{"id":445873,"date":"2010-03-18T20:20:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-19T00:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100317\/2252148611.shtml"},"modified":"2010-03-18T20:20:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-19T00:20:00","slug":"georgia-supreme-court-says-its-okay-to-put-non-sex-offenders-on-the-registered-sex-offender-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/445873","title":{"rendered":"Georgia Supreme Court Says It’s Okay To Put Non-Sex Offenders On The Registered Sex Offender List"},"content":{"rendered":"

The question of registered sex offenders lists is a tricky one — because for those people who really do commit sexually-driven crimes against minors, it’s hard to be even remotely sympathetic to any complaints they have about the punishment they receive. The problem is that so many things are considered sexual offenses these days that many people are put on the list, and must live with it for life, for something that most people may consider a youthful indiscretion, rather than something that automatically should brand them to neighbors as a possible child molester. Things such as kids having sex with each other after only one of the two teens has reached the “legal” limit or even urinating in public can sometimes be classified as a sexual offense.<\/p>\n

And, now, it’s gone even further, so that non-sex-offenders<\/i> can be put on the list. A law passed a few years back says that sex-offender lists must also include those convicted of “kidnapping or falsely imprisoning minors.” Again, if you’ve done one of those things, you certainly deserve to be punished, but should you be put on a sex offender list? A guy who was convicted of “false imprisonment” of a 17-year-old girl when he was 18, during a drug bust gone bad, was added to the sex offender listings in Georgia and he sued to be taken off the list. However, the Georgia Supreme Court has said that it’s perfectly legal to put non-sex-offenders onto a sexual offender list<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Again, no one is saying folks like this shouldn’t be punished for their crimes — but this goes beyond punishment for the crime he committed. And the really bad thing is that including all of these other offenses on such a registry dilutes the power and value<\/i> of any such registry. The purpose behind such a list was supposedly to alert neighbors to be aware — but when you expand the list to include all sorts of people who are of no risk at all to children, it takes such a list away from its very purpose.<\/p>\n

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The question of registered sex offenders lists is a tricky one — because for those people who really do commit sexually-driven crimes against minors, it’s hard to be even remotely sympathetic to any complaints they have about the punishment they receive. The problem is that so many things are considered sexual offenses these days that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-445873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445873\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}