The Alliance for Constitutional Sex Offense Laws (ACSOL) is dedicated to protecting the Constitution by restoring the civil rights of registrants and their families. In order to achieve that objective, ACSOL will educate and litigate as well as support or oppose legislation. The ACSOL website and recordings are provided as a service to registrants, registrants’ families, and others for general information only. The information on the website and in the recordings are not designed to provide legal or other advice or to create an attorney-client relationship. You should not take, or refrain from taking, action based on their content. Prior results and case studies do not guarantee a similar outcome in future representations. ACSOL accepts no responsibility for any loss or damages that may result from accessing or reliance on content on the ACSOL website and recordings and disclaim, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, any and all liability with respect to acts or omissions made by registrants, registrants’ families and others on the basis of content on the ACSOL website.
Important News / Announcements
Janice's Journal
General News Feed
NZ: Labour says no to vigilante action against sex offenders
Labour does not support vigilante-type actions against sex offenders as reported in the Herald on Sunday this morning but says the police must be utterly scrupulous in investigating sex offences in order to keep public confidence and prevent people taking the law into their own hands. Full Article
NEW! Living with 290 – YOUR Story
Tell YOUR Story! There are many challenges facing every person required to register under PC 290 as well as their loved ones. We are inviting you to share the challenges you are facing – as a person required to register, as a family member, as a loved one, or as a friend. It is through the expression of those challenges that we can learn...
CA RSOL Meeting – January 11 in San Diego
The first regular CA RSOL meeting of 2014 will be held in San Diego on January 11 at 10 am. As always, the meeting will be open and free of charge to registrants, friends & family and supporters. Media and government officials are not invited in order to ensure all attendee's privacy. The meeting will cover general topics of interest, as well as specific...
Handbook: Sex Offender Registration and Notification in the United States (2013)
US Dept of Justice: The SMART Office is pleased to announce the release of the 2013 version of Sex Offender Registration and Notification in the United States: Current Case Law and Issues. This edition updates the 2012 version with new cases, issues raised, and corrections where prior case law has been overturned or modified. There were a number of developments in case law, federal...
PA: Law requiring lifetime registration for juvenile sex offenders is unconstitutional
In a decision that seems destined for the appeals courts, a York County judge has ruled unconstitutional a two-year-old Pennsylvania law that imposes lifetime registration requirements on juvenile sex offenders. Senior Judge John C. Uhler issued his ruling against the juvenile registration provisions of the Sexual Offender Registration and Notification Act while weighing the cases of seven county teens adjudicated as having committed serious...
New treatment for sex offenders reduces repeat crimes by 70%
Sex offenders are 70 per cent less likely to reoffend if they are part of a restorative justice programme which exists in other countries but has not yet been introduced inIreland, a conference heard yesterday. The Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA) programme was developed in Canada and 100 such programmes are now in operation in the UK for sex offenders who have been released from...
San Diego Gets in Your Face With New Mobile Identification System
The San Diego regional planning agency, SANDAG, has been quietly rolling out a new mobile face recognition system that will sharply change how police conduct simple stops on Americans. The system, which allows officers to use mobile devices to collect face images out in the field, already has a database of 1.4 million images and serves nearly 25 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in...
Viewpoint: Sex offenders need stronger punishments
Baylor Lariat - A couple months ago, more than 100 people convened in Los Angeles for the Fifth Annual National Reform Sex Offender Laws conference, “Justice for All.” The purpose of the conference is to shed light and try to bring about reform of national and state sex offender laws that they claim deny the civil rights of more than 750,000 sex offenders. I find...
Fresno State ASI: Revised sex offender resolution passes
A debate over a revised resolution regarding the disclosure of sex offenders on campus, which has been among the main focuses of Fresno State’s Associated Students, Inc. agenda for most of the semester, came to a near-unanimous conclusion Wednesday. The resolution, authored by Neil O’Brien, senator for the College of Health and Human Services, calls for students to receive a general notification email from...
