By Sophie Culpepper . . . Last month, a bill that would cap the proportion of registered sex offenders in homeless shelter beds at 10 percent for shelters whose capacity exceeds 50 people passed in the Rhode Island State House. A coalition
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By Melissa Nann Burke . . . The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let stand a lower court ruling that “sweeping” conditions imposed retroactively under Michigan’s sex offender registry law were unconstitutionally punitive. Michigan had appealed a 6th Circuit U.S. Court of
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By John Bacon . . . Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former Congressman who pleaded guilty in May to sexting with a 15-year-old girl, was sentenced Monday to 21 months in prison. Weiner, 53, also faces spending the rest of his life as a registered
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By Maurice Chammah…. If someone finishes a prison sentence for a violent sexual crime, but might still be dangerous, should he be released? How do you know if he’s dangerous? And when does it violate his rights to hold him? On Monday,
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By Olivia Covington . . . Shortly after the controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act went into effect in Indiana in 2015, the unlawful entry by a serious sex offender statute, which prohibits certain sex offenders from accessing school property, also became law.
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By Radley Balko . . . The video below tells the story of Shawna, an Oklahoma woman who is still in mandatory treatment because 15 years ago, when she was 19, she had sex with a boy who was 14. Over at the
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By David Feige . . . I met Shawna a year into filming “Untouchable,” a documentary that examines sex offender laws through the lives of individuals on the sex offender registry. It was at an Oklahoma treatment center where she was participating
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NARSOL Communications . . . NARSOL denounces “Make Albuquerque Safe” for advocating residency restrictions when such laws are contradicted by research and empirical data. An entity calling itself “Make Albuquerque Safe” has attacked a mayoral candidate in Albuquerque because, in 2011, he voted
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Editor’s note: J.B. is the owner, publisher, and editor of a small newspaper. She first came into my life at the point in her story where she was forced to place a sign on her newspaper office at Halloween stating that no
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By Elizabeth Flock . . . It was the day after Hurricane Irma, and two residents of a mobile home park in Lakeland, Florida, sat on their porch, on a street littered with debris. The wind had torn off the roof of
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