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Not all ‘Sex Offenders’ are sex offenders

Monday, April 5th, 2010

From the Cap Times in Madison Wisconsin:

James W. Smith is a criminal, but he has never been convicted of a sex crime. Yet type his name on the state’s sex offender registry and you’ll find his picture.

Yeah, well he was probably thinking about committing a sex crime, right?

In 2000, Smith forced a 17-year-old male to drive around with him in the Green Bay area to settle a drug debt. Smith was also 17 at the time.

So how did he get on the sex offender registry? Apparently he was originally charged with taking a hostage, which is not included on the sex offender registry, but pleaded to the lesser crime of false imprisonment which required him to register as a sex offender. Apparently Wisconsin considers false imprisonment a sex offense while takinig a hostage isn’t.

When Smith didn’t register as a sex offender (after all, he isn’t a sex offender), he got another year in prison.

Kalfka would smile at the Wisconsin justice system. There is no room for common sense when it comes to sex crimes (or non-sex crimes, as the case may be).

Posted in Big Brother is Watching You, Law Enforcement Abuses, Sex Offender Registries, Wisconsin | Comments Off

West Virgina Predator Watch website, a registry for nonconvicted sex offenders.

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

From the Charleston Gazette (Thanks to reader MacGregory):

West Virginia Predator Watch, a watchdog service operated by Warriors Actively Against Sexual Predators, hopes to raise community awareness about those accused but not yet convicted of sexual crimes with online postings of published news stories and public court documents.

That’s right. Their website is essentially a data base of those who have been accused of a sex crime but have not yet completed the technicality of a trial and conviction. While prosecution and conviction can take months, with Predator Watch’s one-stop shopping you can start hating them as soon as they’re arrested. They are conveniently identified by county.

They have a disclaimer on their site stating that they “in no way implicate innocence or guilt” on their site. Of course, listing these links on a site called Predator Watch specifically for the purpose of identifying who they are for the public doesn’t imply anything, right?

Finally, they add a little boilerplate apparently plagiarized from the West Virginia Sex Offender Registry, despite the fact that it really isn’t applicable since the Predator Watch site targets people who are not registered sex offenders and may not have even committed a crime:

The information accessed through the use of this website may not be used to threaten, intimidate or harass registered sex offenders and violations of law will be investigated by the West Virginia State Police.

Regardless of their care in just linking to the stories rather than actually listing names and addresses, it’s pretty clear that their website serves the purpose of a sex offender registry for those who have merely been accused.

While the effectiveness of sex offender registries has come under fire repeatedly, they do at least require a conviction before a name is added. Considering the highly punitive effect of being identified as a sex criminal, to set up a data base specifically targeting those who have not been convicted and then maintaining the listing throughout the many months between arrest and trial is so close to vigilantism as to be indistinguishable. In fact, the question arises as to whether being included on such a listing could prejudice a potential jury.

It is noteworthy that the story about the Predator Watch website makes the following assertion:

According to the West Virginia Division of Corrections, 13.4 percent of sex offenders who were released back into the population in 2004 and 2005 committed the same kind of crime again.

Looking at the table from which that figure comes (page 4), child abuse and sexual offenses have the two lowest recidivism rates of the fourteen crime categories listed. Why do we have a registry for sex offenders (13.4% recidivism), but no registry for those who commit homicide (16.3%) or assault (23.6%), or robbery (38.4%)?

Posted in Persecution, Sex Offender Registries, West Virginia | Comments Off

Sex offender registries

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Maybe they’re just a diversion to keep from finding out where the real perverts are hiding.

Posted in Child Molestation, Child Rape, Sex Offender Registries | Comments Off

Enough is Enough!

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Dona Rice Hughes, centerpiece of a scandal of presidential proportions, “pro-family activist”, and president of Enough is Enough, in a commentary (actually more like an advertisement) on One News Now is urging that more Americans be thrown in prison for producing pornography. Hughes says:

…although authorities routinely prosecute child porn and sexual predators, other forms of pornography – while illegal – are not prosecuted. She laments that prosecution of pornography on a federal level has not been priority for years.

Yep, in a country that calls itself “the land of the free” it’s no small matter that some people actually remain fee. While the U.S. has established itself as incarcerating more of its population than any other country on the planet, there is still much work to be done.

Typical of all anti-sex crusades, they spew forth the same inflated statistics of all types of human trafficking under a sex-related subtitle, intentionally conflating the two as if the broadly based statistics are really all about sex trafficking.

EIE is a promoter of sex offender registries which are of practically no help in preventing offenses against children which come overwhelmingly from first time offenders known to the family rather than convicts identified by registries. In fact, sex offender registries do little more than declare open season on a group of people for the remainder of their lives, essentially stripping them of any hope for a future free from institutionalized persecution. What could possibly bring more safety to the country than to have a few hundred thousand people loose in society who have been permanently denied any opportunity for anything but lifelong misery? That’s about as smart as poking a few of your neighbors every day with a stick, thinking it will make them better citizens. Sex offender registries serve no useful purpose aside from satisfying society’s vengeance. They are The Scarlet Letter writ large and they are systematically creating thousands of ticking time bombs.

So, I guess I don’t have much sympathy for puritanical zealots who make it their mission to complain that the U.S. isn’t prosecuting the paranoid war against sex aggressively enough. I also don’t have much regard for an advocacy group that is financed, at least in part, by an agency of the government (OJJDP) that directly benefits by the hype created by that advocacy group. In fact, the OJJDP has its own problems.

