There’s been a federal requirement since 2006 for states to track Internet identities of sex offenders, but Georgia’s law takes it a step further by requiring passwords as well.
I’ve always been uncomfortable with conditions imposed on sex offenders (or anyone) that were not part of the law when the offense was committed; they smack of double jeopardy (although I know the courts do not agree).
But I suppose it makes things easier: if it turns out a sex offender has a hidden Internet alias, he can always be busted for that without the need to prove that he did anything shady with it.
On the other hand… if it turns out a sex offender has a hidden Internet alias, he can always be busted for that without the need to prove that he did anything shady with it.
Honestly, I’m not a fan of most of the extra punishments heaped onto sex offenders. This is yet another condition I find unreasonable and … generally icky.
I mean, they did a crime. They served time. Then they get paroled and are monitored by PO. All well and good. But then, we also attached sex offender registration for the rest of their lives. Local laws restrict where they can live and work, making it hard to do either (unreasonably so IMO). They’re publicly identified and scorned by neighbors, like some sort of scarlet letter.
I think it’s all a bit over the top for a category with such a wide net of people caught up in the finding. We’ve got statutory rape where the 18 year old bangs the 17 year old. People urinating in public getting tagged with indecent exposure. I recall a story a few years back where a person was arrested for ‘unlawful touching of a minor’ when he pulled his car over and moved a girl that was playing in middle of the street. I never followed up on the case, but I recall that if he was convicted he would be on the sex offender list for that.
I know the paranoia people have about it, but we don’t treat murderers that way. We don’t treat any other criminal that way, AFAIK.
Like I said, I don’t know much about the legal side of things. I just know that this sort of thing makes me really uncomfortable. Just my two cents
Apart from the question of whether this is Constitutional or good law, I think it’s counterproductive at best. Once the sex offender turns over his password, it becomes impossible to prove that the offender took a certain action with the account. If I turn over my SDMB password to the cops, and later a link to child porn appears in a post under my name, I can say the cops did it. Or maybe the cops lost my password, or maybe the cop wrote my password in my files and the file was sent to third-party offsite storage and someone there saw it. Or maybe the cops’ system was breached without them even knowing it (because, as an IT security guy, I know that the majority of breaches are never discovered), and the hacker used my password. Or… It goes on and on. So, I think the GA law actually hurts the cops’ ability to track and punish sex offenders. Also, I would imagine that a cop will abuse this at some point to plant evidence.
I’ve been on record before as saying that I favor capital punishment for child rapists. But, if the law they were charged with breaking said, “You do 10 years in prison” and they did 7 and completed 3 years of parole, then they did their time and it is a violation of the social contract to now impose an additional penalty on them.
Absolutely. If the people want to have child molestation or forcible rape carry capital punishment or mandatory Life Without Parole, then let their representatives by all means make it so* and make it specific to those crimes*(*) from here on out. Don’t weasel around the ban on ex-post-facto penal law by continuing to add “let’s make their lives miserable” conditions.
(*)Because of course part of the worry is, not all “sex offenders” are dangerous rapists, child or otherwise, so not all of them even fall in the categories where people may justify an opinion that they deserve to have their lives destroyed.
But for some reason legislators seem to be enamored of just extending the registration requirement as broadly as possible and piling on the after-the-fact restrictions, so they can look tough and protective without having to expend the effort in making “the punishment fit the crime” (because that’s taking the risk of missing some specific situation, and of course then when the one case you did not foresee happens, the Nancy Graces and O’Reillys of the world will scream and shout as to how horrible you are that you let it happen).
Exactly. And Georgia is particulalrly bad at this. Consider the Genarlow Wilsoncase in which a 17 year-old kid was sentenced to ten years imprisonment for having consensual oral sex with a 15 year-old. This type of “sex offender” should not be snared by laws that should be targeted at the true predators out there.
See also here, which while about the US as a whole, focuses on cases in Georgia.
Georgia also tried to ban sex offenders from living anywhere within 1000 ft of where children might congregate, such as school bus stops. DeKalb County calculated that they would have to evict every sex offender living in the county. And many of these sex offenders are just people who had underage sex when teenagers.
So with respect to the question in the OP, yes, I think it is overreaching. It may be a valid measure to take against sex offenders whose crime involved the Internet, such as uploading child pornography. Even then, I would only suggest it as a measure for repeat offenders.
I oppose it. “Sex offender” is a ridiculously broad category that includes harmless or even innocent people like men who had sex with their girlfriend underage, people who plea bargained a false accusation; older homosexuals. And this long term persecution if anything encourages actual predators to re-offend; punishment isn’t going to work as much of a threat to encourage compliance with the law if compliance ALSO brings punishment. If they are THAT dangerous keep them in prison.
Texas recently expanded the sex offender registration laws to include a requirement that the offender register any online aliases and email addresses that he uses (it became effective on September 1st). There’s no requirement that they report and register passwords, thankfully; even as a prosecuting (persecuting) attorney, that seems needlessly overreaching.
But hell, we’ve always kept track of aliases, and as people do more online, it seems kinda prudent to monitor online aliases as well.
Hate to admit it, but our treatment of sex offenders has indeed gone too far. Naturally, I have zero sympathy for genuine sex offenders, and I can’t help but wonder if greater surveillance would have prevented typical pedophiles like Philip Garrido from committing their heinous crimes, and if typical pedophiles can’t handle the public harassment from being on a list, well frankly, they always have the option to do the world a favor and kill themselves.
But when similar punishment is inflicted upon teenagers having sex with each other, or men urinating in public, the system is clearly broken.
I have no problem with laws designed to keep track of sexual predators. But as several others have already pointed out here, there are many sexual offenses that aren’t predatory in nature.
Idiotic lawmakers who can’t tell one from the other can ruin people’s lives unnecessarily.
Again, people, simple solutions are being ignored. Any sex offender who has had inconsensual sex will be sentenced to life in prison and chemical castration depending on which is cheaper.
Possibly a reasonable approach, so long as it’s not done in an ex post facto way. But if you’ve got some perp who serial-raped six-year-olds, and the maximum sentence at the time he committed the acts was a year’s probation, then justice demands that you give him the year’s probation and let him free afterwards. Change the laws immediately to nab the next guy who comes along, of course, but you can’t change the rules in the middle of the game.
Well, here’s the thing. He claims his conviction was merely for public urination, but you’ll notice what the article carefully says:
…and…
So the article doesn’t contain an actual confirmation of the claim that his crime was simply urinating in public… does it?
I’m no expert on Massachusetts law, but so far as I can tell, here are the elements of open and gross lewdness under G. L. c. 272, § 16:
A person urinating in public does not intend to produce alarm or shock. If he was convicted of the crime, a judge or jury did not believe his explanation… or that wasn’t the explanation he had at the time.
(Or I’m mistaken about the law, and if so, I welcome correction.)
And you’re quite mistaken: public urination is not mentioned once in the Adam Walsh Act.