Prof. Roger Lancaster

Vicky Henry:

I heard Professor Jill Levenson say at the 2016 Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) Public Meeting Event last year there was a 5-year-old child now registered. I knew there were young children but 5 was the youngest age I have heard ‘yet’. If there is a significant behavior problem making a child a registered citizen will NEVER make the situation better. Is it time to teach young children boundaries and respect for themselves and others to protect them?

Are you aware of the bill that passed the U.S. House and is currently sitting in the Senate involving teens caught sexting or attempting to sext. The bill calls for a 15-year mandatory minimum sentence in federal prison?

Lisa Sample

Vicky Henry:

In 2015 Professor Ira and Tara Ellman of Arizona State University researched and produced a 14-page document ‘Frightening and High’ The Supreme Court’s Crucial Mistake About Sex Crime Statistics.

In McKune v. Lile, 536 U.S. 24,33 (2002), the Supreme Court reversed two lower courts in rejecting, 5-4, Robert Lile's claim that Kansas violated his 5th Amendment rights by punishing him for refusing to complete a form detailing all his prior sexual activities, including any that might constitute an uncharged criminal offense for which he could then be prosecuted.

Justice Kennedy, justifying this conclusion for the four-person plurality, wrote that the recidivism rate "of untreated offenders has been estimated to be as high as 80%." The treatment program, he explained, "gives inmates a basis ... to identify the traits that cause such a frightening and high risk of recidivism."

The following year in Smith v. Doe, 538 U.S. 84 (2003) the Court upheld Alaska's application, to those convicted before its enactment, of a law identifying all sex offenders on a public registry.

McKune provides a single citation to support its statement "that the recidivism rate of untreated offenders has been estimated to be as high as 80%": the U.S. Dept. of Justice, Nat. Institute of Corrections, A Practitioner's Guide to Treating the Incarcerated Male Sex Offender xiii (1988). Justice Kennedy likely found that reference in the amicus brief supporting Kansas filed by the Solicitor General, then Ted Olson, as the SG's brief also cites it for the claim that sex offenders have this astonishingly high recidivism rate. This Practitioner's Guide" itself provides but one source for the claim, an article published in 1986 in Psychology Today, a mass market magazine aimed at a lay audience." That article has this sentence: "Most untreated sex offenders released from prison go on to commit more offenses-indeed, as many as 80% do." But the sentence is a bare assertion: the article contains no supporting reference for it. Nor does its author appear to have the scientific credentials that would qualify him to testify at trial as an expert on recidivism." This Psychology Today article was written by Robert Freeman-Longo and has been cited over 100 times in court filings.

Sheriff David Taylor

Vicky Henry:

We had to push some states to include a disclaimer about using the public registrant profile information to harm a person or family member will NOT be tolerated or ‘could result’ in prosecution.