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By remaining on this web page you here by acknowledge that you support human rights and United States constitutional rights for registered sex offenders and that you support freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech is understood to be fundamental in a democracy. The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights.
This blog is not for people to be critical of what is posted here and if the reader is critical of anything here than that means they did not read the disclaimer on the top of each of the pages here and are not welcome here and should stop reading and leave this blog upon my request and in the name of freedom of speech, and my rights as a American citizen.
No sexual abuse is ever acceptable. Sex offense laws and policies should be based on sound research and common sense, not fear, panic or paranoia. Current laws and policies that paint all sex offenders with one broad brush are counter- productive, wasteful, and cause needless harm. Each offense must be judged on its own merits with a punishment that fits the crime and does not waste taxpayer dollars. The public sex offender registry and residency restriction laws do not protect children but instead ostracize and dehumanize individuals and their families. Money spent on purely punitive measures would be better used for prevention, healing, and rehabilitation.
The author of SO FAQ does not affiliate with any other organization or people on the internet or the world for that matter. I have been saying this since I first logged on to the internet. Just because I like organizations like the ACLU; does not mean I believe in everything they believe in or stand for. Just like in our great country when we vote; we will never believe in everything the candidate we vote for; believes in or stands for. That doe not mean we are should not vote.
3 Great Victory's of 2016
Polygraphs made illegal to use on sex offenders.
Plethysmograph's made illegal to use on sex offenders.
Retroactive laws made illegal to be used on sex offenders.
See for yourself read bellow:
Polygraph Requirement Violates Registrant’s 5th Amendment Rights
Posted On 10 May, 2016
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision today stating that a registrant’s Fifth Amendment right to remain silent was violated when the government sought to return him to prison because he refused to answer questions regarding his sexual history during a polygraph exam.
The questions the registrant refused to answer are (1) after the age of 18, did you engage in sexual activity with anyone under the age of 15, (2) have you had sexual contact with a family member or relative, (3) have you ever physically forced or threatened anyone to engage in sexual conduct with you and (4) have you ever had sexual contact with someone who was physically asleep or unconscious?
The court noted that the registrant’s affirmative answer to any one of these questions could have been interpreted as a confession of illegal conduct. The court also noted that the government’s threat to revoke the registrant’s probation for properly invoking his Fifth Amendment privilege is the type of compulsion the government may not impose. The court further noted that an individual is compelled “as soon as the government threatens him with a substantial penalty”.
In the case, the registrant was required to successfully complete a sex offender treatment program mandated by the Colorado Sex Offender Management Board. The registrant was required to sign an agreement that included a requirement to take a sexual history polygraph and allowed his treatment provider to report any sexual crimes discovered during the polygraph exam to appropriate authorities.
When the registrant refused to answer sexual history questions during his polygraph exam, the treatment provider expelled him from the mandatory treatment program. This expulsion, in turn, subjected the registrant to potential revocation of his supervised release and a prison sentence.
In its decision, the court noted that the terms of the sex offender treatment agreement were non-negotiable. The court also noted that its decision was based in part upon the registrant affirmatively asserted his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent during his polygraph exam.
As a result of this decision, the registrant is not required to answer questions regarding his sexual history during a polygraph exam.
Polygraph Requirement Violates Registrant’s 5th Amendment Rights
From: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_29879345/colorado-sex-offender-wins-challenge-use-lie-detector
Colorado sex offender's lie detector court win could have big impact
10th Circuit Court of Appeals says forcing a sex offender into a lie detector test that could be reported to authorities is a rights violation
The Denver Post
Posted:05/11/2016 03:27:45 PM MDT21 Comments Updated:about 16 hours ago
In a decision that could have wide-reaching impact, a federal appeals court in Colorado ruled that a convicted sex offender does not have to take a polygraph test as part of his supervised release from prison.
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' finding Tuesday overruled a lower court's decision and agrees with Brian Von Behren that the lie detector examination would violate his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Because polygraphs are used post-conviction on sex crime offenders across the nation, especially in Colorado, the appellate ruling could impact the practice's implementation in Colorado and beyond, observers say.
