When Animus Matters and Sex Offense Underreporting Does Not: The Sex Offender Registry Regime
ACSOL Board Member Ira Ellman has published a scholarly work that claims the registry regime is motivated by animus and should be stricken. This conclusion is based upon an analysis of four relevant U.S. Supreme Court decisions in which the Court determined what constitutes animus and struck down existing laws on that basis.
According to Ellman’s work, “(n)o similar regime has ever been imposed on any other group of law-abiding former felons who have fully served the sentence for the crime they committed years earlier”. The work also concludes that the registry raises a “strong an inference of animus” and that inference of animus “does not survive the scrutiny of scientific studies which find the registry ineffective and often counterproductive”.
In addition to serving as an ACSOL board member, Ellman is the author of “Frightening and High,” a scholarly work published in 2017 which revealed that the U.S. Supreme Court relied in the past on unsubstantiated statements in a “Psychology Today” magazine article when it determined that the requirement to register does not constitute punishment and therefore new sex offender laws could be applied retroactively. Ellman is also a Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at the Center for Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Every member of the House and Senate judiciary committees should get a copy of Mark Ira Ellman’s abstract on “Animus”. I’ll do my part for Illinois. Durbin will get a copy he can dupe. Most of these legislators do not have an email address you can actually mail to and attach this doc to. But it would help if others also mailed in copies so that the sheer inundation of the individual members’ offices get the message that they should be doing something about this.
I truly believe that a Higher Power is working for us. This is great news and is cause for a tremendous thank you to Ira Ellman for this great work. What I have in my mind right now is the photo taken of a Sheriff and his deputies, in some state I don”t remember, where they put some dinky playground in a neighborhood to keep registrants out. They were all smiling and so pleased with themselves, so if thats not hate, I don’t know what is!
Wow, Wow and Wow. A game changer!
More hope we hope but its something we already knew now we have more cofirmation!!!!!!
I’ve gotten through part I so far and am really impressed. It is well written and thoroughly researched and documented. It will be a tremendous resource in the fights to come. So, on to parts II and III. Well done Ira.
This seems very well researched. Maybe some lawyers will make good use of it for our cause.