Tag: registration

CCRC files amicus brief in Illinois sex offender case

The CCRC has filed an amicus brief in the Illinois Supreme Court in support of the appellant in People v. Bingham, a case challenging the constitutionality of a state law requiring registration as a “sexual predator” based on the commission of a non-sexual offense.  The relevant facts of the case are as follows.

Jerome Bingham was convicted of attempted sexual assault in 1983 and served several years in prison on that charge.  At the time, Illinois did not have a sex offender registration requirement.  Thereafter, Bingham was convicted of a number of petty drug and theft offenses.  In 2012, Illinois enacted an amendment to its sex offender registration act (SORA) providing that its registration requirement would apply retroactively to anyone who had previously committed a qualifying sex offense and, subsequent to the 2012 act, committed any felony.  In 2013, Bingham stole goods worth $72 from a K-Mart storage lot.  Although this would ordinarily have been a misdemeanor, the fact that he had a prior similar offense permitted it to be charged as a felony, which it was, thereby subjecting him to the sex offender registration requirement.

Read more

Sex offender residency restrictions in the courts: is the tide turning?

The Marshall Project has published an important new article by Maurice Chammah on legal challenges to restrictions on where registered sex offenders can work, live, and visit. See “Making the Case Against Banishing Sex Offenders: Legislators won’t touch the subject, but courts are proving more sympathetic.”  Chammah writes that activists, finding lawmakers unreceptive to any measure perceived to benefit sex offenders, “have taken the route favored by other politically unpopular groups and turned to the legal system, where they are more likely to encounter judges insulated from electoral concerns.”

 Their legal claims vary, but in numerous cases, reformers have argued that these restrictions associated with registration add up to a sort of second sentence, and that they are defined in a vague way that makes them difficult to abide by. In some cases, the plaintiffs have argued that individual towns have enacted restrictions above and beyond what states allow them to impose.

Read more

State courts question mandatory lifetime sex offender registration

Notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s decisions in Connecticut Department of Public Safety v. Doe, 538 U.S. 1 (2003) and Smith v. Doe, 538 U.S. 84 (2003), state courts are coming to different conclusions under their own constitutions about whether sex offender registration and notification laws constitute punishment for purposes of due process and ex post facto analysis.  The Pennsylvania Supreme Court is the most recent to invalidate mandatory registration requirements imposed on juveniles, but several state supreme courts have limited the retroactive application of registration requirements to adults under an ex post facto analysis.

Read more