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August 11, 2009

The Economist assails US sex offender laws

The August 6th issue of The Economist includes these two pieces concerning US sex offender laws and policies:

As these headlines suggest, these articles are mostly critical and their main focus is sex offender registration rules.  Here is a snippet from the first piece linked above:

Every American state keeps a register of sex offenders. California has had one since 1947, but most states started theirs in the 1990s.  Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester.  But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes.  At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present).  No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.

Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded.  As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.  If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota.  As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. America’s registers keep swelling, not least because in 17 states, registration is for life.

August 11, 2009 at 07:40 AM | Permalink

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Comments

All law making, including case law making, is ghoulish human experimentation. Any law not previously shown to be safe and effective should not get enacted. Any law showing no evidence of safety and effectiveness after enactment should get repealed.

Is there any evidence that registration has reduced the rate of victimization, or even the rate of offenders living in communities with children. Had Megan's murderer been registered, would her murder have been less likely? The freak lived close by and knocked on the door, and her mortal mistake was to open it.

Here is what would have prevented her murder with far greater certainty. Not massive lazy, worthless government worker make work databases that offer no one protection, and that ruin the lives of kids peeing outdoors (raise your hand if you have never done that - everyone has done that).

123D

If you want to save a child from murder by a sex predator, by constitutional amendment, exclude the incompetent, self-dealing lawyer from all benches, legislative seats, and responsible policy positions in the Executive. When the public has had enough with the irresponsible and self-dealing CCE, I have the amendment drafted.

Posted by: Supremacy Claus | Aug 11, 2009 10:24:48 AM

The murder of Michael A. Dodele by Ivan Garcia Oliver is overlooked because when the California DoJ moved in to "investigate" the case disappeared from the news in California. The murder of John Derek Chamberlain was big news in Orange County, CA, but nowhere else. It is difficult to believe the Dodele murder was the first in California since the enactment of registration in 1947 given the law enforcement's complicity in the Chamberlain case.

Posted by: Spartacus | Aug 11, 2009 11:08:13 AM

Jail murder as does jail suicide should carry a presumption of jail liability, because the jail controls the bodies of the victim and of the murderer. Until proven otherwise, the murderer should be considered an agent of the jail. The same should hold true for rape, all unauthorized batteries, and all other victimizations.

The administrative exhaustion provision should be repealed because of the inherent conflict of interest.

As an aside, increasing liability shrinks an enterprise. The crybaby, criminal lover leftists here should be pleased to reliably foresee a shrinkage of incarceration by such increase in liability.

In exchange, any corporal punishment not requiring medical care to heal, for example, caning, should be permitted and immune from torts. To deter. Any utterance by any inmate to any inmate ordering a behavior breaking a rule should be called a conspiracy, with summary public caning of the gang kingpin. Do it every day, if necessary, until the message is understood, and the population decides to settle down.

Any appellate judge holding against corporal punishment has his residence surrounded by halfway houses for released career criminals. Use Kelo to acquire the properties on all sides. Each may contain 8 unrelated individuals without a zoning hearing. The judge should have no recourse, and these halfway houses should be immunized for the conduct of any resident.

Posted by: Supremacy Claus | Aug 11, 2009 2:09:08 PM

Dear Supremacy Claus,

Thou Art a Modern Prophet-God. I Quiver in the Wake of Thy Divine Rightness.

Finally - After Waiting 3300 years - A Replacement with Good Old-Fashioned Values.

Posted by: King Tut-Tut-Tut | Aug 11, 2009 3:21:37 PM

Tut: For I so loved the lawyer, that I gave my one and only cult deprogramming, that whoever stops resisting it shall no longer violate the Establishment Clause, but make the rule of law prevail.

Here is a shock. Jews are over-represented in law faculty (by hard work and academic success). Yet, they refuse to see that they teach the Catholic Catechism, straight, without disguise. The criminal cult indoctrination is so good, they do not even know it took place, and that it has made them indoctrinate the Catholic Catechism into others.

