Comments on Advance Indiana™: State's New Sex Offender Law Posing Problems

Anonymous, the courts have held that retroactive l...

2006-09-10T11:39:00.000-05:00

Anonymous, the courts have held that retroactive laws are not punishment. If you believe they're wrong, by all means proclaim so to the courts. If you say it loudly and long enough, the courts will agree with you. And once they agree that registration, notification, residency and proximity restrictions are indeed punishment, they will no longer permit the state to apply them to anyone convicted prior to the law's enactment.

So if your only basis for the laws is that the past offenders and their families "deserve the punishment," you will lose the very laws you think are such a good idea.

What about the liberties of their victims? Where ...

2006-09-10T10:00:00.000-05:00

What about the liberties of their victims? Where I live there is a man who has been convicted of 4 seperate counts of child molestation over a period of 10 years and the longest sentence he has recieved for his crimes has been a 4 year prison sentence. Oddly enough he didn't have to serve a full 4 years and after being released last year he got a job working at the local fairgrounds(wow I bet that job keeps him far from new children to become his victims). Most of these idiots committed crimes that will mentally punish their victims for the rest of their lives.

I'm glad to see that the state is making things harder on them. Two years in prison will never make up for taking the innocence of a child, raping a woman, or any of the other crimes these perverts commmit. Their punishment should be life long and the state is on the right track in doing so. So what if the liberals cry foul, I bet they stop when it's their child who is molested or them who is raped.

The Enrolled Acts state the residency restrictions...

2006-09-09T08:19:00.000-05:00

The Enrolled Acts state the residency restrictions apply only to "crimes committed after June 30 2006." Of course, that's not in the statute because it's pretty well known that criminal statutes don't apply retroactively. The only reason it's being questioned is that the public has decided sex offenders can be treated differently.

As a result, sex offender laws most impact those LEAST likely to reoffend--those who have proven over years, sometimes decades, that they live safely and responsibly within the community. The longer they live a law-abiding life, the worse their lives become under the law.

Eventually the general public will figure out that court precedent doesn't just apply to sex offenders. If the government decides that something in your past makes you dangerous--and they don't have to prove it, remember--they can do to you what has been done to offenders. So says the courts.

It isn't punishment to list someone's past online because it's simply "public information." It isn't punishment to order someone out of the home because the government's determination on where individuals can live infringes upon no liberties. It isn't punishment to be subjected to harrassment, threats, vandalism, assault, and murder because the government claims no responsibility for making it so easy--and socially acceptable--to do so. So says the court.

And it isn't just the offenders. It's their families, too--many of which were established after the offender's sentence was completed. Now the parents, spouses and children get to live under sex-offender restrictions because of crimes that are sometimes decades old, or they can split up the family in order to retain their basic rights and freedoms.

Keep in mind, too, when someone says the registry is there to protect the public from dangerous persons, that the state argued an individual's dangerousness is irrelevant. The only way they keep from violating due process is to argue that everyone, yet no one, is actually pointed out as dangerous.

Civil liberties be damned! Far-right Republican a...

2006-09-08T19:16:00.000-05:00

Civil liberties be damned! Far-right Republican agendas must be advanced!

And on another civil liberties front, Mike McDaniel, on "Indiana Week in Review," tonight stooped to a new low: he said the entire Bosma prayer fight was David O's fault.

That first direct-mail piece for Ms. Densborn is in the mail, you can bet.

Isn't it amazing how the far right can twist issues to pander to the electorate?

And shame on the Dems on the CIty Council for voting for this ordinance without thinking about its far-reaching impact. All to try to give Melina an advantage.

Misguided.

Tonight, the Constitution is weeping.