David Beller, a criminal defense lawyer with the Denver firm Recht Kornfeld, said that although the ruling does not reflect a change in law, it clarifies a probationer's right to remain silent when asked about uncharged criminal behavior unrelated to a conviction.
"This decision provides some indication that the legal community's support for polygraphs as an appropriate and constitutional tool in the treatment of sex offenses is waning," he added.
Von Behren in 2005 was sentenced in Colorado's federal court to 121 months in prison and three years of supervised release for receiving and distributing child pornography.
As part of the conditions of his release, Von Behren was ordered to take a sexual history polygraph requiring him to answer four questions about whether he had ever committed illicit sex acts for which he was never charged.
If any crimes were unearthed, they were to be reported to authorities.
Von Behren declined on the basis that the polygraph violated his Fifth Amendment rights, putting him at risk of having his supervised release revoked. The 10th Circuit court agreed.
In the ruling, however, the appellate court wrote a solution to the Fifth Amendment issue would be if the polygraph were used "sensibly" as part of an offender's probation and not in criminal prosecution.
The court covers a six-state region made up of Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah.
Polygraphs are used as part of sex offenders' probation across the country.
In Colorado, the state's Sex Offender Management Board standards and guidelines manual lists polygraph examinations as an important part of a thorough investigation into an offender.
The lie detector results are used in sex offender treatment to improve treatment decisions, deter an offender's problem behavior and access information about an offender that otherwise might remain a mystery.
Jeanne M. Smith, director of Colorado's Division of Criminal Justice, which oversees the Sex Offender Management Board, said state legal counsel will review the ruling to determine any possible response.
"Polygraph is a big part of how Colorado treats sex offenders," said Michael Miner, a professor in the University of Minnesota's human sexuality program and president of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. "I would assume this is going to have some impact on that if someone can in fact refuse to take the polygraph and if doing so doesn't jeopardize their standing on probation or within a treatment program.
"It will be interesting to see how the chips fall."
Kurt Gransee, a criminal defense lawyer in San Antonio who handles several sex crime cases each year, said he thinks attorneys across the country will use the opinion.
"It won't be binding necessarily in other jurisdictions," he explained. "But lawyers will go to the reasoning in this case. I think it will be pretty persuasive."
Court cases challenging lie detector testing for sex offenders have popped up across the nation in recent years.
In January, a New Jersey court upheld the state parole board's use of lie detectors to monitor sex offenders in the wake of a challenge that likened the practice to coerced interrogations, NJ Advance Media reported.
Michael Woyce, the lawyer who brought that case before the court, said Wednesday that the 10th Circuit's decision likely will play a part in a similar lie detector challenge he's working on before the New Jersey Supreme Court.
"We'll certainly be looking at it," he said of the Colorado ruling. "It's probably something we will be submitting as a supplement."
The U.S. Justice Department can ask for further review on the case from the 10th Circuit or the Supreme Court.
But Eric Wiggam, spokesman for Colorado's U.S. attorney's office, which handled the case, said there were no plans to take action on the ruling. Federal prosecutors declined to comment further.
Updated May 16 2016
The Virginian-Pilot
NORFOLK
Plethysmograph Now Illegal!
The court ruled in a Tazewell County case in which a teenager was sentenced to two life terms for orally sodomizing a 9-year-old boy.
Circuit Court Judge Henry A. Vanover imposed the sentence based in part on the results of a penile plethysmograph, a controversial device akin to a polygraph. The machine measures blood flow to the penis.
Matthew E. Billips was convicted of two counts of forcible sodomy and one count of soliciting a child to perform sodomy. Billips was living at a relative's house in May 2003 when he exchanged oral sex with the boy and tried to persuade another young boy to commit the same act, according to the trial evidence.
Billips, now 21, maintains his innocence and claims that his relatives set him up over a drug deal gone sour.
A jury found him guilty and sentenced him to 25 years in prison.