UK: 10 years for killing sex offender
A man who admitted killing a convicted sex offender in a flat fire in Worcester has been jailed for 10 years. Daniel Martin, 25, set fire to a wheelie bin and pushed it up against the front door of ____ ____'s flat in the early hours of December 14, 2011, sparking a rapidly spreading and ferocious blaze in which the 52-year-old was killed. Sentencing...
Ex-San Jose officer cops plea over teen’s pics
... As a condition of his plea to a felony charge of distributing or exhibiting harmful matter to a minor, ____ has resigned from the department where he had served for eight years, authorities said. When ____ is sentenced, the judge will determine if the conviction will be reduced to a misdemeanor, in which case ____ would not have to register as a sex offender...
AR: Sex Offenders, Experts Question Effectiveness of New Restrictions
LITTLE ROCK, AR - After serving their time, some sex offenders can be on another list for the rest of their lives. Convicted sex offenders are required to register with their local law enforcement office for at least 15 years, often much longer than that. Now some registered sex offenders and their families are saying this branding is doing more harm than good. Full Article
OR: Sex offenders commute to easy registration sites
... Recently, Fairview Police Chief Ken Johnson reported an unusually high number of sex offenders registering in Fairview. Even more odd, a majority of them don’t live in Fairview, but are arriving from Portland and elsewhere within Multnomah County. Full Article
CO: Denver Post article, shows eight amendment violation, for lack of treatment
An article in the Denver Post on November 3, 2013 was titled “Unintended effect of 1998 Colorado law: More sex offenders in for life”. This article brought to light that Colorado has not been offering treatment, as is required by law to people who have been sentenced for crimes. These people can only be released after receiving effective treatment and the state is not...
Static-99 developers embrace redemption – Sex offender risk plummets over time in community, new study reports
And now -- drum roll -- the authors of the most widely used actuarial tool for assessing sex offender recidivism are conceding that even sex offenders cross a "redemption threshold" over time, such that their risk of committing a new sexual crime may become "indistinguishable from the risk presented by non-sexual offenders." Tracking a large group of 7,740 sexual offenders drawn from 21 different...
TX: Is the public sex offender registry fair?
Kids across Southeast Texas are gearing up for Halloween, and with the holiday season upon us, parents should be aware of who lives in the homes their children are visiting. As part of a special report, 12News has researched which cities in SETX have the most registered sex offenders per capita. According to city-data.com, Woodville has the highest percentage, with one in every 79...
WI: Sex offender ordinance is working, Sheboygan officials say
Five years after Sheboygan first enacted strict limits on sex offenders seeking to live here, the city’s sex offender population has slowly waned, with the city now denying about a quarter of all residency requests it receives, records show. The 2008 ordinance essentially barred most registered sex offenders from living here without first receiving a waiver from a city committee and ultimately the Common...
Canada: Trouble with registries
On Sept. 16, Prime Minister Harper promised Canadians a national, online database accessible to the public listing the names of high-risk child sex-offenders to replace a patchwork of existing databases. Another proposed change announced by him would have such offenders planning to travel outside the country alert Canadian authorities before they leave, and who, in turn, may warn destination countries. The prime minister said this...
TX: Online solicitation statute ruled unconstitutional
In a surprising decision - both for its unanimous outcome and the unlikely reference to Miley Cyrus "twerking" in a Texas judicial opinion - the Court of Criminal Appeals today declared Texas Penal Code §33.021(b), criminalizing online solicitation of a minor, "facially unconstitutional" in a habeas corpus writ styled Ex Parte John Christopher Lo. See their unanimous opinion (pdf) written by Judge Cathy Cochran which ruled that...
CO: Unintended effect of 1998 law: More sex offenders in for life
In Colorado prisons, the number of men and women serving life sentences for sex offenses today is 41 times greater than that of just 14 years ago. On the roster of lifers, sex offenders now outnumber everyone else — killers, kidnappers, armed robbers, arsonists, habitual offenders, adults who fatally abuse children. Sixty-three percent of all Colorado prisoners sentenced to life are sex offenders, a...