By Jacob Sullum…. “Sounds like you enjoy sex with kids,” a reader tweeted at me after seeing a blog post I wrote about former Subway pitchman Jared Fogle. It was 2015, and Fogle had just signed a plea agreement in which he
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By Bob Munsey . . . No matter how a person may have corrected his or her actions and paid for failures, in the state of Florida, it’s “once a felon, always a felon.” What is such a policy as this supposed
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By Eric Dexheimer….. Mark Lay had been a registered sex offender for more than five years before he heard there might be a way to erase his name from the public Texas list. Convicted in 2008 of a single count of
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By Larry….. Ms. Diamond’s column “Hastert prosecution shows justice uneven” strongly criticized former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s plea deal and suggested Mr. Hastert is receiving special treatment because of his status and wealth. Mr. Hastert was speaker of the U.S. House
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By Sandy . . . This was written as a rebuttal to an editorial in the Longview, WA Daily News: In response to your March 13 editorial, “Laws help keep children safe,” I would first like to thank you for your condemnation
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By Robin Vanderwall . . . I voted today. I know. What’s the big deal, right? Most Americans exercise the privilege sorta like they wash their cars. Sometimes it’s important. Other times, whatever. And that’s all it is, you know. A privilege.
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Attorney Catherine Carpenter serves on the board of CA RSOL. She spoke at our 2013 conference. Catherine has published a new paper dealing with the practice of putting our children on the sex offender registry. She states, “It is about the deeply flawed
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By Larry Neely . . . The case of Zach Anderson has certainly been in the news in recent weeks. In fact, RSOL has joined the crusade for Zach. My opinion is that we are placing far too much emphasis on Zach’s
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By Radley Balko . . . In the 2002 case McKune v. Lile, the Supreme Court upheld a Kansas law that imposed harsher sentences on sex offenders who declined to participate in a prison rehab program. The substance of the Kansas law
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[N]ot all people who have been convicted of sex offenses pose a risk to children, if they pose any risk at all. Blanket residency-restriction laws disregard that reality — and the merits of an individualized approach to risk assessment — in favor
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