Author: FAC Contributor #3

In Greenville County, SC, nine out of the 560 people forced to register for a sex offense were found not to be living where they said they were living or failed to register.  What should have been the takeaway in this story:  None of the 560 people was found to have committed a new sex offense.  Isn’t this what society

States sued over the registry often try to get the case against them dismissed on procedural grounds. Sometimes a state will argue that a suit is time-barred, not ripe, brought too soon, brought too late, or that plaintiffs lack standing. Or, as in the example of this case, the state argued that we are simply suing the wrong people. In

Recently we posted a story from The New Yorker on an innocent man being sent to prison and then placed on the registry for a rape that he did not commit.  One reason for this travesty was the overreach of a prosecutor who carelessly handled the results of a botched identification in a lineup. This particular case, if it had

By Sandy Rozek, Communications Director for NARSOL Jacob Wetterling’s abduction and death in 1989 led directly to a massive system of laws that today affects close to a million men, women, and children plus their family members. In that same year, 1989, the death by firearms of 4,384 children and teens caused barely a blip on the radar. What if,

This all-too-common theme is to promote harsher laws for people with a sex offense all in the name of protecting our communities. Political leaders in Tallahassee, along with our Florida governor, have passed and signed into law Bill 537 that effectively removes the possibility of any gain time while incarcerated for people who have been charged with an “attempted” sex

Fascinating from The New Yorker (note article limit and paywall)

Registrants represented by Oliver Law Group appeal dismissal of their suit against governors and state police, as reported by Courthouse News. For more background on Michigan registrants’ challenge, visit Michigan ACLU’s SORA Resources Page.

The civil commitment fiasco gets covered in the publication Route Fifty: ”’There is no evidence that having these programs reduces sexual assaults,’ said [ACLU lawyer Ben] Wolf. ‘We have a good lab: Lots of states have these programs and lots don’t. There is no appreciable difference [in the number of sexual assaults reported]. If the goal is community safety, the

“There is a difference between the conviction and the effect of the registry’s label of a ‘high risk of danger’ on individuals, particularly things like unemployment and joblessness, houselessness, depression, and even suicide are affected by the label. SORNA says that individuals on this registry pose a risk of sexual danger, not just at the time of conviction, but now

John Covert, with our affiliate, Arizonans for Rational Sex Offense Laws (AZRSOL), has published a guest column in the Arizona Capitol Times. In this column, John educates Arizona readers on the myth of “frightening and high,” how a Supreme Court decision perpetuates this myth, and the setbacks that this poor decision has caused. The Arizona Capitol Times, which has published