https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/contributors/2020/12/10/michigan-sex-offender-registry-legislation/6507848002/
In early 2012, more than eight years ago, five people challenged Michigan’s Sex Offenders Registration Act (SORA) in court, arguing that the registry branded them as dangerous “sex offenders” without any individual review.
One was a man — we’ll call him John — who met a woman at a club open only to those 18 and older. They slept together and only later did he learn that she was actually 15. They fell in love, eventually married, and now have three kids. But due to her age, John was prosecuted and put on the sex offender registry. As a result, he has lost countless jobs, was often homeless and unable to live with his family, and couldn’t even attend his own kids’ basketball games.
Another man in the lawsuit — we’ll call him Paul — never even committed a sex offense. In 1990 when he was 20, he tried to rob a McDonald’s. But because he threatened the manager’s teenage son — an offense charged as “child kidnapping” even though it had no sexual component whatever — he was placed on the sex offender registry for life.
John and Paul won their case in 2016, when the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that SORA is unconstitutional. The court not only found that Michigan treats registrants as “moral lepers,” but it also concluded, based on a mountain of evidence, that registries don’t make people or communities safer.
As the court pointed out, registries may actually increase offending and have “at best, no impact on recidivism,” probably because they make it so “hard for registrants to get and keep a job, find housing, and reintegrate into their communities.”
Despite the Court’s ruling, and despite the scientific consensus that registries don’t do anything to prevent sex offenses, neither the Michigan Legislature nor the executive branch did anything to reform our state's registry. Instead, Michigan continues to waste millions of taxpayer dollars on running the registry, paying legal bills to defend it, and incarcerating people for technical registry violations, not to mention forcing local police departments to spend scarce public safety dollars on pointless tasks like tracking whether a registrant borrows a car. That’s all money that could have been more effectively invested in survivor, prevention and rehabilitative services.
And the state continued to brand tens of thousands of people as forever dangerous, when the research shows that is simply not true. By refusing to do its job, the state has undermined the efforts of some 44,000 people—more than the population of Mt. Pleasant or Muskegon—to re-enter society and lead productive lives after having fully served their sentence of conviction.
Throwing good money after bad
Four years and another lawsuit later, the House has now passed a bill to revise SORA. But that bill ignores the judicial rulings, rejects the science, and would put John and Paul right back on the public registry.
It is the same thing all over again. We — a judge whose hands were tied by SORA’s one-size-fits-all approach, a researcher who has documented the counterproductive impact of registries, and an attorney who has represented John, Paul, and other registrants who just want a chance to have their individual circumstances considered before the state ruins their lives — are appalled.
The bill is clearly unconstitutional. It tinkers with the statute, but leaves unchanged the core constitutional defect: retroactively imposing what the Sixth Circuit has described as a “byzantine code” that governs registrants’ lives “in minute detail” and “consigns them to years, if not a lifetime, of existence on the margins,” all without any individual review to see if there is any justification for such constant government surveillance.
More litigation is inevitable. As Attorney General Dana Nessel said in her comments on the legislation, “[t]he bill needs considerably more work if the State is going to avoid future litigation over the constitutionality of its registry.”
But even more importantly, legislators and the governor have failed in their obligation to protect Michigan families. During legislative work group sessions over the past four years, no one at the table — absolutely no one — could explain why we need a law that condemns people to lifetime registration without individual consideration. And during three legislative hearings, of the 170 people who testified, all but one opposed the bill.
The reality is that this bill, which is essentially the same law that the courts have already struck down, sabotages people’s efforts to positively reenter society, makes it extremely difficult for survivors to report abuse, imposes an impossible burden on law enforcement to monitor over 44,000 people, and diverts resources from prevention programs. Indeed, many law enforcement officials will admit privately that SORA is useless.
So, what’s to be done? The public should demand true public safety, rather than allowing Lansing to recreate the same old bloated, expensive, and ineffective registry. Legislators should bring together stakeholders and experts to draft an evidence-based statute, looking to examples like the draft model law written by the American Law Institute, the leading independent source of model legislation nationally. And the governor, who has so boldly advanced scientific evidence to support emergency measures to mitigate the spread of COVID 19, should make clear that she cares about smart research-driven policy and about public safety by insisting on comprehensive registry reform.
If our goal is to end sexual offending, we need to invest in prevention, hold people accountable, support survivors, and ensure that people with past convictions can reenter society successfully. The bill passed by the House — like the existing SORA law it mimics — does none of those things. Michigan families deserve better.
