Registered Sex Offenders

As some of you know, I am not a big fan of the sex offender registry. I find it objectionable that the government publishes the current address of people who once committed a crime. I wonder if sex offenders will be the end of it. Don't I have the right to know if a "habitual" drug dealer/user lives in my neighborhood? Burglar? Shoplifter? I have seen friends and wives of mine pouring over the registry in Oregon looking for "offenders" in the neighborhood. I have mildly raised objections and been shouted down. What do my friends who are fans of this type of registries think about the following?

From LGM:

Due Process for Me But Not for Thee

I can't think of a less sympathetic group to defend than sex offenders. But here I go.

TalkLeft had a post up the other day about the predicament in which many former sex offenders find themselves once they have served their sentences and are released into communities that don't want them. From TChris:

Here's a Catch-22 for you: Laws regulating where former sex offenders may live are so restrictive that, in urban areas, former offenders can find no housing (forcing them, in this famous example, to live under a bridge). But former sex offenders have to register their addresses, and the homeless have no address to register. So if they find a home, they're breaking the law by living too close to (for instance) a park or school; if they remain homeless, they're breaking the law by not registering.

Which all seems hypothetical. Until it's not. Larry Moore, a convicted sex offender who successfully served his time in prison for a 1994 offense, was convicted last week of failing to register his address. Because he was homeless. Because the laws, which restrict where he can live, left him nowhere he was able tolive. In Georgia, where he was convicted, this second conviction carries a mandatory life sentence.

Mr. Moore is one of 15 former sex offenders who have been arrested for homelessness since the law requiring their registration took effect in July. He registered twice after the law went into effect but was unable to maintain a permanent address because he could not afford, on his salary from Popeye's chicken, to pay for a hotel room indefinitely. And he couldn't find a home that fit within the law's narrow parameters.

Now, there's no doubt that sex offenses are serious. But once a person has completed his sentence, he has paid his debt. His punishment is supposed to be up. Yet these laws continue to punish people -- indeed, robbing them of their due process rights by making it impossible for them to live without violating the law. Either they're too close to a school or church or they're homeless and thus cannot register. And, the ACLU (which has challenged GA's sex offender registry law before)is arguing in Mr. Moore's case, sending a man to jail for life because he is homeless amounts to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

As TChris notes (and I agree), the combination of laws restricting where sex offenders can live and requiring them to register drive them off the map and underground . . . or directly back into prison. Which perhaps was the GA legislature's intent. But it's not in keeping with the Constitution.

Duke Rape Case

As long as we're discussing it...

Maybe I'm living in the wrong world or have seen a small slice of it, but is my reading on this correct that a woman accused three Duke lacrosse players of raping her. These charges proved to be unprovable and (possibly) false. The entire country is acting as if three white men being falsely accused of raping a black woman is perhaps the greatest crime in the history of the US.

That's it right? The "overzealous" prosecutor has been fired. The "boys" have been given an extra year to play lacrosse. Crazy right-wing pundits are allowed to babble on about "name rape" and "emotional murder." College sports announcers are allowed to go on and on about how the Duke lacrosse team had their season "stolen" by this woman. Less crazy right-wing pundits use this case to show that the Times is a far-left paper because the editors believed the accusation. Everything wrong about the liberal rush to judgment has been exposed, right? This is the narrative I am seeing.

Ash, please tell me in Durham there is someone pushing the counter-narrative of 400 years of white men raping black women with no punishment whatsoever. Someone is mentioning the history of lynching in the south (other than to try to say these innocent angels were lynched by the prosecutor, which I pray, but don't doubt, is being said) where black men were summarily executed with no evidence at all. Please tell me that someone is pointing out that normally the assholes who want the prosecutor to go to jail don't really mind it when black men go to jail on drug possession, which is almost solely based on the word of the arresting officer and prosecutor. Everyone knows that black men go to jail on completely bogus stops with no probably cause. In other words, everyone knows that the judicial system in this country is set up in favor of whites and against black men and women. Is this narrative being discussed?

Has anyone else seen any strong counter-narratives in our supposedly crazy-liberal blogosphere? I think I've seen one or two references in passing putting forth the idea that the rape(s) did happen, but otherwise I see a lot of people trying to distance themselves. What am I missing?