Vanover, however, citing Billips' criminal record, the nature of the offense and the harm done to the boys, imposed two life terms plus five years. The judge said he could not "imagine any more a heinous offense than what you have committed."
Before imposing sentence, Vanover ordered Billips to undergo a psychosexual evaluation, which included a plethysmograph. Billips became aroused when shown pictures of boys and girls in sexual situations. The report placed him in the highest risk category for re-offending.
Billips' attorney objected to the use of the test results, to no avail. The Virginia Court of Appeals also upheld the circuit judge. The Virginia Supreme Court has now sent the case back to Tazewell County for a new sentencing.
If the circuit judge plans to use the test results, he must find some scientific basis for its accuracy, the court ruled.
Scientists are divided on the reliability of the plethysmograph. Some have found it accurate in determining recidivism among sex offenders. Others have found it unreliable, and some states prohibit its use entirely.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a 2002 case that the plethysmograph lacks "scientific validity" and is prone to false positives.
L. Steven Emmert, a Virginia Beach lawyer who tracks Virginia's appellate rulings, wonders what Vanover - having already seen the test result - will do when the case returns.
"That's the real question," he said.
A spokesman for the attorney general's office, which argued the case, declined to comment.
Billips' appellate attorney, James R. Henderson IV, a Norfolk native and Old Dominion University graduate, said he welcomes the ruling and hopes that Billips' new sentence will not be as harsh.
"It can't get any worse," he said.
Unconstitutional retroactive punishment, in violation of the Ex Post Facto clause.
Judges Are Starting to Question Overzealous Sex-Offender Laws
August 30, 2016
There’s a stark divide between lawmakers and experts when it comes to laws which restrict where registered sex offenders can live. Cities and states all around the country have enthusiastically banned offenders from living too close to schools — and introduced other, similarly oriented restrictions — on the grounds that such legislation is a common-sense way to help keep kids safe. Experts, on the other hand, have insisted that these laws at the very least don’t reduce recidivism, and could have the opposite of the intended effect, increasing the odds of sex offenders victimizing more children.
The expert consensus is pretty firm. The Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, for example, has come out strongly against residency restrictions for two reasons: One, these restrictions wrongly assume that sex offenders target strangers rather than acquaintances, when the latter is far more common (despite the established trope of the creepy dude in the trenchcoat standing at the edge of the playground, waiting to spirit a kid off to his windowless van). Two, as the ATSA put it in a 2014 policy paper, “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. Housing instability can exacerbate risk factors for reoffending.” Overall, there’s literally zero empirical evidence that housing restrictions reduce the rates of sex-offender recidivism.
These claims have mostly fallen on deaf ears: Who wants to be seen as arguing “for” sex offenders? But a decision handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit last week suggests that at least some judges are starting to operate from a more evidence-based approach.
As Reason’s Jacob Sullum notes, the question before the court was whether it was kosher for the state of Michigan to have amended its Sex Offender Registration Act, or SORA, in 2006 and 2011 to introduce new restrictions that applied to previously convicted sex offenders. Six plaintiffs on the state’s sex-offender registry — five of them men — argued that in doing so, the state violated the Constitution’s ban on so-called ex post facto laws, or laws that are applied retroactively.
The court agreed, but also went further, offering what Sullum describes as a “scathing” assessment of Michigan’s tangle of restrictions on sex offenders:
“What began in 1994 as a non-public registry maintained solely for law enforcement use … has grown into a byzantine code governing in minute detail the lives of the state’s sex offenders,” the court notes. Among other things, the Michigan legislature in 2006 barred registrants from living, working, or “loitering” within 1,000 feet of a school, a rule that effectively banishes sex offenders from large swaths of densely populated cities such as Grand Rapids (see map). “Sex Offenders are
forced to tailor much of their lives around these school zones, and, as the record demonstrates, they
often have great difficulty in finding a place where they may legally live or work,” the court says.
