“The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person's] life.” -William O. Douglas
A letter received regarding Sex Offender Legislation in Canada
MONTGOMERY, ALA. — After serving his prison sentence for rape, Jeffrey Seagle tried to find a place to live. But with no fixed address and no family or friends able to take him in, Alabama's sex offender law kept him behind bars.
When it came time for him to leave the Kilby Correctional Facility near Montgomery, he was re-arrested. The reason: He couldn't give officials an address where he would be living.
"This is essentially an eternal prison sentence. It could be a life sentence," said attorney David Schoen, who represents Seagle and three others in similar situations. "It is the ultimate scarlet letter."
Challenged by Schoen, the law was later declared unconstitutional by two Montgomery circuit judges, but the state attorney general has appealed to have it reinstated. State's attorneys say the four inmates could have complied with the law by listing a park bench or even a street corner as their permanent address.
Montgomery County Circuit Judges Truman Hobbs and Tracey McCooey ruled last year in separate cases that the law is unconstitutionally vague. The ruling struck down charges that the four inmates violated the law when they declared that they were homeless and did not provide an address for where they would be living outside prison.
(CNN) -- Law enforcement officers may secretly place a GPS device on a person's car without seeking a warrant from a judge, according to a recent federal appeals court ruling in California.
Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Oregon in 2007 surreptitiously attached a GPS to the silver Jeep owned by Juan Pineda-Moreno, whom they suspected of growing marijuana, according to court papers.
When Pineda-Moreno was arrested and charged, one piece of evidence was the GPS data, including the longitude and latitude of where the Jeep was driven, and how long it stayed. Prosecutors asserted the Jeep had been driven several times to remote rural locations where agents discovered marijuana being grown, court documents show.
Pineda-Moreno eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy to grow marijuana, and is serving a 51-month sentence, according to his lawyer.
But he appealed on the grounds that sneaking onto a person's driveway and secretly tracking their car violates a person's reasonable expectation of privacy.
BANGOR, Maine — Geoff Gratwick doesn’t mind holding or voicing minority opinions. His tenure as a Bangor city councilor has often been marked by votes that challenge the prevailing trend.
Geoff Gratwick
That’s why he may well be the only councilor to vote against proposed residency restrictions for convicted sex offenders when the issue comes before the council in late September.
Earlier this month, Gratwick cast the lone opposing vote at a Government Operations Committee meeting that forwarded an ordinance change request to the full City Council. That request came to the city from resident Angela Hoy, who, with the help of a local lawyer, crafted an ordinance change modeled after a state law passed last year allowing municipalities to enact reasonable restrictions.
Hoy, who lives near Newbury Street Park, has strong feelings about sex offenders. Her family has been affected personally, as have hundreds of families throughout the Bangor area.
But while Hoy and others often find support when they bring up concerns, convicted sex offenders have few voices speaking up for them. Many people feel they don’t even deserve a voice. Gratwick disagrees. So does Alysia Melnick, public policy counsel for the Maine Civil Liberties Union.
The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) was established by the UN General Assembly in 2006 as a process through which the human rights records of the United Nations’ 192 Member States could be reviewed and assessed. This review, conducted through the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), is based upon human rights obligations and commitments expressed in the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human rights instruments to which the State is party, etc. The United States is a strong supporter of the UPR process, which provides a unique avenue for the global community to discuss human rights around the world.
Individual countries are slated for review every four years, with the United States scheduled for its review in 2010-2011. UPR sessions take place at the HRC in Geneva, and are framed by reports submitted by national governments.The United States submitted its report to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on August 20. The report, which reflects input collected during an extensive program of consultations with the American public, can be found here:
[Librarian note: For full page display, click here]
The state of California is close to passing a law that is aimed at preventing sexual attacks, yet because of distorted reporting of the rape and murder of two young women including one whose name was incorporated into Chelsea's Law , the effect of this law will probably be just the opposite. And the same forces that has driven this law to near passage also prevents serious objections such as this from reaching the public.
My conclusion to oppose this law was triggered by obtaining a report on the sentencing, imprisonment, parole regulations and procedures surrounding this case produced by the California Sex Offenders Management Board. After carefully reading this and many other documents, and interviewing the chairman of the board of this body, along with other officials, I became convinced that passing this law as is now pending will be a continuation of the legislative mistakes that have occurred over the last six decades.
As the CASOMB report concluded:
California has not effectively prioritized when making policy decisions about the management of convicted sex offenders. Many decisions seem to have been made for political reasons or what feels good at the time. As a result, money and time have been wasted on policies and programs that are politically popular but do not make our communities safer.
