Thursday, March 18, 2010

Georgian Supreme Court Upholds Government’s Right to Put Non-Sex Offenders on The Ttate’s Sex-Offender Registry

While you may expect people on a state's sex-offender registry to be, well, sex offenders, that is not necessarily the case. The reason stems from what ’sexual offender’ means in the legal sense is different then common vernacular. The Georgian Supreme Court enforced the definition from the statute. The two remaining choices to change this is to go the Supreme Court and get them to hold the statute unconstitutional or get the legislator to change the meaning.

Georgian Supreme Court Upholds Government’s Right to Put Non-Sex Offenders on The Ttate’s Sex-Offender Registry

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/sex-offender-databases

"Georgia’s Supreme Court is upholding the government’s right to put non-sex offenders on the state’s sex-offender registry, highlighting a little-noticed (but growing) nationwide practice.

Atlanta criminal defense attorney Ann Marie Fitz estimated that perhaps thousands of convicts convicted of non-sexual crimes have been placed in sex-offender databases. Fitz represents a convict who was charged with false imprisonment when he was 18 for briefly detaining a 17-year-old girl during a soured drug deal. He unsuccessfully challenged his mandatory, lifelong sex-offender listing to the Georgia Supreme Court, which ruled against him Monday.
...
“Rainer’s belief that the term ’sexual offender’ may only apply to offenders who commit sexual offenses against minors does not change the fact that the definition provided in the statute, and not the definition that Rainer wishes to impose upon the statute, controls,” the court’s majority said.
...
Fitz’s client, Jake Rainer, is waiting to see if Georgia changes its law before asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review his registration requirement. Fitz argues that that being forced to register as a sex offender, without having committed a sex crime, is cruel and unusual punishment.
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