“Some jobs that require traveling from jobsite to jobsite are rendered basically unavailable since work will surely take place within a school zone at some point … These restrictions have also kept those Plaintiffs who have children (or grandchildren) from watching them participate in school plays or on school sports teams, and they have kept Plaintiffs from visiting public playgrounds with their children for fear of ‘loitering.’”
It’s important to keep in mind that because the category of “sex offender” has become so bloated — because courts can easily apply the label for many different reasons — that a good deal of the people subjected to these restrictions aren’t, by any reasonable definition of the term, dangerous sex predators. The details vary from state to state, of course, but Reason notes that Michigan introduced a tiered system in 2011 designed to correspond to a given offender’s threat level to the public. And while all of the plaintiffs in the current case were assigned to the most “dangerous” tier, some of them didn’t commit crimes which would seem to warrant the designation: “one of them was convicted at age 18 of having consensual sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend,” writes Sullum, “while another was convicted of ‘a non-sexual kidnapping offense arising out of a 1990 robbery of a McDonald’s.’”
But even for offenders who did commit more serious crimes, there just isn’t evidence these restrictions do more good than harm, and the court’s cost-benefit language is notably similar to the ATSA’s: “The punitive effects of these blanket restrictions … far exceed even a generous assessment of their salutary effects.” In other words, the court is acknowledging that sex offenders in Michigan were likely hindered, in important ways, from getting their lives back on track, for no good reason. And if you buy the ATSA’s logic, there’s at least a solid circumstantial case to be made that this could have increased the rate of recidivism.
One way to test this theory, albeit not in a dispositive manner, would be to look at how frequently sex offenders in Michigan recidivate, and how that percentage has changed alongside changes to the relevant laws. Unfortunately, the 6th Circuit notes that “Michigan has never analyzed recidivism rates despite having the data to do so.” It’s easier — politically at least — to just layer restriction atop restriction without stopping to ask whether doing so is making anyone safer.
Unconstitutional retroactive punishment, in violation of the Ex Post Facto clause.
Down Michigan’s Punitive Sex Offender Law
September 09, 2016
Free Expression
Privacy & Data
Free Expression
Privacy & Data
Last week, the Sixth Circuit issued its decision in Doe v. Snyder, a case challenging state sex offender registry requirements in which CDT participated as amici. We argued that Michigan’s strict requirements for registrants to disclose their online identifiers to the authorities violated their First Amendment rights to speak without permission and self-identification. We won, in a sense: the federal court of appeals struck down Michigan’s registry law as an unconstitutional retroactive punishment, in violation of the Ex Post Facto clause.
The court didn’t decide the case on First Amendment grounds — which we argued in our briefs was violated by the law’s requirement that former sex offenders disclose all of their social media accounts to the authorities. But we have reason to take heart in this decision as a turning point in the way groups are singled out and denied their expressive rights, including their right to connect with others online without seeking the government’s permission first.
As Slate noted, the appellate court’s departure from a long line of case law upholding harsh sex offender restrictions was significant, indicating that parts of the judiciary have “finally begun to view draconian sex offender laws as the unconstitutional monstrosities they obviously are.”
With the enormous growth of IT, taxi drivers, medical professionals, administrative support staff, and mechanics will need digital networking and communication skills in the future. Enforced technical disabilities undermines former offenders’ efforts to expand their skillset, find employment, and reenter society after a period of incarceration.
Our co-amici, Internet law expert David Post, writes that by concluding that Michigan’s sex offender registry was a retroactive punishment, the court implicitly acknowledged that the restrictions on registrants’ residence, line of work, educational opportunities, and Internet access were a form of punishment, inflicted on individuals who had already served their sentences.
It’s clear that the punishing restrictions imposed by many state registry laws are intentionally so. But requiring former offenders to register all of their online accounts and identifiers is as misguided as it is punitive. A computer science major who can’t create an account without permission from her registering authority cannot hope to work as a professional technologist today. With the enormous growth of IT, taxi drivers, medical professionals, administrative support staff, and mechanics will need digital networking and communication skills in the future. Enforced technical disabilities undermines former offenders’ efforts to expand their skillset, find employment, and re-enter society after a period of incarceration.
