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Thursday, January 05, 2012

Law - "States struggle with national sex offender law"

The ILB has had a number of entries on the federal Adam Walsh Act (AWA) aka the federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), including this most recent one from Aug. 1, 2011, headed "5 years later, states struggle to comply with federal sex offender law."

Well, now it is 2012, and the latest story on the topic, by Maggie Clark of Stateside, is similarly headed "States struggle with national sex offender law." Here is a quote from the long story:

The vast majority of states did not comply on time. As the five-year deadline of July 2011 was approaching, only four had met the terms of the law. The Obama administration issued new guidelines earlier in 2011 that gave states more discretion in implementing the act and clarified how to share information, and in the past year, 12 more states have become compliant. But most still are not, even though they will lose 10 percent of their justice assistance grants from the federal government in fiscal year 2012 as a penalty for inaction.

It’s not that states are uninformed about the law; it’s that they have substantial objections to it. Many see it as an unfunded mandate requiring them to spend millions of dollars collecting information and placing it in the national registry. They are reluctant to bear the cost of updating their own technology to register digital fingerprints, palm prints and DNA, and of paying for the additional time that law enforcement officers would spend processing sex offenders who appear before them in person.

Advocates for juveniles also complain about what would be a lifetime listing for some juvenile sex offenders, which they say goes against any commitment to rehabilitate juveniles, rather than punishing them for long periods of time.

There is much more to the article, including:
In the absence of changes to Adam’s law, however, some states will argue that complying with it is simply not worth the costs. Even though they lose 10 percent of their justice assistance money, that is usually less than they would end up paying for compliance. Ohio, which was the first state to become compliant in 2007, had within two years spent about $10 million just defending itself against lawsuits from offenders sentenced to the registry, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. In contrast, Ohio would have lost only about $2 million for non-compliance during the same period.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on January 5, 2012 01:39 PM
Posted to General Law Related