were both registered sex offenders and Drum told Sheriff’s deputies that is why he killed them, according to court documents. Full Article