Social media bans and burdens, including compulsory disclosure of individuals’ usernames and accounts, place too high a threshold on the exercise of First Amendment freedoms in the digital age. We’re pleased the Sixth Circuit implicitly recognized the punitive nature of compulsory disclosure of Internet identifiers in rendering its decision.
PA: A deal is a deal – Supreme Court blocks retroactive registration boosts for sex offenders
Sex offender registration requirements can’t be increased for people who reached deals to plead guilty to sex crimes before Pennsylvania’s latest registration law took effect, the state Supreme Court has decided.
The high court reached that conclusion in an opinion Justice Max Baer issued this week on three consolidated cases involving York County sex offenders. Full Article:
Sex offender registration requirements can't be increased for people who reached deals to plead guilty to sex crimes before Pennsylvania's latest registration law took effect, the state Supreme Court has decided.
The high court reached that conclusion in an opinion Justice Max Baer issued this week on three consolidated cases involving York County sex offenders.
Wayne Shower, Gabriel Martinez and Adam Grace all pleaded guilty to sex crimes before Megan's Law was superseded by the more stringent Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act in December 2012. Shower was sentenced in 2006, Martinez in 2010 and Grace in 2011.
All three men pleaded to crimes that, under Megan's law, required them to register with state police as sex offenders for 10 years. Under SORNA, however, the crimes to which Shower and Martinez pleaded carry lifetime registration requirements, while a 25-year registration would apply in Grace's case.
The registration dispute came to the Supreme Court after the county district attorney's office appealed rulings by a York County judge and a state Superior Court panel that sided with Shower, Martinez and Grace.
Like the lower courts, Baer's court essentially agreed that a deal is a deal and that the plea agreements constituted enforceable contracts.
When Showers, Martinez and Grace reached their plea agreements with county prosecutors, the government was bound by the terms that then limited their registration periods to a decade, Baer concluded.
"In this commonwealth, when trial courts accept plea agreements, the convicted criminals...are entitled to the benefits of their bargains," he wrote.
Lawsuit challenges Tennessee sex offender registry
4:49 p.m. CST November 9, 2016
Retroactive enforcement of Tennessee's sex offender registry law is being challenged in a federal court lawsuit that mimics a separate, successful appeal that led to the nullification of retroactive laws in Michigan.
The case, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Nashville, argues that Tennessee's registration laws are illegally applied retroactively. It notes that the laws and restrictions on those offenders have become significantly more burdensome since the laws were first enacted in 1994.
The first registry law deemed the register of sex offenders confidential and only accessible by law enforcement. The General Assembly tweaked the law multiple times, and made registrants public, and then overhauled it a decade later. Legislators added restrictions including in-person reporting and limits on where offenders could live and work.
Offenders cannot live or work within 1,000 feet of parks or educational institutions and state laws say those who committed crimes against minors cannot live with minors.
And the lawsuit says that in nearly every year since the 2004 overhaul, restrictions on sex offenders have increased and are now unreasonably applied to offenders like a man the lawsuit names as John Doe.
"The State of Tennessee has burdened him, retroactively, with an increasingly onerous and punitive registration law whose vague and arbitrary provisions and crushing criminal penalties enable and encourage law enforcement to treat him like a pariah and disrupt his and his family members’ lives at any moment, without warning or reason," the lawsuit reads.
In early 1994, before the state's first sex offender registry law, Doe pleaded no contest to two counts of attempted aggravated sexual battery involving his daughter, the lawsuit states. He completed a five-year probation term in 1999 and has not been convicted of a crime since, the lawsuit states. The man went to work as a pilot and then in property management.
But the lawsuit alleges Metro Nashville Police and U.S. Marshals showed up at Doe's house, harassing him though he was compliant. It says in 2011, police and Nashville prosecutors threatened to arrest and prosecute the man because he lived in a duplex next door to his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren.
