For nearly a decade now, we’ve been questioning the wisdom of punishing a criminal who used the internet as part of their crime, with a ban from internet access. With the internet becoming so integral to everyday activity, it almost seems impossible to ban them from getting on the internet at all. Does it mean they can’t use a smartphone (or even a featurephone)? Can they not use VoIP? It really makes very little sense. Thankfully, it seems like most of these bans get overturned. All the way back in 2002, we wrote about a court overturning such a ban, saying that it was an “unfair encroachment on his liberties.” In 2007, a similar ban was overturned. Earlier this year, another such ban was overturned as being a restriction on the guy’s free speech.
And yet, the courts seem to keep giving out these bans. So, yet again, we have a story of a 30 year computer ban being overturned. And again, the court found that such a ban seems to go way too far. In this case, it was deemed “substantively unreasonable” and “aggressively interferes with the goal of rehabilitation.”
So, at what point do judges stop giving out these kinds of bans in the first place?
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