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Strollerderby
In a new book called “Sex Panic & The Punitive State,” professor and author Roger N. Lancaster says that sex offender registries are a waste of time and that current punishments for sex offenders in the US are too harsh.
While sex offender registries in the US now collectively list three quarters of a million people, Lancaster argues that many of those listed are being unfairly treated as public pariahs. End up on a registry and you’ll be told where you can and can’t live, and will find it impossible to get a job. While certain criminals may deserve such punishment, he believes there are quite a few who shouldn’t even be on the lists, explaining in a Washington Post interview that registries now include those convicted of sex crimes who “… had consensual relations with near-adults. Others appear to have been falsely accused and accepted a plea bargain. Some were themselves minors who had consensual sex with their girlfriends or boyfriends. A random sample of one state’s listings shows that two-thirds of the registrants were convicted of non-violent first offenses — and their crimes may have involved no physical contact.”
New York legislators are pushing to create a national domestic violence offender database.
Three New York legislators are working to enact a proposed law, which would automatically register people who have been on convicted of domestic abuse on a nationwide database similar to the national sex offender registry.
State Senator Eric Adams, Assemblywoman Vanessa Gibson and Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries are pushing to have the Domestic Violence Offender Database created. The proposed law comes on the heels of the murder of 23-year-old Sarah Coit, who was stabbed to death and nearly decapitated last week during a domestic dispute with her boyfriend. The suspect in Coit’s death, Raul Barrera, has been linked to several violent incidents in the past. Just last year, he plead guilty to smashing a man in the face with a bottle.
Labeling Shane Sandborg a sex offender is ridiculous.
Back when Shane Sandborg was just 17, he entered a relationship with 16-year-old Kristina. Like many teens, they began a sexual relationship, but unlike many teens, they eventually married and went on to have three children. They were engaged at the young age of 17, when police investigated a burglary near their Illinois home and discovered the relationship between the two. Sandborg was technically breaking the law by engaging in sexual activity with an underage minor and was placed on the sex offender registry.
Today, ten years later, he is still on the sex registry list — even though Kristina was just fourteen months younger than he when the sexual relationship began and the relationship was consensual, and even though he and Kristina married, creating a sustained, loving family together.
How would you feel if you knew the person sitting next to you in church was a sex offender?
Me, I’d be pretty nervous. And I’m not the only one. Some churches are banning sex offenders from the weekly service, because they offer things like a nursery for children or Sunday school. That puts offenders inc conflict with several states’ laws that require sex offenders to stay a certain distance away from any facility that cares for or serves children. Continue reading »
When we shared the story of the woman kidnapped at eleven who showed up eighteen years later, we knew nothing about the intervening years.
We sort of wish it had stayed that way. Jaycee Lee Dugard, the little girl who resurfaced as a full grown woman of twenty-nine yesterday in California has apparently been through unspeakable horrors – including becoming a mother to two children via rape. Continue reading »
Currently in Texas, there are about 4,000 people on the permanent sex offender registry for crimes they committed as juveniles–in some cases, when they were as young as 10 years-old. The case of a 12-year-old Texan girl who was recently arrested for sexual assault has raised the question of whether it’s ethical to register juveniles as sex offenders. Continue reading »
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