Doe was kicked out of his house, the lawsuit says, while fighting in a Nashville court for the right to live in the duplex and have his own children come visit. Nashville Criminal Court Judge Seth Norman ruled in 2013 that the law's ban on residing with a minor did not include the duplex living arrangement nor overnight visits, court records show.
The lawsuit challenges the retroactive application of the registry laws, including those restrictions on contact with minors, work and residency. It argues those restrictions violate the due process clause of the 14th Amendment and a constitutional provision known as the ex post facto clause, which says laws cannot retroactively enact punishment on previously legal conduct.
It asks a federal judge to stop the state from enforcing those provisions against Doe and remove him from the registry, noting that he pleaded no contest before the registry even existed, Doe's lawyer, Ed Yarbrough, told The Tennessean on Wednesday.
A ruling in Doe's favor could have wide-sweeping impact on hundreds of other offenders, who would be able to use it to challenge their own terms of supervision and restrictions. The case was initially assigned to U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Nashville.
The challenge in Michigan, decided earlier this year, could foreshadow a favorable ruling from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appeals district that includes Michigan and Tennessee. The lawsuit lists 10 cases in courts around the country that have recently declared retroactive enforcement of sex offender registries unconstitutional.
In the August appeals court ruling, the federal judges struck down a retroactive provision of Michigan's sex offender registry law, finding that it violated the ex post facto clause.
The Tennessee challenge names Gov. Bill Haslam and Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director Mark Gwyn as defendants. TBI maintains the sex offender registry in Tennessee, but local law enforcement agencies handle registration and monitoring. TBI officials said they had not yet received the lawsuit and could not comment. A spokesman for the Tennessee Attorney General said the office just received the complaint and would not comment.
Though the number of people on the registry fluctuates, on Wednesday there were about 15,800 registered sex offenders in Tennessee, TBI officials said.
Lawsuit challenges Tennessee sex offender registry
4:49 p.m. CST November 9, 2016
Retroactive enforcement of Tennessee's sex offender registry law is being challenged in a federal court lawsuit that mimics a separate, successful appeal that led to the nullification of retroactive laws in Michigan.
The case, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Nashville, argues that Tennessee's registration laws are illegally applied retroactively. It notes that the laws and restrictions on those offenders have become significantly more burdensome since the laws were first enacted in 1994.
The first registry law deemed the register of sex offenders confidential and only accessible by law enforcement. The General Assembly tweaked the law multiple times, and made registrants public, and then overhauled it a decade later. Legislators added restrictions including in-person reporting and limits on where offenders could live and work.
Offenders cannot live or work within 1,000 feet of parks or educational institutions and state laws say those who committed crimes against minors cannot live with minors.
And the lawsuit says that in nearly every year since the 2004 overhaul, restrictions on sex offenders have increased and are now unreasonably applied to offenders like a man the lawsuit names as John Doe.
"The State of Tennessee has burdened him, retroactively, with an increasingly onerous and punitive registration law whose vague and arbitrary provisions and crushing criminal penalties enable and encourage law enforcement to treat him like a pariah and disrupt his and his family members’ lives at any moment, without warning or reason," the lawsuit reads.
In early 1994, before the state's first sex offender registry law, Doe pleaded no contest to two counts of attempted aggravated sexual battery involving his daughter, the lawsuit states. He completed a five-year probation term in 1999 and has not been convicted of a crime since, the lawsuit states. The man went to work as a pilot and then in property management.
But the lawsuit alleges Metro Nashville Police and U.S. Marshals showed up at Doe's house, harassing him though he was compliant. It says in 2011, police and Nashville prosecutors threatened to arrest and prosecute the man because he lived in a duplex next door to his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren.
Doe was kicked out of his house, the lawsuit says, while fighting in a Nashville court for the right to live in the duplex and have his own children come visit. Nashville Criminal Court Judge Seth Norman ruled in 2013 that the law's ban on residing with a minor did not include the duplex living arrangement nor overnight visits, court records show.
