The Register's Editorial: Expanding sex offender registry is unworkable

12-2-2014 Iowa:

Kathleen Carr's anger is understandable.

In 1983, she was raped in Des Moines by Clifford Freeman III, who served less than five years in prison for the offense. In 1997, Freeman was convicted of robbery and served an additional 17 years behind bars before being sent to the Fort Des Moines Community Corrections Center last month.

Freeman's conviction on the rape charge predates Iowa's 1995 creation of the state sex offender registry by almost 12 years. As such, he is not required to register with the state as a sex offender — a fact that doesn't sit well with Carr.

A few state legislators have indicated they would support a move to make the registry retroactive so that it would include all Iowans who have been convicted of a sex crime. A retroactive sex offender registry is a bad idea — both for practical and legal reasons.

On the practical side, lawmakers would first have to define what constitutes a sex offense. Crimes that meet that definition today would not necessarily have met that definition 40 years ago.

Then, for the law to mean anything, state officials would have to enforce it. How would they even begin to track down offenders whose most recent contact with the criminal justice system was in the 1960s or 1970s?

On the legal side, the hurdles would be greater.

Although the Iowa Supreme Court has previously said that a retroactive registration requirement does not constitute a form of double punishment, other courts have disagreed.

Over the past 20 years, 17 states have passed laws creating some form of retroactive sex offender registry, but seven states — including Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Maryland — have had their laws struck down as incompatible with a constitutional prohibition against punishing people twice for the same offense. Similar court challenges are pending in Kansas and other states.

It's notable that the Iowa Supreme Court's finding that the registry doesn't constitute a form of punishment dates back to 1997, before the proliferation of on-line registries and privately hosted web sites that seek to shame registered offenders.

In its 1997 ruling, the Iowa Supreme Court noted that sheriffs at the time were authorized to release information about registered offenders "to the general public if the person making the request gives that person's name and address in writing, states the reason for requesting the information, and provides the sheriff with the name and address of the person about whom the information is sought."

Registration, the court said then, "does not allow such a widespread dissemination of information" that an offender would be so stigmatized as to effectively be punished twice.

Clearly, a lot has changed in the 17 years since that decision was written.

Since March 2000, the state of Iowa has provided the public with a searchable, online sex offender registry. Other organizations collect that data and distribute it through their own websites, allowing for access that is both global and instantaneous.

It's hard to imagine information being disseminated more widely than this.

There's no question that Clifford Freeman III is a sex offender. But there are hundreds of Iowans like him, convicted of sex crimes before they were required to register with the state. The state can't change that any more than it can turn back the hands of time.

A retroactive registry would be unworkable, and almost certainly illegal. ..Source.. by The Register’s Editorial