Posting # 45 –RSOL of NH, Testimony Submitted at March 10, 2009 Congressional Hearing on SORNA Compliance by the States

By: New Hampshire RSOL Organizer
Date:  03/10/2009

It was a pleasure to meet the organizer from New Hampshire at the Washington DC Congressional Hearing on SORNA. We both exchanged the literature that we were passing out to the members of Congress and I wanted to share her letter with you.

Dear Members of the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security,

The phrase “sex offender” is no longer a descriptive label; it has become an active dirty noun in America. These two words are synonymous with evil, the enemy child molester: a person worthy of moral exclusion. To illustrate this point, there are painfully few elected officials in this country who are brave enough to suggest that some on the registry do not belong there.

As the proud wife of a wonderful man who is required to register, I have witnessed the collateral damage of these laws firsthand in our family. Thirteen years ago at the age of nineteen, my husband believed he was having lawful sexual relations with a seventeen year old young lady in the State of New Hampshire. I won’t impose the details on you, but the end result was that she was ninety-five days shy of the age on consent (sixteen) and with no mistake of age defense available in New Hampshire, he was convicted of statutory rape and required to register under the Jacob Wetterling Act for life. The rules of registration have changed many times since then and it’s become increasingly frustrating and discouraging to keep up.

With a decade of sex offender law behind us, many families like my own eagerly anticipated reform. Unfortunately the Adam Walsh Act has fallen short in many ways. The Act fails to recognize registrants as individuals. All convictions within a categorized tier are assumed to contain the same level of deviousness and harm. It also fails to recognize a job as one of the most stabilizing elements in a registrant’s life by requiring employer addresses to be posted publicly (employer names are optional). It fails to adequately control the duration of registration by requiring that a State meet the minimum standard, where many States had already exceeded the minimum under the Wetterling Act. This failure has resulted in a hodgepodge mix of laws on the duration requirements under the AWA where they can (and should) because they do not wish to appear “weak” on sex offenders.

Ironically while the AWA recognizes that my husband is not a sex offender (he is within 4 years of age of his partner) the State of New Hampshire has categorized him as a Tier 3 offender in their efforts to comply with the Act. Seven convictions for one night of consensual intercourse with a peer are viewed as “multiple offenses” in New Hampshire, worthy of a Tier 3 status based entirely on the number of convictions, with no recognition that these convictions resulted from one night, no determination of the level of dangerousness or the risk to reoffend. Over the last decade, we’ve seem registration law change from once a year on a private list to every 90 days in person on a public list, with ever increasing reporting requirements, all of which will result in a felony charge if he fails to comply perfectly with the law. The daily anxiety we live with is palpable in my home. We cannot afford (emotionally or financially) to misunderstand the registration laws in our home State or any other State we may travel to with our three children. My husband is not alone in this nightmare of the ever-changing goal post.

Felony convictions coupled with sex offender registration are a heavy burden for a young man to carry at the dawn of his adult life. Many of you have children and but for the grace of God, this could have been your family. Can you imagine the difficulty your son would have in finding a spouse, a job or a good neighborhood? Or the teasing your grandchildren would be subjected to by their peers in school? There are tens of thousands of registrants that are like my husband. They are individuals with individual circumstances who are labeled “se offenders” and equated with unthinkable evil in the eyes of the public. When will it end? An entire population of our society has been dehumanized. The public hatred for this group and any one associated with a registered offender is evident in the comments left by online readers of articles on sex offender issues. “Send them all to an island”, “Put them on a slow boat to China”, “Kill them all”, “Castrate them all”….Is there any doubt that society views anyone with this label as less than human?

The barriers to timely compliance of the Adam Walsh Act are due largely to concerns that the Act ignores and what those on the ground level of sex offender management and compliance have learned to be true. We’ve learned that actuarial risk assessment is a valuable tool in defining the balance between a former offender’s right to a productive and law abiding life and the interests of justice and society. We’ve learned that a stable place to live and work is essential for compliance and there are numerous studies that support this. We’ve learned that not everyone who wears the label based on conviction is a danger to the public. I’m asking this committee to recognize for the record, the collateral damage done to the families and children of those required to register and to work toward minimizing that damage by carefully tailoring registration to individuals, not broad categories of conviction.

Sincerely,
Laurie