News & Updates

The State of Illinois is among the latest to see their “proximity ordinance” challenged. A lawsuit was filed on behalf of six registered citizens in federal court yesterday. The lawsuit specifically challenges four statutes: One that prohibits a child sex offender from knowingly being present at any “facility providing programs or services exclusively directed toward persons under the age of

While Florida continues down an irrational path, some states have come out with opinions recently that have shown a bit more reasonableness when it comes to sex offender management and probation terms.   This past Friday, the Vermont Supreme Court issued an opinion removing internet restrictions (among others) from the standard conditions of probation.  The court held that a condition

Laws are having a difficult time catching up with the times and when legislators try to create legislation to update them, sometimes their ignorance of technology creates more problems than the laws are intended to solve. Take for example the change to the definition of “internet identifiers” that will become effective in Florida this coming October. The new law requires

When she was an adolescent, Lauren Book was sexually, physically and emotionally tortured by her nanny for six years. Her abuser’s name will be forever included on a publicly available sex offender registry. So will the name of Shawna Baldwin, a hardworking and loving mother of two whose life has been blighted by a decision, when she was 19, to

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like it. On Friday the Kansas Supreme Court issued decisions in three cases — State v. Buser, State v. Redmond and Doe v. Thompson — holding that Kansas’s Offender Registration Act, requiring anyone previously convicted of various violent felonies, drug crimes or sex offenses to register with state authorities, cannot be constitutionally applied to people whose underlying

Still a “slap on the wrist” from the perspective of most reading this, but former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert received a 15 month sentence for the financial crimes related to his pay-offs to keep a former victim of his molestation quiet. Hastert, who had a guidelines sentence of up to 6 months, was given three times the amount