The court ultimately ruled that legislation is assumed to be constitutional, and since the man was arguing that the law was applied in an arbitrary manner, the validity of the legislation was not being tested- merely whether it was applied as written.

So ultimately, the legislature is at fault here.

People who kidnap or imprison people unlawfully should possibly be warned about somehow, but when it includes somebody who grabbed somebody else’s arm for ten seconds to yell at them, it’s going way beyond what the legislature intended. Of course they never seem to think about feature creep when “protecting the public”.

This is another example of legislation the state was forced to enact in order to receive federal funding. All 50 states have a sex offender registry, and 41 of them have basically the same criteria.

What REALLY sucks is this guy’s housing options are severely limited in many areas. There are quite a few cities in Wisconsin that limit where people on the list can live, some with distances of up to 2000′ from anywhere children commonly hang out. Sheboygan, for example, did not do an exhaustive study of what amount of residential area in the city would be available for people on the registry to live when their ordinance was created, but they guessed it would be less than 20%. There are pockets of land outside the city limits that people want to annex for the sole reason that people on the list are allowed to live there.

Wisconsin’s “no guns near a school” law has the same effect with regard to carrying a firearm, which is otherwise legal to open carry in the state. A man was arrested for having his handgun on his front porch ON HIS OWN PROPERTY because his house is within 1000′ of a school- as is a large portion of residential property in a city.

Its like three strike laws putting people in a situation where they would rather shoot a cop than go to jail for stealing a stereo.

The judge agreed that 28-year-old Fitzroy Barnaby of Evanston, Ill. probably didn’t have any sexual intention when he grabbed a 14-year-old girl’s arm to chastise her (he says) for walking in front of his car. But unlawful restraint of a minor, the offense of which Barnaby was convicted, automatically qualifies as a sex offense under Illinois law.

He should have just smashed in her face with an iron pipe. He’d be free and clear by now.

Lesson taken.

Seriously, if a 17 year old can’t consent to sex because they are too young to fully comprehend the consequences, then they cannot consent to committing a crime. And if you can’t consent to committing a crime, then it cannot be a crime – or at least not in the try-them-as-an-adult sense.

So it seems to me that anyone who attempts to prosecute a minor for a crime against a minor is violating the very principle that justifies the law in the first place. It’s just logically incompatible. Either they’re minors, and thus not fit to be standing trial for an adult crime, or both youths are functionally adults, and thus there is no justification for the crime. You can’t have one youth be functionally considered a minor and the other be functionally considered an adult.

And if you take that idea to its logical conclusion, imprisoning a minor for a crime against another minor, and charging them as an adult, is falsely imprisoning a minor. Thus, the prosecutor is a sex offender.

What is it like 2% of the SOR is child molesters? A lot of the others are listed as rape or sexual assault, which anyone who reads this blog knows includes 16 year-olds caught in the back of the car with 15 year old partners. But 20 years later the registry still reads “unlawful sex with a minor.”

I’m surprised the whole practice hasn’t been found unconstitutional even for the legitimately guilty. We can brand someone so that they are ostracized by society long after their sentence is up, publicly post their personal information to make them easy victims for revenge crime and harassment, and if they violate any number of state or local laws about where they are and aren’t allowed to be they get thrown back in prison for nothing. Yet many still claim its not a cruel and unusual punishment. It’s all about pushing that fear of the outsider, compounding the suffering of the leper just because you can. This is a modern day lottery, you don’t get stoned to death, just forbidden from ever leading a normal fulfilling life.

The chickens are only beginning to come home to roost.

And it’s not just sex offender registries. Civil commitment is being widely used as an end-around to keep sex offenders incarcerated indefinitely after they’ve completed their sentence. Once upon a time, it took a criminal trial to imprison someone, but civil commitment is much easier, is closed to public scrutiny, and basically rests on the assumption that a person can be locked up for a crime he might commit in the future.

Brace yourself because in the American justice system where precedence is everything, thanks to civil commitment, the concept of an open-ended incarceration will become common for more than just sex crimes.

“I encourage further developments in this vein. The more mission creep, the sooner the sex offender registries will become useless and the sooner the public will cease to take them seriously. I hope.

Radley, did you know that Tennessee has a “meth offender registry” to go with its SOR?”

I’m pretty sure that Tennessee is the state which famously includes public urinators in its sex offender registry.