ng the Constitution's ban on ex post facto laws (Lane, 2002). Their attorney, Darryl L. Thompson, told Supreme Court justices that the ex-offenders have difficulty in finding housing or work. The regular reporting to the police is a burden, creating a lifetime of probation (Lane, 2002). The attorney in the Connecticut case, Shelley Sadin, said that these laws create a new class of citizens, second-class citizens (Lane, 2002). According to the defenders, the state is violating their constitutional right to due process of law because there is no court hearing to determine whether they are still likely to commit crime. In the Alaska case, it was pointed out that the public does not get see whether a given offender has been rehabilitated through treatment. Other critics of the laws say that it is unfair to put together all types of offenders "serial pedophiles with someone who might have committed statutory rape by having consensual sex with a 14-year-old when he was 19" (Lane, 2002). The entire group is stigmatized, and there is no way to counter the stigmatization that goes with the requirements of Megan's Laws
Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union said the laws raise questions about whether sex offenders are treated fairly and given their rights to due process. According to Lieberman, any program that targets a particular group for specialized law enforcement raises the concern about respect for that group's rights (Rashbaum, 2002). Lieberman insists that sex offenders have rights.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says this is like shaming in the town square, a modern day version of the Scarlet Letter (Savage, 2002). The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the Alaska law violates the Constitution's ban on after-the-fact punishments, and this case and the Connecticut case went to the Supreme Court. The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said that th...