SMART Case Law Summary
An FAC member sent this July 2023 Case Law Summary for our pundits.
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4 thoughts on “SMART Case Law Summary”
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Chief Justice John Roberts recently wrote in majority opinion: “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.”
While reading the SMART Case Law Summary, I see many phrases that say something like, the US Attorney General did this…or can do that…or exercised discretion…in regard to SORNA.
FAC recently asked in another post: “Did Congress violate the non-delegation doctrine when it passed the federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, giving the attorney general authority to issue regulations?” It appears from the SMART Case Law Summary that the answer is a resounding YES!
NO punitive law, rule or ordinance should ever be retroactively applied. If you want to retroactively apply my social security check, I would be ok with that, but you won’t. But you apply a registry on people whose crimes were sometimes decades before the law came into existence.
They went back 6 years on me, with no plea deal or any bargaining or recourse. I have in the past used this example. When I was 19, I was allowed to drink. When they raised it to 21, we in Florida were able to still drink because they “Grandfathered” us in instead of taking away our rights and didn’t retroactively take away those freedoms.
Does anyone know of any jurisdiction that uses actual data in their risk assessment analyses? From what I’ve read, that process would be more properly described as risk presumption.
Since ‘risk assessment’ is a purely political idea, there’s no need for real data, I’m afraid.