Hi, all—

After a tremendous amount of work over the last few years, including the publication of our SMART Summary: Prosecution, Transfer, and Prosecution of Serious Juvenile Sex Offenders last year, today we have posted and opened for comment a new Proposed SORNA Supplemental Guideline which addresses the registration of juvenile offenders. You can find the new proposed supplemental guideline here: Proposed Supplemental Guideline.

Put very briefly, this new proposed supplemental guideline, if adopted, would allow our office to look at the totality of a state’s system for handling serious sex offenders who are under the age of 18 at the time of the offense. In other words, having a discretionary—or otherwise fairly limited—registration system for juveniles will no longer necessarily result in a finding that a jurisdiction has not substantially implemented SORNA’s juvenile registration provisions.

I encourage you to review and circulate the proposed supplemental guideline, and to provide any comments that you wish through the official channels indicated. The link to submit electronic comments via www.regulations.gov has not yet gone live, but should do so within the next 24-48 hours. As someone who has been through this process multiple times over the years, I can assure you that we review every submitted comment, and they are reviewed by higher-ups in the Department, as well.

If you have any questions, please email me. As you can imagine, we expect that we might get a fairly high volume of folks contacting us this week, and half of our (already small) policy team is on travel this week. 

I will respond, as quickly as I am able. Thanks!

Lori McPherson

Senior Policy Advisor

SMART Office

202-353-3591

post comments via http://www.regulations.gov/ begining 4/13/2016 if not sooner.