New Jersey Bars Sex Offenders From the Internet 435
eldavojohn writes "New Jersey just passed legislation making it illegal for sex offenders to use the internet. NJ congresswoman Linda D. Greenstein said, 'When Megan's Law was enacted, few could envision a day when a sex offender hiding behind a fake screen name would be a mouse-click away from new and unwitting victims. Sex offenders cannot be given an opportunity to abuse the anonymity the Internet can provide as a means of opening a door to countless new potential victims.' While they still can search for jobs, this is a major expansion over the prior legislation which barred them from social networking sites like facebook or myspace."
RTFA: (Score:2, Interesting)
This seems to make slightly more sense than how the summary portrays it. If they were convicted of molesting someone through myspace et al, why not take their weapon away from them? On the otherhand, if you didn't know she was underage at that party, from the sounds of things you should still be able to read slashdot.
Can slashdot comments have one of those EULA style things that pops up and asks you to check that you've RTFA'd?
Or maybe some kind of captcha that makes you answer questions about TFA? :P
Mod Parent Up (Score:1, Interesting)
Seriously, you're telling me this man can't use the internet? This guy who will have FINISHED his debt to society and is square with the house, who spent 20 years before his imprisonment fiddling with breadboards, he can't check out slashdot? You already banned him from facebook and myspace, that wasn't enough?
P.S. We both live in NJ, and I vote here. I also don't agree with Megan's law. You fuck up the lives of THOUSANDS of people re-entering society, who have paid their debt, and you save, what, TWO lives a year?
See, maybe I think a little differently from the mainstream, but not everything these days should be saving lives. Kids don't have any fun toys any more cause a few kids eat things they shouldn't and die. Great, you save a couple lives, and the rest suffer. I say let a few die and let the millions of others have decent toys.
Who is a sex offender? (Score:5, Interesting)
I practice in Australia - another country of puritan heritage, but fortunately not as openly hostile towards sex as the US, and courts here tend to be less "Mickey Mouse" style. Nevertheless, one of my patients fell for a 15yo prostitute and had non-penetrative sex with her, one single time. Independent witnesses all reported they would have taken her for at least 18 if not older. The "perpetrator" had no prior offence and the circumstances were such that he was not actively seeking such connection but it happened spontaneously when she was allegedly actively seeking such relation
For that the man got 5 years of which he served 3. Since he was announced as a paedophile to his inmates when he was jailed, they scalded him badly with boiling water and beat him up badly before they had opportunity of learning the whole story. When he was released, he moved to my town. He is a religious man who confided into a local priest who had nothing better to do than walk from door to door and warn people about the dangerous paedophile who moved into town. A really nasty witch hunt started against him where even otherwise nice and educated people blindly joined in. Is this just? Will it improve anything? Will this protect any children?
The legislation mentioned in this article which deprives so called "sex offenders" regardless of their background of essential human rights is obscene, and the people producing such legislation either ignorant or criminal.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
FTFA:
Salt Lake City - Utah Supreme Court justices acknowledged Tuesday that they were struggling to wrap their minds around the concept that a 13-year-old girl could be both an offender and a victim for the same act - in this case, having consensual sex with her 12-year-old boyfriend.
http://www.denverpost.com/ci_4783650 [denverpost.com]
Re:WTF? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)
It can be things like:
- Urinating in public
- Indecent exposure
- Unlawful detention
- Voyeurism
There's been reports telling that there's not a majority here who're doing sex offenses against children, but rather these minor crimes. Earlier it was no big deal if someone mooned others for a short moment from a car while being drunk, or urinating in public for that matter after having a few too many beers. Or if you took a chance and peeked at a hot neighbor when he/she was walking nude at home. All pretty innocent stuff to me that doesn't scar any "victim" for life either. Now these things risks you being placed in a public sex offender registry for life (searchable by anyone -- especially those who assume everyone there are paedophiles and want to hurt the people in there physically) and have your Internet access right withdrawn (??).
Messed up personal experience (Score:3, Interesting)
How do you accidentally distribute CP, you ask? That's pretty easy. You don't know shit about computer security and you get your computer infected with something that makes you part of a botnet used for storing 'questionable content'.
My bro had the bad luck of discovering a whole series of zip files he didn't know anything about on his computer. He posts one to try to figure out what this shit is on his computer and how it got there. Boom, he has just distributed CP. This means he goes directly to jail, does not pass go, and DOES collect an unnerving sounding criminal record that will stay with him for a long time.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
"A 26-year-old college student on federal disability, Whitaker doesn't fit most people's image of a sex offender. But, because of an ill-considered 10th-grade blowjob -- resulting in her conviction for an act that's no longer crime in Georgia -- she has spent nearly a decade on Georgia's sex-offender registry."
The sex offender registry laws are an absurdity. It's essentially a life sentence that applies to a huge swath of activity that we deem "deviant", not just child molesters.
In Georgia, the laws are so badly written, that no lawyer can really tell you what's required of an offender.
For example, I had a homeless client (registered sex offender) charged with failure to update his address after he had "moved". But the law says "homeless does not constitute an address." So does that mean that there is no address change and that he has committed no crime? (the position we took) Or does it mean that it's illegal to be homeless?
