News: United States
- Sex parolees must hide on Halloween
- By John Simerman, San Jose Mercury News, 2007-10-30.
- Under special Halloween conditions, sex-offender parolees must stay indoors from 5 PM to 5 AM, keep their exterior lights off and answer the door only to law enforcement agents.
- Genarlow Wilson rejoices over his release
- By John Simerman, San Jose Mercury News, 2007-10-26.
- Genarlow Wilson, victim of Georgia’s insane age-of-consent laws, finally released.
- Deltona, Florida residency restrictions challenged in court
- By Ludmilla Lelis, The Orlando Sentinel, 2007-09-18.
- Registered sex offenders in Florida are fighting back against residency restrictions.
- Patty Wetterling on the harm in sex-offender laws
- By Patty Wetterling, Sacramento Bee, 2007-09-14.
- The mother of Jacob Wetterling, whose abduction lead to the creation of sex-offender registries, repudiates current sex-offender legal policy and the “get tough on sex offenders” attitude behind so much of it.
- Human Rights Watch press release on “No Easy Answers” report
- Human Rights News, 2007-09-12.
- The press release from Human Rights Watch about their 146-page report on sex-offender policy in the United States, including residency residency restrictions. HRW’s conclusion is that U.S. sex-offender laws don’t protect children from sex crimes very well, but they do lead to harassment, ostracism, and even violence against former offenders.
- Avoiding kids: how men cope with being cast as predators
- By Jeff Zaslow, The Wall Street Journal, 2007-09-07.
- More fallout from the sex-offender hysteria.
- Laws end up hurting the not-so-dangerous
- By Lauren FitzPatrick, The Milford Daily News, 2007-08-27.
- In Pennsylvania, a 13-year-old girl who took pictures of her naked self will be a sex offender for life. In Florida, a 16-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy made a video of themselves having sex and have to register not for the legal sex acts but for the tape, considered child porn.
- Costs mount to support sex-offender laws
- By Lauren FitzPatrick, Gatehouse News Service, 2007-08-20.
- A detailed analysis of all the costs associated with sex-offender registries.
- Goodbye to sex predator classifications
- By Russ Bensing, The Briefcase, 2007-08-20.
- More fallout from the Adam Walsh Act: Ohio switches from a risk-based classification system to an offense-based system.
- Six months in jail for consensual sex with an adult
- By Paula Horton, The Daily World, 2007-08-16.
- A high school coach sleeps with an eighteen-year-old student, is sent to jail for six months, and then forced to register as a sex offender.
- Statistics: most sex offenders know victims
- By The Associated Press, The Orlando Sentinel, 2007-07-22.
- More evidence that residency restrictions designed to keep strangers away from places where children congregate are pointless.
- Sex-offender residency restrictions
- By Russ Bensing, The Briefcase, 2007-03-22.
- The city of Parma, Ohio, tries to evict a man because the corner of his property is 997 feet from a school. The article also talks about the Iowa County Attorneys Association report, how residency restrictions are based on the myth of the “stranger danger,” and how the “sex offender” label covers far more than child molesters.
- Sex-offender residency laws get second look
- By Wendy Koch, USA Today, 2007-02-26.
- Oklahoma state representative Lucky Lamons realizes residency restrictions do not differentiate between predators and those who are no risk, and they force registered offenders underground.
- Reasonable rape
- TIME, 1966-01-21.
- An article about Francisco A. Hernandez, whose statutory rape case eventually lead to the removal of strict liability from California’s statutory rape laws.