Donna Rice was an order of magnitude more respectable before she become a crusader for purity and morality (all to “protect the children”, of course).

Posted in Censorship, Pornography, Sex Offender Registries, Trafficking, United States | Comments Off

First there was the sex offender registry and now…

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

…there’s the animal abuse registry.

This should be no surprise. There is no doubt that such a proposal will have quite a few supporters.

How does that saying go? First they came for the cigarettes, but I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a smoker. Then they came for high fat foods, but I didn’t speak out because I didn’t eat high fat foods. Then they came for the sugar but I didn’t speak out because wasn’t a sugar eater. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out…

When you lose your freedom, don’t direct your anger at the government. The real enemy is your neighbor, because he’ll stand by and watch. Freedom is stolen in nibbles and the loss of any nibble is only felt by a minority. The majority is only too happy to go along.

Posted in California, Sex Offender Registries | Comments Off

Man sues over high risk offender designation

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

A Boise Idaho man is suing the state for $5 million for labeling him a violent sexual predator.

The violent sexual predator designation was intended to identify high-risk offenders, according to state rules: “A sexual offender shall be designated as a VSP if his risk of re-offending sexually or threat of violence is of sufficient concern to warrant the designation for the safety of the community.”

The Idaho Department of Corrections stopped assigning the label after the state supreme court ruled that the label violated offender’s due process rights, but retained the designations applied before the ruling. Apparently they think the law only became unconstitutional after it was ruled on. Whether or not he gets his money, he will almost certainly have the designation removed, at least until they revise the law.

Of course, the entire idea of predicting someone’s likelihood of committing a crime is a bit like basing justice on what a witch sees in her crystal ball. Knowing how government, when given an inch, will take a mile, the idea of punishment based purely on speculation will certainly be expanded to other areas of criminal behavior. That movie, “Minority Report” doesn’t seem so far fetched anymore…

Posted in Idaho, Sex Crimes, Sex Offender Registries | Comments Off

Most sex crimes committed by 1st time offenders

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Melissa D. Grady, a teacher at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Social Work, has an interesting opinion piece on newsobserver.com regarding the effectiveness of registering sex offenders.

She points to a study covering ten years before Megan’s Law to ten years after Megan’s Law was enacted and comments:

This study found that even after the passage of the registration law, there was no change in the rate of sex crimes because more than 96 percent of all sexual crimes are committed by first-time offenders.

The entire article is worth reading because it really makes a convincing case that registering sex offenders or keeping them locked up under civil confinement are largely a huge waste of money.

Posted in Civil Commitment, North Carolina, Sex Crimes, Sex Offender Registries | Comments Off

Court questions Constitutionality of Jessica’s Law

Friday, January 29th, 2010

The California Supreme Court ruled 5-2 yesterday that treating sex offenders differently from others under civil confinement may violate the constitutional guarantees of equal treatment and ordered a fact finding hearing.

The majority said the state must provide “some justification” for creating greater obstacles for sex predators to win their freedom than for severely mentally disordered offenders who commit crimes but serve their terms in mental institutions.

Considering the wording of the published opinion, they seem to leave a lot of leeway for the lower court to uphold the law with minimal justification.

Posted in California, Civil Commitment, Sex Offender Registries | Comments Off

Lock away your kids! The Who is coming!

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

In a typical display of lynch mob mentality, child “protection” groups are rabidly protesting the planned visit of the Pete Townshend as part of the scheduled Super Bowl half time entertainment. Pete Townsend of the well known band, The Who, was nabbed in 2003 as part of a UK child porn crackdown. No child porn was found in his possession, but he admitted to using his credit card to access a Texas based child porn web site as part of a personal research project on the easy accessibility of child porn. In the UK, you can apparently reach an agreement with police, avoiding adjudication in court. By so doing he agreed to be placed on the UK’s sex offender registry for five years, which ended in 2008.

A group calling itself “Protect Our Children” mailed out an advisory to residents near the stadium that will host the event.

While protecting children might be an admirable mission, actively campaigning to incite hysteria over the temporary visit of a single person who poses not even a hint of a risk to anyone, is irresponsible and vicious. The tyranny imposed upon people, families, and communities in the name of protecting children is a growth industry. This is simply another case of a cause becoming an end in itself. Everything is perceived as a threat and every threat is characterized as being of maximum severity. In the end, the crusade exists only to benefit the crusaders at the expense of those it claims to serve. It has become an angry mindless mob addicted to its own fervor.

Posted in Censorship, Child Pornography, Florida, Paranoia, Persecution, Sex Offender Registries, United Kingdom, United States | Comments Off

Woman attacks sex offender in traffic, except…

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

…he wasn’t a sex offender.

From the original article:

A Concord man told Alcoa police officers Friday that he was waiting for a light to change at an intersection on Hall Road when a woman in a Jeep in front of him got out, jumped on his hood and started kicking and punching his windshield.

The woman … “repeatedly said she knew he was a ‘sex offender.’” Williamson is not a registered sex offender, the report said.

Not that there’s any reason to think that media hype and sex crime hysteria has anything to do with a woman jumping out of her car and attacking another motorist who she mistakenly thought was a sex offender. Hell, no. I mean doesn’t that happen all the time to other types of criminals?

Credit to Sex Offender Issues for the link.

Posted in Paranoia, Persecution, Sex Offender Registries, Tennessee | Comments Off

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