The court saw that ours was a plausible interpretation of the statute and dismissed the case. But the opinion of most lawyers in this state is that the sex offender law makes it illegal for a registered sex offender to be homeless.
Re:The US is the laughing stock of the world. (Score:2, Interesting)
I've read two books: one from Greg Palast - "Armed Madhouse" and one from Anna Politkovskaya - "Putin's Russia".
People who are saying the USA is getting similar to the old Soviet Union are wrong, the situation is much much worse in Russia (they did slide back to Soviet times). This fact however, doesn't make the USA a good place. It is simply the case of comparing a bad place and a really bad place.
The USA is not going to be Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany. It is heading towards a different direction, however not a good one.
I would not say that the USA is a democracy (it is supposed to be one). In effect, there isn't an informed, educated public in the USA. This is due to distorted media ownership (which makes the press in the USA de facto NOT free), lack of education and overly religious people. Without information, people cannot vote according to their best interests. Due to religion, people forget what the main issues are. The corporate extremism that is present in the USA has a few fascist tones. Deregulation of monopolies is a really telling case. The two party system, where one is downright malicious and the other is so loosely coupled to not be a coherent whole and spends time infighting or doing nothing. To sum it up: unchecked corporate power, ignoring the US constitution and international treaties, unstable party system and media, leglislative chaos, xenophobic/imperialistic foreign policy, scaremongering with terrorism and using it as a tool to institute fascist policies. These are the main things that I think are wrong with the USA these days, and these are the reasons why I'm avoiding that country.
I would be scared if I were a citizen of the USA, given that the last two elections were rigged in favor of a certain party and the other party did nothing about the election anomalies. When I say rigged, I mean that in the last presidential election around 3 million votes were removed through racial or geographical profiling. Very convenient.
Re:Moderate legislation (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a parent, and I'm guessing that under your worldview, I want to be `soft on sex offenders'. But I don't see it that way -- instead, I want the punishment to fit the crime. If you're 17 and have sex with your 15 year old girlfriend, you should be grounded for a week, perhaps have your cell phone taken away. Peeing on the side of a building? $50 fine. Rape a 3 year old girl to within an inch of her life? Life in prison, perhaps even the death penalty.
`Sex offender registration' is a huge crock. All it really does is let us take some people, found guilty of certain offenses, and make them pariahs for life. I imagine the original premise was to protect society from these dangerous predators, but in many cases they're not predators at all! And why only sex crimes? I'd be FAR more concerned if the guy next door killed his neighbor in a fight 10 years ago than if he got caught diddling the 16 year old girl next door when he was 19 -- but guess which one has to register?
I might be better able to support registration as either further punishment or to protect society if it applied to all crimes of a certain level, not just `sex crimes'. But even then I can't really support it -- when you've paid your debt to society, that should be the end of it. And if you're too dangerous to be let out, then you shouldn't be let out -- the sex offender registry should not be a `last ditch' sort of thing.
And what good does the sex offender registry do? Sure, it gives people a list of names of people to harass, to run out of town, to lynch, to kill. And you can tell your kids to avoid these houses, but what good does that really do? Has anybody ever shown that knowing where the sex offenders in town were led to children (we're worried about protecting the children, right?) who were less likely to be the victims of crime (or sex crimes, if you want to be more specific?)
And the whole banning them from the Internet thing, even worse ...
Re:Whatever happened to the notion... (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree - those murderers put to death are *guaranteed* not to hurt anyone else ever again, in prison or society. As regards preventative value, I'll defer to those who have studied it in detail, but for the individuals put to death, it's most definitely effective at preventing recidivism.
I allways marvel at those chritians that seem to not understand "Thou shalt not kill". There is not proviso for punishment or self-defense in there.
Please see Exodus 21:12-14, Leviticus 24:17 and 21, Leviticus 20:10, Deuteronomy 22:22-24, etc. for some of the non-existent provisos. Whether one agrees with them or not is a separate issue, but the commandment clearly was not intended to be an absolute prohibition against killing in all circumstances.
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Interesting)
Your wording there just highlighted on of the prime problems with our current "sex offender" laws,definitions, and perceptions. The is a huge world of difference between a child molester (has physical sexual contact with a child that has not yet reached puberty) and Ephebophilia (sexual attraction to adolescents). There is an even greater difference between actual child molesters and someone who streaks a football game [wordpress.com], and is seen by minors. Or a minor who takes naked pictures of themselves [news.com]. Or how about failing to have a good pop-up blocker [wired.com].
I'm all for stopping the who will lure or grab a child off a playground, but why is this the one class of criminals that has to "register" for a lifetime of rejection and fear [freerepublic.com]. Why don't drunk drivers have to register and why are they allowed near bars again? Why don't those convicted of libel have to identify themselves as such when posting online? If someone rapes a child perhaps they should be locked away for life, but if a lesser crime doesn't call for lifetime incarceration, then it shouldn't call for lifetime tracking.
Re:Foolish to think it is simply about "sex" (Score:4, Interesting)
You may very well be right, and sexual trauma may be more intense by a degree, but you also have to keep in mind the irrational societal stigma attached to anything sexual.
Re:WTF? (Score:2, Interesting)