Brevard County Commissioners backtracking on rule prohibiting sex offenders on property

Brevard County Commissioners look set to soften a restriction prohibiting sex offenders from Commission meeting premises just months after a lawsuit was filed against them. During Tuesday’s meeting, commissioners voted to approve legislative intent and permission to advertise amending a section of the county code regarding restrictions the county imposed on people on the sex offender registry allowing them access

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Experts say sex offender registries don’t work. Can they be fixed?

During confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Republicans hammered away at her record in cases involving sex offenders. Much of that centered around misleading claims about sentences she handed out to people convicted of possessing child pornography. But GOP senators also repeatedly questioned Jackson on her views on sex offender registries, a topic she wrote about as

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The hollowness of the child porn smear: Ketanji Brown Jackson has been bold and prescient

Soon after her nomination, it was reported that as a law student in 1996, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a Harvard Law Review note analyzing the constitutionality of sex offense registries and that during her judicial career she did not always give the maximum sentence in child pornography cases. Unsurprisingly, she was immediately accused by Sen. Josh Hawley of “endangering

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How campaign rhetoric about child porn made it to the Supreme Court hearing

Since 1990, when Congress first voted to make the possession of child pornography a federal offense, the law has moved toward stiffer penalties, and never toward relaxing them. (Making and distributing child pornography was made a federal crime 13 years earlier.) When voters have gotten their say, judges seen as stopping short of the sentencing guidelines have landed in political

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It’s Worth Looking at Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Actual Views on Punishing Sex Offenders

What makes the young Ketanji Brown Jackson remarkable is her challenge to legal interpretations of a system of control over people who were not only made a separate category of human being then but are still largely shunned by reformers now. In a Harvard Law Review Student Note titled “Prevention versus Punishment: Toward a Principled Distinction in the Restraint of Released Sex

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The Dobbs Wire: Rights for ALL?

The Dobbs Wire:  Rights for all?   Alarmingly, individuals and groups who are despised get shortchanged on constitutional rights.  In a new piece for The Nation, JoAnn Wypijewski tackles this topic just as the Senate considers Ketanji Brown Jackson for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.  The essay reveals how courts make the rights of those with a scarlet letter

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