General background. Fifty states and the District of Columbia have recently enacted laws requiring convicted sex offenders (SO's) to register with police and make certain public reports. The original motivation for Megan's laws or SORLs, sex offender registration and reporting laws, was a lurid sex crime in New Jersey in 1994. A 7-year old girl, Megan Kanka, was abducted, raped and murdered by a neighbor. In 1996 Congress passed the Wetterling Act, 42 U.S.C. 14071 (1994 and Supp. V 1999), which conditioned certain types of federal aid on the adoption by states of sex offender registration and public information laws.
Connecticut Dept. of Public Safety, et al. Petitioners, v.
John Does on Writ of Certiorari to 2d Cir. Court of Appeals, July 19, 2002. Summary of Briefs:
Issues. Respondent, who was convicted of a violent sex offense before Connecticut's SORL went into effect challenged the law's constitutionality on the grounds that it was an Art. I, sec. 10 ex post facto law and that his rights to procedural due process were violated because the law caused him to be stigmatized and defamed as a dangerous sex offender without his having been afforded an opportunity to show that he was not dangerous. The District Court and Court of Appeals agreed with his procedural due process claim. They held that the central flaw in the law is that the registration requirement and SO registry did not differentiate between dangerous and non-dangerous SO's. The Court of Appeals added that the respondents had a liberty interest which the law unconstitutionally abrogated.
State of Connecticut argued that the state had a legitimate interest to protect the public against repeat SO's: "when convicted sex offenders reenter society, they are much more likely than any other type of offender to be re-arrested for a new rape or sex assault" (p. 7).
Respondent's claim that the law caused him to be defamed must fail because that is at most a colla...