Weekly Updates

Weekly Update #116 Dear Members and Advocates, This week’s update has one message. If you have not left comments for the DOJ Proposed Amendments to SORNA, today is the deadline. The link where you can leave comments is: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/08/13/2020-15804/registration-requirements-under-the-sex-offender-registration-and-notification-act Comments are due by 11:59 PM Tuesday, 10/13/20! As of the time of this writing there are 687 public comments submitted.

Weekly Update #115 Dear Members and Advocates, A good decision came out of a Massachusetts appellate court yesterday. The Court sided with a registrant who was arrested and convicted for failing to register his work address. But did he fail to register his work address? You see, the man was a handyman who did home renovations. He reported to the

Weekly Update #113 Dear Members and Advocates, I begin this week with a mea culpa. In last week’s update I wrote about the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the impact a Supreme Court Justice has on shaping rights and liberties in this country. I praised the decisions in Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v.

Weekly Update #112 Dear Members and Advocates, On Friday, the world lost Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her death was a great loss to the Court and to those who shared her ideologies, but it was also a great loss to our cause. RBG was one of only two Justices that dissented against the majority opinion in Smith v. Doe,

Weekly Update #111 Dear Members and Advocates, The California Bill that we wrote about last week was signed off by Governor Newsom. That’s good news. What continues to boggle the mind is how two stories can present completely different perspectives on the same set of facts and how so many people will buy into (and I hate to use this

Weekly Update #109 Dear Members and Advocates, Something good was spun so horribly wrong that it’s worthy of being the first thing we mention in this week’s update. California State Senator Scott Wiener set out to eliminate a significant disparity in the state’s sex offender registration laws that discriminated against LGBTQ youth.  The way the law exists, a judge has

Weekly Update #107 Dear Members and Advocates, It’s so hard to explain something you don’t fully understand yourself. I’ll start with a basic fact: There’s no “Federal Registry.” When we go to re-register or report changes, we show up at our County Sheriff’s Office. That information gets entered into a database (registry) that’s maintained by the Florida Department of Law

Weekly Update #106 Dear Members and Advocates, It has been a disappointing week. Yesterday, Brevard County Commissioners voted in favor (only one Commissioner voted against) of amending their proximity ordinance to include private businesses. From watching the simulcast of the meeting, it appears passing the ordinance was a foregone conclusion, but nonetheless it was disappointing to watch. Our concern is

Weekly Update #105 Dear Members and Advocates, Before modern technology existed we had the public square. It was an open area, generally in the heart of a city, where people would gather to exchange information. If you couldn’t make it to the public square you would miss out on all the community discourse. Cutting you off from the public square

Weekly Update #104 Dear Members and Advocates, On Friday we posted something that received positive feedback so we’ll reference it here and encourage everyone to take a read through it when you have time. The post made me theorize about the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Constitution (found at Article IV, Section 2), which states that “the citizens of