When these crimes occurred, The San Diego Union Tribune, the sole remaining metropolitan area newspaper, had recently been sold to a venture capital group. Their business model is to turn around the paper by increasing circulation for a quick profitable sale. As the case progressed, after many hundreds of editorials, articles and letters focusing on the heinous details of the crime and of the criminal, they ran a front page editorial described as "a call to action."
For years, James Kaufman has wanted to renounce his citizenship. He may finally get his wish.
The Justice Department is dropping its challenge of Kaufman's desire to cut ties with the United States, according to court records filed today in a federal appeals court in Washington.
Earlier this year, Justice attorneys filed a notice in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to challenge a ruling that said Kaufman, a convicted sex offender, should be allowed to renounce his citizenship.
The Justice Department filed a motion today seeking voluntary dismissal of the appeal. The notice did not say why the government was abandoning the case. A Justice attorney, Catherine Hancock of the Civil Division’s appellate staff, declined to comment. A DOJ spokesman also declined to talk about the department's position.
Kaufman, who remains jailed in Wisconsin for probation violation, said in court papers in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that he has no intention to remain in the United States. He is eligible for parole next year. Kaufman, pro se for much of his fight, has been trying for six years to cut his ties to the United States. He made two official requests, in 2004 and in 2008.
Sometimes events conspire to make you think that things are worse than you imagined. On August 3, Marilyn Buck died. Marilyn was a fighter in the struggle for racial justice and against the most virulent pestilence in the world—United States imperialism. Unlike most of us, she put her money where her mouth was and her life on the line. It is easy now to forget that the agents of repression—the police, the FBI, the courts, the government itself—consciously and actively targeted those who were active in and led the civil rights and Vietnam war resistance movements. They infiltrated and acted as provocateurs in movement organizations; they arrested innocent people; they enacted and enforced draconian laws; they illegally tapped phones and spied on any and all persons suspected of “subversive” activity; and they tortured and murdered those who they deemed to be the most dangerous radicals.
Whites like Marilyn who militantly supported black liberation were high on the list of suspects. She was arrested in 1973 for buying (legal) arms under a false name. She was sentenced to ten years in prison, and during a furlough to consult with her lawyers in 1977, she went underground. She was arrested again in 1983, accused of multiple crimes—aiding the prison break of Asata Shakur, planning and participating in several bombings of public facilities, and taking part in the infamous Brinks robbery of 1981 in which a guard and two policemen were killed. She was convicted and sentenced to eighty years in prison.
BOSTON -- At Jose Pagan's "sexually dangerous person" trial two years ago, the jury was told of a 30-year criminal record that included three separate instances of molesting young girls.
The jury's verdict: Pagan is a sexually dangerous person.
Under the "SDP" statute, Pagan, who had finished his prison sentence for his latest crime, was sent to Bridgewater State Hospital under a civil commitment to be kept behind bars until he is deemed no longer dangerous -- possibly a lifetime sentence.
But Pagan, of Lowell, could have been a free man in 2008 if he had opted for a jury-waived or bench trial before a judge without a jury.
Since 2007, when Middlesex District Attorney Gerard Leone took office, there have been a dozen SDP trials in Middlesex County. Of the seven SDP jury trials, juries have found all seven offenders to be dangerous. In the remaining five jury-waived trials, judges have found only two to be dangerous and three sex offenders were released into the community.
WASHINGTON — The growing use by the police of new technologies that make surveillance far easier and cheaper to conduct is raising difficult questions about the scope of constitutional privacy rights, leading to sharp disagreements among judges.
A federal appeals court, for example, issued a ruling last week that contradicts precedents from three other appeals courts over whether the police must obtain a warrant before secretly attaching a Global Positioning System device beneath a car. The issue is whether the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches covers a device that records a suspect’s movements for weeks or months without any need for an officer to trail him.
The GPS tracking dispute coincides with a burst of other technological tools that expand police monitoring abilities — including automated license-plate readers in squad cars, speed cameras mounted on streetlight poles, and even the widely discussed prospect of linking face-recognition computer programs to the proliferating number of surveillance cameras.
Some legal scholars say the escalating use of such high-tech techniques for enhancing traditional police activities is eroding the pragmatic considerations that used to limit how far a law-enforcement official could intrude on people’s privacy without court oversight. They have called for a fundamental rethinking of how to apply Fourth Amendment privacy rights in the 21st century.