Element, intent, intent for each element, foreseeability, reasonable (code for Jesus Christ), IRAC, adversarial system, bench, gavel, robe, oaths, audience standing up, the brief, Latin, plea bargain, false confession. All church. Church that burned rich Jews and took their possessions.

Confiscation for blasphemy (lawyer gotcha - you blasphemed by eating meat on Friday - plea bargain: burning at the stake or forfeit your estates). This was part of the Dominican Order business plan to defund the Jews, the Protestants, the merchants. Only mass executions of these Dominicans ended that business.

We are in Inquisition II, with the lawyers using the Dominican Order business plan, not to mention their technical vocabulary, including Latin, which is unlawful in our secular nation, being the foreign language of a church.

I am trying to save the lawyer from End of Inquisition II. Here is a preview of the way it will go. That would break my heart. Once it starts, there will be nothing even I can do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianisation_of_France_during_the_French_Revolution#Toll_on_the_Church

Posted by: Supremacy Claus | Aug 11, 2009 5:43:25 PM

Excerpt from "The Economist assails US sex offender laws"," unjust and ineffective"
“Jane”, the mother of a sex offender in Georgia, says she sent a letter to her senator, Saxby Chambliss, urging such reforms. “They didn’t even read it,” she says. “They just sent me a form letter assuring me that they were in favour of every sex offender law, and that [Senator Chambliss] has grandchildren he wants to protect.”

The real question IS?
What about the thousands of children being harmed under the guise of saving children? What legislator wants or takes credit? Will Senator Chambliss stand and take the credit?

*SO at 17, Wendy Whitaker, banned from home, now incarcerated by registration
*youthful SO, Justin Fawcett suicide by registration
* SO at 14, Dale Wayne Ellis homeless by registration and murdered as a result of registration
* SO 17, Brandon serving 60 year prison term by sex offender laws
* Ricky's Life,
* 23 children, personal stories: http://www.ethicaltreatment.org/stories.htm
* "THOUSANDS" of our youthful citizens in which their own Government has placed in harms way, holds hostage and under siege, branded, tracked, hunted, banished from society; hopeless, helpless, irredeemable for LIFE!

Posted by: Honest Opinion | Sep 26, 2009 10:32:09 AM

For some reason I ha ve stopped receiving this blog in my email. I would really like to continue receiving it. I am the mother of a son in prison.

Posted by: Patsy | May 24, 2010 5:55:04 PM

Hi, I am just a citizen of Austin Texas who came across your blog from an thread in a Mama's on-line group. I am for reforming the laws of who is called a sex offender-sometimes for life. How can a person keep track if the numbers of the offenders is so large and inflated? As far as Spartacus calling us liberals-criminal loving, it is not that we love criminals it is that we are smarter to realize that all person's must be treated justly and once a person allows themself to give into baser instincts and call for improper punishment and harshest penalties that often they lose the human side of themself and become little more than an animal who says he is intent on punishment but is now actually standing for abuse, excess violence and outright sanctifying of murder. A harsh Punisher usually becomes nothing more than a criminal himself, using a county's laws, if allowed to let their vile, strict side flourish.

Posted by: Laura | Aug 23, 2010 11:58:07 AM

The more and more I look into this the more and more I thank God that here in my country—Britain—we have tended to get it right in practice, if to US ears the theory may sound dodgy.
What is the legal situation here?
1. Age of consent - 16(18 if the adult is in a position of responsibility vis-à-vis the child)
2. Under-age sex - if she's between 15 and 13 it's a misdemeanour, if under 13 a felony
One thing I found looking over the feedback - I would appreciate clarification - is that in Texas a boy can be classed as a sex offender if he kisses and underage girl. Now, is that conditional on the girl herself complaining? Or is it a heinous offence in TX for boys to join in a game of kiss-chase with girls, even at their invitation? If so it sounds as if the lunatics are really running the asylum!
Which is a great pity....back in 2000 I spent a fortnight in the San Antonio area, and felt safer in downtown San Antonio than I would in many British cities. But that is another story!

Posted by: Barry Gowland | Jul 17, 2013 6:40:59 PM

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