{"id":12010,"date":"2010-12-28T02:21:54","date_gmt":"2010-12-28T09:21:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=12010"},"modified":"2010-12-28T02:21:54","modified_gmt":"2010-12-28T09:21:54","slug":"top-wisconsin-court-oks-putting-non-sex-offenders-on-sex-offender-registry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=12010","title":{"rendered":"Top Wisconsin Court OKs Putting Non-Sex Offenders on Sex Offender Registry"},"content":{"rendered":"

From The Legal Watchdog<\/a>:<\/p>\n

For each violent rapist, a registry may contain dozens of teenagers who had consensual sex with younger teens, and dozens of other teens who were convicted of \u201csexting,\u201d urinating in public, or similar behavior.<\/a> But, perhaps the biggest problem with sex offender registries is that they\u2019re not just for sex-related crimes anymore.<\/p>\n

An excellent example of this trend can be found in the Wisconsin case of State v. Smith<\/a>, where Smith, a 17-year-old boy, made another 17-year-old boy go with him to collect a debt.  Smith was convicted of felony false imprisonment for this behavior and, because his \u201cprisoner\u201d was a minor, the state forced Smith to register as a sex offender.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And Scott Greenfield writes:<\/p>\n

Of critical importance is that the court did not hold that the purpose of the sex offender registry is in any way directly related to sex, but rather “protecting the public and assisting law enforcement.” That pretty much covers everything in the world, except releasing Brett Favre when he still had life in his arm.<\/p>\n

By decoupling sex from the sex offender registry, there’s no rational end to where legislatures can go. It’s invariably in the interest of protecting the public and, my personal favorite concern, assisting law enforcement to keep tabs on every person ever convicted of anything, anywhere, any time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is pretty horrifying — and the decision is pretty ridiculous. I wonder if this is partly a problem with having judges be elected; elected judges may have a strong incentive to be “tough on crime” and to not make any decision that could be misrepresented, in an election, as being soft on sex offenders. Or maybe Wisconsin judges are just cheeseheads.<\/p>\n

It would be nice if the legislature would step in and fix some of the problems with sex registries, but that’s not too likely, either. Neither major party has shown any real interest in these sort of justice issues. A lot of this comes down to the American public, which seems very comfortable with injustice. At heart, we just don’t care if prisoners get raped and tortured, if people’s lives are unjustly ruined by misuse of sex offender registries, if prosecutors falsely prosecute innocent people, if police raids lead to dead dogs (and sometimes family members) because someone is suspected of smoking a joint, and so forth. And as long as we don’t care, why should our politicians?<\/p>\n

Via The Agitator<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From The Legal Watchdog: For each violent rapist, a registry may contain dozens of teenagers who had consensual sex with younger teens, and dozens of other teens who were convicted of \u201csexting,\u201d urinating in public, or similar behavior. But, perhaps … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crossposted-on-tada","category-prisons-and-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12010\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}