Tag: megan’s law

New collection of research on sex offense registration

Cambridge University Press has just published a new book, edited by Professors Wayne A. Logan and J.J. Prescott, containing chapters from the nation’s leading social science researchers on the many important empirical questions surrounding sex offense registration and community notification (SORN).  Since SORN’s origin in the early 1990s, basic questions have existed regarding its effects, including whether it actually achieves its intended purpose of reducing sexual offending.

SORN surely numbers among the most significant social control methods of the past several decades.  Although the Supreme Court in 2003 rejected two constitutional challenges to SORN laws (Connecticut Dept. of Public Safety v. Doe and Smith v. Doe), of late courts, including the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals (Does v. Snyder, 2016), have cast a more critical eye, invalidating new generation SORN laws that have become more onerous and expansive in their reach.

An updated review of caselaw from Professor Logan on SORN and other collateral consequences triggered primarily by sex offenses will be included in the forthcoming fourth edition of Love, Roberts & Logan, Collateral Consequences of Arrest & Conviction: Law Policy & Practice (West/NACDL, 4th ed. 2021). Also, as readers might be aware, the American Law Institute, as part of its overhaul of the Model Penal Code’s sex offense-related provisions, has tentatively approved a slate of reforms advocating a vastly reduced approach to registration and discontinuation of community notification. (We plan a post about the MPC’s important new model in the near future.)

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NJ high court bars retroactive application of Megan’s Law

The New Jersey Supreme Court on Wednesday held 2014 amendments to Megan’s Law enhancing certain penalties for sex offenders who violate parole requirements unenforceable against four defendants based on the ex post facto clauses of both the state and federal constitutions. The court, in a unanimous ruling, vacated the convictions and sentences of four paroled sex offenders who committed minor violations of their parole conditions and mounted a challenge to the laws. The ruling vacates the individuals’ third-degree convictions for the parole violations.
“A law that retroactively increases or makes more burdensome the punishment of a crime is an ex post facto law,” wrote Justice Barry Albin for the court. “The Amendment, therefore, is an ex post facto law that violates our Federal and State Constitutions as applied to defendants.”  The four sex offenders—Melvin Hester, Mark Warner, Linwood Roundtree and Anthony McKinney—after completing their sentences for the original crimes, were placed on community supervision for life, according to the decision. That means that they must register their addresses with local law enforcement, and inform law enforcement if they change their addresses.  Those registration requirements were enacted by the state Legislature in 1994 after a 7-year-old Hamilton Township girl, Megan Kanka, was sexually assaulted and murdered by a convicted sex offender, Jesse Timmendequas, who was living in her neighborhood. The requirements that paroled sex offenders register their whereabouts later became federal law.

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A wide-ranging look at sex offender registration in PA and beyond

The Cumberland County (Pennsylvania) Sentinel recently published a series of articles by Joshua Vaughn that examine the operation and effect of sex offender registration laws from a variety of perspectives. We summarize the articles with links to the Sentinel’s website.

Finding statistics to fit a narrative

Original article

Vaughn traces the “frightening and high risk of recidivism” for untreated sex offenders that Justice Kennedy used to support the Supreme Court’s holdings in McKune v. Lile (2002) and Smith v. Doe (2003) to an unsourced “anecdotal quip” in a 1986 article from Psychology Today suggesting sex offender recidivism rates as high as 80%.  That figure found its way into a Justice Department practitioner’s guide for treating incarcerated sex offenders, which in turn was cited by the Solicitor General’s amicus brief in McKune. Vaughn, asking how such a questionable statistic could turn out to be a “linchpin fact” in two extremely influential Supreme Court cases, proposes that the Court relied on the Solicitor General, who in turn relied on the practice guide without doing his own research.

Vaughn reports that the Justice Department “now states on its website that the rate at which released sexual offenders are rearrested for new sexual offenses is as low as 3 to 10 percent,” evidently referring to a report of the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

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