NH- Senate didn't weaken sex-offender measure

5-19-2008 New Hampshire:

The state Senate did not "loosen" sex offender laws. The issues at stake in the article printed by The Telegraph recently does not even begin to accurately describe the process House Bill 1640 has taken from beginning to end (May 1: "Senate panel loosens sex offender bills").

I have sat in on almost every meeting, and I can assure you that the House did far more "weakening" to sex offender laws in New Hampshire than did the Senate. But The Telegraph article that came out during that part of the process did not paint those "weakenings" in such a negative light.

It was the House, not the Senate, that decided to move to a three-tier system that would allow offenders the opportunity to come off the public registry, though The Telegraph implied (without a negative spin) that these offenders would come off the registry completely.

Where was the outcry then? (Not that there should have been outrage, but suffice it to say that the way the article is written goes a long way to stir up the public.)

The changes made applied to Tier 1 and Tier 2 offenders, the offenders least likely to be a risk to young children based on their convictions (without any risk assessment analysis). After a risk assessment and proper notification, those offenders who met the requirements could come off the public list only. Those changes are a drastic step away from what we currently have, yet there was no outrage that the House "loosened" sex offender laws.

The changes the Senate made were minor in comparison. They chose to keep Tier 1 offenders at 10 years registration, which is in line with our current laws for misdemeanor crimes. Additionally, they removed a provision that would post employer addresses online; they did not remove the duty to report employer information as The Telegraph implied in the recent article. It is important to note that sex crimes are not happening by registered offenders at their places of employment. They happen within the circle of trust and most times by an unregistered offender.

A job is one of the most stabilizing factors in a released offender's life. To disrupt this stability would be adverse to the public safety, and the Senate wisely chose to remove that provision in the same spirit with which New Hampshire's legislators have chosen to twice strike down statewide residency restrictions. As to the DNA issue, I was unable to find any significant changes to the DNA provisions of this bill in the Senate calendar, and I am unsure as to why The Telegraph reported that the Senate removed this provision, as it clearly has not.

Further, the Senate combined HB 1613 that would have raised the age of child pornography to 18 with HB 1640. They removed the provision of HB 1613 that would have raised the age to 18 for child pornography only because it would have also inadvertently raised the age of consent in New Hampshire under the same text of law. This change would have been in direct conflict with our felonious sexual assault statutes, and they cannot responsibly let something like this pass because of the ambiguity it would create in the law.

In short, I urge the people of New Hampshire and The Telegraph to look a little deeper before jumping to conclusions about the hard work our senators have put in to balancing the issues before suggesting that they undeniably weakened our state's sex offender registry. ..more.. Opinion of Laurie Peterson, Manchester