Southwest Ohio SORN update

More than three years after Congress, in passing the "Adam Walsh Act," ordered stepped-up monitoring of sex offenders, an MSNBC article the first of the month said, only one state – Ohio -- has succeeded in adopting the government's strict new requirements.

This entry attempts a survey some of those recent developments in our area.

The law was designed to keep closer tabs on sex offenders, including an estimated 100,000 who are not living where they are supposed to be, and create a national sex offender registry and toughen penalties for those who fail to register. "The initial deadline for states to comply was in July," the article says. "Then the deadline was extended to July 2010, although several states have signaled they may still be unable to meet it. States that do not adopt the mandates risk losing millions of dollars in federal grants… But those efforts have been hampered by high costs and legal challenges from the nation's 686,000 registered sex offenders."

Recent court cases have varied returns, too. The article related Nevada U.S. District Judge James Mahan, last year declared pertinent laws there unconstitutional because "application of these laws retroactively is the equivalent a new punishment tacked onto the original sentence – sometimes years after the fact – in violation of the Ex Post Facto and Double Jeopardy Clauses of the U.S. Constitution, as well as the Contracts clauses of the U.S. and Nevada Constitutions."(Nevada Injunction )

Closer to our home here in Cincinnati, the 6th. Circuit Court of Appeals just two months ago reversed a sex offender's conviction for failing to register under SORNA, holding in part that "The circuits are split on whether defendants with pre-SORNA convictions had to comply with SORNA before the Attorney General issued an implementing regulation. But because SORNA explicitly required the Attorney General to specify the applicability of the Act to persons convicted prior to the effective date of SORNA, and because the Attorney General did not promulgate a regulation making that determination in compliance with the Administrative Procedure Act, [appellant here] was not subject to SORNA's requirements during the period indicated in his indictment." (6th. Circuit Ruling )

And just last Friday morning, a Law.com article was telling of the 2nd. U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' rendering that Federal prosecution for failure to register as a sex offender does not violate the right to due process of law. "The 2nd Circuit explained that 'Although neither New York nor Florida had implemented the specific requirements set forth in SORNA during the time period charged in the indictment, both states had sex offender registration programs that complied with the federal Jacob Wetterling Act, 42 U.S.C. §14071, et seq., which was the statutory precursor to SORNA.'"( 2nd. Circuit Opinion )

The Ohio Supreme Court's case announcements last Wednesday noted that of the seven cases the Court agreed to hear this week, five of them were being held pending a decision in the State v. Bodyke sex offender case about heightened registration and public notification requirements of the state's sex offender statute, amended in 2007. Bodyke, a consolidated appeal out of Huron County, Ohio, "challenges to Ohio's statutes based upon separation of powers, retroactivity, ex post facto, double jeopardy, due process, cruel and unusual punishment and breach of contract." Oral arguments in the case were heard Nov. 4( Memorandum in Support)( Answer ). Ohio's SORN law was SB 10, effective Jan. 1, 2008 (Bill Analysis )

Of the seventy Ohio bills introduced in the "crimes & punishment" category this year, nine are SORN-related, including one introduced just before Thanksgiving which would revamp how often & the way Tier III offenders register their addresses – from every 90 to every 30 days-- and the way deputies track them, though not how sheriff's offices would pay for the cost of increased monitoring. ( Cleveland Plain Dealer article) ( Text of Bill )