Sex offender registry law in Pa. facing life-or-death test at Supreme Court
The landmark Pennsylvania law that for nearly a quarter of a century has required a public registry of sex offenders and community notification about their whereabouts is facing a life-or-death challenge before the state’s highest court.
Enacted nearly 25 years ago, Megan’s Law was hailed as a pivotal step toward making communities safer by empowering the public with information about where sex offenders live. Now, five separate cases before the state Supreme Court are attacking it as outdated, discriminatory, and unnecessarily cruel, depriving thousands of people of their fundamental rights.
The cases challenge nearly every aspect of the law, which has undergone several incarnations since being signed in 1995, one year after the death of 7-year-old Megan Kanka. The New Jersey girl was raped and killed by a neighbor who, unbeknownst to her family, was a twice-convicted pedophile. Similar laws were adopted across the United States and at the federal level.
Prosecutors believe the pending cases could gut Pennsylvania’s law, allowing sexually violent predators to evade detection and endangering public safety. They also warn that the law’s best-known aspect — the website that lists the thousands of offenders in the state — could be watered down or dismantled. In the last year alone, the website received 411 million page views, state records show.
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Megan’s Law and/or The Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), has allegedly been enacted to protect our children from sexually violent offender(s). These laws regardless of what you went to call them do not protect children at all, as a matter of fact these laws have caused more children to be raped, sexually assaulted, pimped out, and sold into child prostatution. I myself am on the sex offender registration list here in Pennsylvania. I am not guilty of the crimes to which I was charged and convicted. But that is not for this comment at this time. I have served over 20 years in prison, and have met many inmate who were in prison for Sexually prostituting Young children out. When I spoke to these prisoners I would ask each and everyone of them how they would obtain their customers. Each and every one of them all have the same thing to say. The government state or faderal made it very easy to find customers to sale our young children to. We just use the Megan’s Law or Sex Offender Registration website to find out customers. It easy just log on and in seconds you can find 10,000 of thousands of customers who enjoy have sexual relationships with young children. On of the inmate state that he make over 4½ Million dallors selling little girls for sex using the Pennsylvania Sex Offender Registration website. I truly believe that the sex offender registration laws in Pennsylvania should be “FULLY ABOLISHED”
I am thinking that maybe the worst argument I have ever heard. . I also do not believe that to be very factual either, and am a little curious as to what exactly is the objective you are trying to reach? . I will list my argument below.
Argument) If using the registry as a tool for finding clients to illegally market children into sex slavery for the sex trafficking trade was true then the registrants would have a much higher rate of reconviction than the super low reoffense rates that the statistically have. Also If these sex traffickers you claim to be interviewing really were doing what you claim successfully then the State and Federal police would be well aware of it and they would be netting huge successful stings using the same registry. It would be front-page news every day..In effect, the registry would be a glowing success because it would be capturing predators.. But that just is not happening.. So let’s be real.. there is something really fishy about your comment?
Sorry but I call bullsh*t on these inmates’ stories. No one made money using the registry to sell sex, certainly not $4 million.
Virtually no one on the registry is a willing buyer of sex with children. And most never have been.
Douglas
That may explain why I get the dozens of junk mail each week supposedly from girls that are lonely and want to meet me. I just ignore them but I figured some of them were just from police trying to bait me . Last week I deleted 1500 of them. They need to be going after the people sending out these Emails. Not the unsuspecting victims, then putting them behind bars. Good information thanks.
Is this post relating to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court or SCOTUS? It’s not entirely clear from the content. If it is SCOTUS, and the cases are decided on the basis of the common weal and good of society, all these unconstitutional laws across the nation will be struck down. Who cannot see the Registries online are anything but punitive in nature and intent.
PA Supreme Court
Most of those 411 million views of the registry are by registrantsand their Zfamily members.I know I have to go on there all the time after making updates and changes to make sure that the information is accurate. There have been other instances where I’ve had to view myself online numerous times a day for one reason or another. I try to limit my clicks on the registry because I know they’re counted but there are many occasion’s where I can’t worry about it and must click on it several times a day many times a year. Now with that being said take one million other registrants that are currently registered here in the U.S. and think about how many times a day they go on it for a whole year. There is the 411 million views. Or at least close to it!!!!!
You have overlooked the numerous search engines that rake in many hundreds of “views” as part of whatever search term is used. Not to mention the many businesses that utilize the registry purely for profit.
Why would you give a flip if the information on the $EX Offender Registries ($ORs) is accurate or not? I think it is great when it is not. All you need to do is ensure that you have proof that you gave the criminal regime the correct information. If they can’t keep track of it, that’s their problem.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the views that the $ORs get. If you created a website that lists the incomes of every person, that website would get a million times the views of the $ORs. It’s not that the $ORs are legitimate or that anyone needs the information, it’s just that people are nosy and love to gossip. There are probably also some poor souls who think it is helpful information.
We also all know that most “people” who live in Amerika are dumb, shallow, disgusting, awful, hateful, self-entitled, self-righteous douche bags. Of course those Nazis are going to be harassing other people. They have to. They must gossip. Must.
I wouldn’t worry about it. Big government is always going to lie how much everyone so badly needs them. It’s part of their non-stop propaganda.
But … a few thoughts about the views. A lot of them are from automated bots, of course. I personally used to run one that read all of the web site data several times a day. I also have people (e.g. attorneys, churches, etc.) reading the Registries and contacting me quite often to offer services. So there are a lot of companies doing that.
On the flip side, the criminal regimes are allowing people to sign up for alerts when Registered People move near them. I expect that plenty of people do that and then do not view the online Registries. I expect that reduces the views by a lot. I also expect that a huge percentage of “people” who use the $ORs are dumb and thus instead of using direct information sources, they use grifters like OffenderWatch or whomever. I expect those uses greatly reduce the view count.
It would be very interesting though to file some FOIA requests and get the IP addresses and statistics.
Blanket policies…boogeyman imagery…emotional voters…entrenched politicians and officials…
What could go wrong? Yep, the system rides it out term after term and gets off when they’re done. “Just doing my job”.
So the job is to silently but quickly exterminate people who are only criminals because of the laws WRITTEN to make them that way by a system BUILT to handle them way for no real purpose other than to JUSTIFY itself? But do it while skirting by ever-so-slightly under the radar, only surfacing to show people the violent stories to say “Look, it’s true”.
The real fact is Megans Law was written to prevent and in theory discourages sex crimes against children has never worked. Its accounted for thousands of suicides and vigilianti violence against mostly non violent offenders.
The law has ruined families and destroyed lives whilst not statistically doing what it was designed to do.
Per being registered marks a human being for life. It punishes a person until they die even after the courts have spoken. It falsely accuses a offender of being a monster that society has casted out. Its discriminatory and unconstitutional and grossly unjust.
JEV – True Confessions
First problem in this article is they said “convicted pedophile”. Pedophilia in itself is not a crime of conviction. The crime of conviction would be “child molestation”.
I recently commented on another post on here that the law was passed due to this heinous crime and then ALL things that involve sex or the sexual organs of the human body (your penis when urinating behind a tree) somehow got lumped in and that should NEVER have happened.