The lawsuit challenges the retroactive application of the registry laws, including those restrictions on contact with minors, work and residency. It argues those restrictions violate the due process clause of the 14th Amendment and a constitutional provision known as the ex post facto clause, which says laws cannot retroactively enact punishment on previously legal conduct.
It asks a federal judge to stop the state from enforcing those provisions against Doe and remove him from the registry, noting that he pleaded no contest before the registry even existed, Doe's lawyer, Ed Yarbrough, told The Tennessean on Wednesday.
A ruling in Doe's favor could have wide-sweeping impact on hundreds of other offenders, who would be able to use it to challenge their own terms of supervision and restrictions. The case was initially assigned to U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Nashville.
The challenge in Michigan, decided earlier this year, could foreshadow a favorable ruling from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appeals district that includes Michigan and Tennessee. The lawsuit lists 10 cases in courts around the country that have recently declared retroactive enforcement of sex offender registries unconstitutional.
In the August appeals court ruling, the federal judges struck down a retroactive provision of Michigan's sex offender registry law, finding that it violated the ex post facto clause.
The Tennessee challenge names Gov. Bill Haslam and Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director Mark Gwyn as defendants. TBI maintains the sex offender registry in Tennessee, but local law enforcement agencies handle registration and monitoring. TBI officials said they had not yet received the lawsuit and could not comment. A spokesman for the Tennessee Attorney General said the office just received the complaint and would not comment.
Though the number of people on the registry fluctuates, on Wednesday there were about 15,800 registered sex offenders in Tennessee, TBI officials said.
From: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/15/justice-denies-michigans-appeal-to-halt-sex-offend/
Associated Press - Tuesday, November 15, 2016
LANSING, Mich. (AP) - A U.S. Supreme Court justice on Tuesday denied Michigan’s request to halt a lower court decision that found the state unconstitutionally put new restrictions on registered sex offenders long after their convictions.
Justice Elena Kagan’s decision means law enforcement can no longer retroactively enforce 2006 and 2011 changes to the country’s fourth-largest sex offender list while the state pursues an underlying appeal in the high court, said Miriam Aukerman, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in August said Michigan’s revisions, which included restricting sex offenders’ movements near schools and listing many on the registry for life, retroactively penalized offenders as “moral lepers” and there is “scant” evidence that the law accomplishes goals such as reducing recidivism. Kagan rejected Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette’s emergency appeal to block the ruling. His office still plans to ask the high court to review the appellate court’s decision.
In a filing last week, Schuette warned that the 6th Circuit’s ruling would take effect early this week unless a stay was granted. He said the state should be able to appeal “without being forced to make costly, time-consuming, and complex changes to its sex-offender registry and enforcement protocols that may prove unnecessary should this Court decide to grant review.”
A Schuette spokeswoman said the office was reviewing the decision. The Michigan State Police, which maintains the list, issued a bulletin to law enforcement agencies on Oct. 14 notifying them of the earlier appellate opinion.
“We have instructed law enforcement officers to consult with their prosecutor’s office prior to taking any enforcement action related to the 2006 and 2011 amendments to Michigan’s” Sex Offenders Registration Act, agency spokeswoman Shanon Banner said.
The registry has 42,900 registrants, including more than 39,000 whose names and photos are shown on a searchable public website. About 10,700 are incarcerated.
“Police should not be enforcing parts of the law that the court said are unconstitutional,” Aukerman said. “Our registry is broken, and Michigan families deserve public safety measures that actually work - not a failed, ineffectual system that stigmatizes people who are not a threat.”
The state began prohibiting registrants from living, working or loitering within 1,000 feet of school property in 2006. Five years later, lawmakers required that offenders be divided into three tiers based on the seriousness of their crimes, rather than on individualized assessments. Many offenders must be listed on the registry for life under the changes.
The lawsuit was brought by the ACLU and the University of Michigan Clinical Law Program on behalf of six people who are on the registry for life, including some who were older teenagers who had sex with underage teens. It is unclear how many thousands of offenders will be affected by the case.
Critics argue that the registry, initially created in 1994, lists so many people that it does not identify the truly dangerous offenders.
