BUT, it claims, it’s just a ‘remedy’ in the interests of public safety (since you are so irremediably and uncontrollably prone to do what you did again or even worse than what you did). So the government FIRST creates an atmosphere of terror, horror and outrage among the public THEN it convicts you (with whatever skullduggery might therein be involved) THEN it ‘tags’ you semi-permanently not only for what you (allegedly) did but for what sort of a monster you allegedly are and THEN – to escape the constitutional consequences of such a treacherous gambit – it insists that it doesn’t mean to hurt you further by publishing all of the ‘information’, the publication of which in the already superheated public atmosphere that presumes that there are not only sex offenses but Sex Offenders, effectively quashes any possibility of housing, employment, education, or even the ability to live in peace after having paid your debt to society (which a whole lot of Americans have done over the centuries). It has to demolish you in your fundamental dignity as a human being in order to justify twisting the Constitution into a pretzel to Register you as a sex offender. SORNA wants to publish what you did (or at least were convicted of) AND to do that in the context of an already (and shrewdly) established terrified and enraged public misapprehension about what you ‘therefore are or at least probably are and what you always will be’. This SO Registration and Notification isn’t at all just like a simple matter of ‘renewing your driver’s license’ or of having it taken away after a DUI/OUI conviction it isn’t at all simply a matter of losing your medical license after a conviction for malpractice. It seems to me that if you are going to exercise the sovereign legal authority and power in such a way as to deprive a person of a right (as opposed to a privilege), especially in connection with a criminal conviction, then you are into Retroactivity no matter whether your intention is ‘remedial’ or ‘punitive’. (The excuse being that in a ‘mobile society’ the ‘sex offenders’ can easily go from State to State so the national government has to do something but there are very few stranger-child molesters who kill children, and I think it lethally unwise to undermine the entire American Framing Ethos, especially as it is embodied in legislation and jurisprudence, simply to deal with such rare (though telegenic) instances of monstrosity.) I feel that the whole idea of registering people for crimes is fundamentally and irredeemably antithetical to the American Vision and ethos: it deploys the ever-dangerous government authority to permanently label citizens, and in conjunction with a government-enabled smear campaign to terrify and enrage the pubic with egregiously false information and ‘Findings’ it amounts to outright manipulation of the Citizenry by the government and the advocates whom it has chosen to ‘valorize’ that it smacks of totalitarian police-state practices and that in involving the federal government in areas where the States are constitutionally in authority it centralizes power (and in the SO case very sleazily and lethally wielded power) in the national government rather than allowing the individual States to handle matters as they see fit. Whereas Ohio’s current classification scheme, S.B.10, was enacted in later 2007 to comply with the federal 2006 AWA-SORNA. 7 notes that the classification scheme in effect at the time Williams committed his offense was based on Ohio’s version of the mid-1990s federal Megan’s Law schematic. And given the rather reserved response of the genuine professional community from the get-go, a gaggle of ‘advocacy scholars’ had to be raised up overnight (see my recent Post “Junk Advocacy Science”) cottage-industry entrepreneurs whose bread would come from providing the benefit of their ‘expertise’ to bolster government and advocacy claims, and surfing the waves of federal cash (ahhhh – those were the days) pumped into the SO Mania industry. This whole thing has been a politically-constructed Monster and ditto a public stampede, with the ‘therapeutic’ dragged in only later after it was necessary to somehow avoid the Retroactivity-punitive problem and support the semi-permanent civil confinement of sex offenders after their sentences had been served. Why? Because this has never been about a disease or disorder and diagnosis and therapy to begin with.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |