6-2-2012 National:
U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina summoned the tearful 57-year-old woman to the podium, a crumpled piece of notebook paper in her hands.
“Don’t worry about reading anything,” Urbina said, as a scowl flashed across his hawk-like face. “I want you to talk to me,” the judge said as the defendant dipped her head to recite her carefully crafted statement.
The woman cringed; so did her lawyer. They had not anticipated this. But Urbina knew this would be his final chance to hear directly from the defendant before imposing a sentence, and he wanted to gauge her remorse and get a sense of her as a person beyond the stick-figure rendered in court papers.
Judges are loathe to discuss the emotional strain or joys of the job, lest they raise questions about their impartiality.
But Urbina, a gray-haired jurist who took up Aikido in his 50s and meditates daily, is known for wearing his heart on his sleeve. And in a series of interviews, the judge spoke candidly about what he and most of his colleagues consider the most difficult and draining aspect of their work: sentencing, a gut-wrenching courtroom moment where a real life intersects with esoteric legal arguments and sentencing guidelines that never truly capture a case’s nuances.
For Urbina, sentencing has always been filled with stress and doubt — of agonizingly weighing the crime against the defendant’s past, of worrying about what message to send to the public and of feeling that he was never given the proper tools to rehabilitate offenders. So, after 31 years on the local and D.C. federal bench, of sitting in judgment of scam artists, burglars, corrupt government officials and murderers, the judge retired last month, explaining that a prime reason he left a job he loved was that he had simply grown too fatigued of sentencing.
So, perhaps it is fitting that this sentencing, his second to last and the final one in which he had any discretion, was so typical of what he had confronted during his long career — ambiguity and tough choices.
Before he could make those choices, however, the judge needed to hear from the frightened woman standing before him. So he asked her again, this time more gently: “Tell me what happened.”
Courtroom 30A
It was 2:17 p.m. on a recent Thursday when Urbina, clad in his robe, entered the august wood-paneled Courtroom 30A through a back door, carrying a thick file of paper. The judge strode five steps and sat in his high-backed leather chair on the courtroom’s elevated bench. He pivoted slightly to his right and studied Norma Borgono, a diminutive woman whose hands were clenched under the defense table. Next he scanned from right to left: taking stock of Borgono’s lawyer and a federal prosecutor, a probation official, a deputy U.S. Marshal and his own law clerk. Then he eyed the gallery, empty except for a federal agent, two law students and four of Borgono’s relatives.
The judge opened his file and retrieved the case’s sentencing memos, plea agreement and lengthy pre-sentence report, which he had read over the past few days and which spelled out the case’s particulars: Borgono had pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the federal government for falsifying records that allowed her boss, the president of a Miami-based export company, to swindle more than $10 million from the Export-Import Bank of the United States.
Because so much money had been stolen, federal prosecutors argued in court papers that Urbina should sentence the former office manager to the low end of the sentencing guideline range of 18 to 24 months in prison.
Her lawyer countered that Borgono deserved just a year of home detention and two years of probation because the Peruvian immigrant, who became a U.S. citizen in 2007, had not reaped a dime in the scheme’s proceeds beyond her $500-weekly salary. She also cooperated extensively with authorities and helped them build their case against her boss, a man sentenced by Urbina to nearly four years in prison. And, the attorney argued, she had the support of her community: The judge’s folder was filled with heart-felt letters from her relatives, friends and even her priest.
After questioning the prosecutor and defense lawyer for 15 minutes about their positions, Urbina called Borgono to the courtroom lectern.
“The thing is that I trusted my boss,” she said haltingly in response to Urbina’s questions.
“He told you what papers to prepare,” Urbina replied, his voice growing stern. “This happened for six years. This happened time after time after time after time. Right? So, Why did you trust this man?”
Borgono stammered — her boss had also been a friend, she said.
“So he had helped you?” Urbina asked.
“Yes,” she squeaked.
“Who do you think he was actually helping? You or him?”
“I don’t know exactly,” she replied.
“I think I know what happened,” Urbina said. “Te uso como un juguete.”
“You understand?” the judge said, looking down at Borgono through his wire-rimmed glasses. “He used you like a toy.’”
“I have no passion for punishment”
That morning, as has been his routine for more than three decades, the 66-year-old judge, who retains the lean build of a former high school and college track star, sat cross-legged on a blue mat in a sunny second-floor room of his D.C. home and began to meditate.
His goal was simple, if not always easy to achieve: “I try to identify and contain my biases,” he said of the practice he picked up as a young law professor who wanted to think more clearly. “Your mind is like a murky glass of water, and meditating is like letting the sediment settle until the water clears.”
Urbina, who strangely has a reputation among prosecutors, defense lawyers and courthouse employees for being a bit prickly and quick-tempered, said there was no more important time for clarity than in the hours before sentencing.
Appointed to D.C. Superior Court in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan and then to the federal bench in 1994 by President Bill Clinton, the judge had sentenced hundreds of people to punishments ranging from life in prison to community service (he never presided over a death-penalty trial).
Urbina also imposed imaginative punishments - he ordered two men to write lengthy books about their deeds in the hopes it would help them better understand their crimes and allow others to learn from the experiences. And he ordered most defendants to reappear in his courtroom every six months after their prison terms ended to check on their progress while on supervised release.
“I do not have a passion for punishment,” he said, a statement that helps explain why he is one of the more lenient sentencers on the D.C. federal bench, according to statistics. “If there is a way the court can contribute to the rehabilitation process, it is more likely the person will return to the mainstream.”
Urbina, who has two grown children from his first marriage and is joining an arbitration firm in retirement, said his attitude can be traced back to his childhood and as a judge in the D.C. Superior Court, where he presided over a docket crowded with detritus from the city’s battle with drugs and poverty.
The son a Puerto Rican mother and Honduran father, Urbina also spent his formative childhood years in an all-white neighborhood in New York City, one that was not always welcoming to Hispanics. But he excelled as a runner in high school and won an athletic scholarship to Georgetown University and even flirted with making the 1968 Olympic team. Following in the path of his college teammates, he attended Georgetown Law School and eventually became a public defender and a law professor who supervised a clinic of students working on criminal cases.
“My life experience demonstrated stereotyping people is a sure way to make serious mistakes,” he said. “I liked to get to know the person.”
Weighing the Factors
After he had finished querying Borgono, Urbina carefully walked through the factors he must consider before imposing a sentence, including the seriousness of the offense, the desire to deter future crimes and the defendant’s potential for rehabilitation.
Urbina said that it seemed that Borgono had learned her lesson — through sobs, she had tried to apologize at least three times — and had cooperated extensively with authorities. “I don’t think you need a whole lot of deterrence, and I can tell this matter has been weighing heavily on you and your family,” the judge said. “In a sense your punishment has started; in a sense your rehabilitation has started.”
Noting that her adult son and daughter were in the courtroom and that he had received extensive letters from family and friends, the judge said, “It appears you have a safety net,” a key point in her favor.
The judge then grew silent and pondered a stack of papers in front of him before again locking eyes with Borgono. “My parents were immigrants,” he told her. “They came from Latin America. I am very much acquainted with the qualities and characteristics of the Latin culture from a long time ago — ‘The woman obeys the man. period.’ But this was very bad judgment on your part. The fact that it was a man telling you what to do is not an excuse, but it is a factor.”
“And that is everything I have to look at, really,” he said.
“And then there is common sense … and my sense of right or wrong.”
The judge grew silent for a moment, shuffled his stack of papers, then turned to Borgono and issued his sentence: a year of detention in her Miami home, another four years of probation and $5,000 in restitution payments.
Was it the right decision? Urbina will probably never know.
Before stepping from the bench and heading back to dusty and box-filled office, the judge ordered Borgono’s case transferred to the federal court authorities in her home state of Florida because he will not be around in six months to check on her progress — and to ensure he had made the right decision. ..Source.. by Del Quentin Wilber
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Judge calls it quits after 31 years; sentencing too much to bear
Friday, June 1, 2012
Blog Changes: States in / or not in Compliance w/SORNA
6-1-2012 National:
A few changes have been made, first a SPECIAL graphic will be used when a state, that is considered SORNA compliant, anticipates or actually makes a change in their law which might affect whether or not they are in compliance w/SORNA; that graphic is below.
Next, at the top of the two news blogs (soon all blogs) you will now see:
SORNA Compliance: States in Compliance States w/Questionable Compliance
At this time we only show two news articles (Kansas and Missouri) and there is something else very unusual which we described in PART-IV of our series Behind Closed Doors "The Alabama Factor" as we have coined it. Alabama's mechanism for assigning tiers (ONE ONLY) we believe places them in question. See PART-IV for explanation of The Alabama Factor.
Finally, if anyone knows of other news items showing states IN COMPLIANCE, anticipating / enacting something into law, which would bring their compliance into question, PLEASE send me the link and I will post it for everyone to know about.
For now, have a great day and a better tomorrow.
eAdvocate
Bill Would Require Tracking of Honor Violence
6-1-2012 National:
The Department of Justice would be required to start tracking incidents of “honor violence” – an act of vengeance against women who are believed to have brought dishonor to their families – as part of a House appropriations bill passed last month.
While the idea of women becoming targets of violence for refusing to enter into arranged marriages, being victims of sexual assault or seeking a divorce seems rare in the United States, a CBS News story this year found that a growing number of police and social services agencies in the United States are seeing cases.
“Honor violence often times puts the lives of women in danger for actions outside of their control,” Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), chairman of the House appropriations committee that funds the DOJ, said in a written statement. “We need to learn more about the prevalence of this crime in America and make sure we are doing everything we can to prevent it.”
The 2013 Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations bill requires the DOJ’s Office on Violence Against Women and the National Institute of Justice to track data on honor violence to determine how prevalent it has become and recommend best practices for law enforcement and service providers to prevent it, Wolf said.
There are no national or state agencies currently tracking honor violence, according to the CBS News report in April. The report cited a 2011 survey from the Tahirih Justice Center that found 67 percent of more than 500 social service, religious, legal, educational and medical agencies last year believed there were cases of forced marriage occurring among the populations they serve.
And it highlighted the 2009 murder of 20-year-old Noor Almaleki, who police say “was run down in broad daylight by her father who was angry that she had become too westernized and did not want to accept a marriage her father had arranged for her in the family's native Iraq.” ..Source.. by The Blog of Legal Times
Opinion: Facebook threatens to 'Zuck up' the human race
6-1-2012 National:
Editor's note: Andrew Keen is a British-American entrepreneur and professional skeptic. He is the author of "The Cult of the Amateur," and "Digital Vertigo." This is the latest in a series of commentaries for CNN looking at how internet trends are influencing social culture.
(CNN) -- The news last week was all about Facebook's dodgy IPO. Investors are filing suit against Facebook about withholding "negative" assessment on its business prospects. This IPO not only "Zucked up" Silicon Valley's supposed tech bubble, but it has created the suspicion that Facebook willfully exploited the innocence of the small investor.
But something even dodgier than a potential stock market fraud is going on. The social network is taking something much more important than money from its nearly one billion members. By sabotaging what it really means to be human, Facebook is stealing the innocence of our inner lives.
Oh, Zuck: Facebook's bumpy start just got a little worse
It may even be Zucking us up as a species.
Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells us there's a "shift" from an analog world in which our identities are generated from within, to a digital world in which our sense of self is intimately tied to our social media presence.
But this shift to a Facebook world of incessant "friending," Professor Turkle correctly warns us, is a "seductive fantasy" which is weakening us both as individuals and as a society. The problem, she explains, is that a "capacity for solitude is what nurtures great relationships." But in today's always-on social media world, our solitude has been replaced by incessant online updates, which both weaken our sense of self and our ability to create genuine friendships.
I call this shift from the private to the public self "digital narcissism." Behind the communitarian veil of social media, we have fallen in love with ourselves. But this is a super sad love story. Because the more we self-broadcast, the emptier we become; and the emptier we become, the more we need to self-broadcast. ..For the remainder of this story: by Andrew Keen, Special to CNN
Feds Want Warrantless Spying Loss Overturned, Saying the Law Can’t Touch Them
6-1-2012 National:
The Obama administration is set to argue to a federal appeals court Friday that the government may breach, with impunity, domestic spying laws adopted in the wake of President Richard M. Nixon’s Watergate scandal.
The case tests whether Americans may seek recourse or monetary damages when a sitting U.S. president bypasses Congress’s ban on warrantless spying on Americans — in this instance when President George W. Bush authorized his secret, warrantless domestic spying program in the aftermath of the September 2001 terror attacks.
A federal judge found in 2010 that two American lawyers’ telephone conversations with their clients in Saudi Arabia in 2004 were siphoned to the National Security Agency without warrants. The allegations were initially based on a classified document the government accidentally mailed to the former al-Haramain Islamic Foundation lawyers.
The document was later declared a state secret, removed from the long-running lawsuit and has never been made public. With that document ruled out as evidence, the lawyers instead cited a bevy of circumstantial evidence that a judge found showed the government illegally wiretapped the lawyers as they spoke on U.S. soil to Saudi Arabia.
Against the government’s objections, San Francisco U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker awarded the two lawyers — Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor — $20,400 each in damages and their legal counsel $2.5 million in costs. It marked the first time anyone had prevailed in a lawsuit challenging Bush’s so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program. ..For the remainder of this story: by David Kravets
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Judge hears fight to sex offenders' Facebook ban
5-31-2012 Indiana:
A federal judge said Thursday she plans to rule within a month on the constitutionality of an Indiana law that bans registered sex offenders from using social networking websites where they could prey on children.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana is heading the class-action suit on behalf of a man who served three years for child exploitation, along with other sex offenders who are restricted by the ban even though they are no longer on probation. Federal judges have barred similar bans in Nebraska and Louisiana. Similar restrictions remain in effect in New York, Illinois and North Carolina.
In a one-hour hearing at U.S. District Court in Indianapolis, Judge Tanya Walton Pratt questioned attorneys about convicted sex offenders' civil rights and whether the state law is outdated in the age of Facebook, LinkedIn and dozens of other social networking sites.
ACLU attorney Ken Falk argued that even though the 2008 law is only intended to protect children from online sexual predators, it also prevents sex offenders from using social media for political, business and religious activity such as using Facebook to follow the pope or comment on newspaper websites, posting a profile on LinkedIn or following presidential candidates on Twitter.
Falk said the law violates the rights of communication, receiving information and association, all of which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled are guaranteed by the First Amendment. He also argued that the ban was unnecessary because Indiana already has a law that makes it a crime to use the Internet to contact a child for the purposes of sexual gratification.
Indiana Deputy Attorney General David Arthur argued that the 2008 ban is limited only to social networking sites that allow access by children, and that Facebook, Twitter and similar sites aren't the only forms of communication.
"We still have television. We still have radios. And believe it or not, people still talk face-to-face," he said. Arthur also said the ban doesn't apply to email or Internet message boards.
Falk said social media are almost indispensable. "It's not enough to say that the plaintiffs can still write letters or go to meetings," he said. "These are not adequate alternatives for instant communication."
Courts have long allowed states to place restrictions on convicted sex offenders who have completed their sentences, controlling where many of them live and work and requiring them to register with police. But Falk told Pratt that the social networking ban was far broader, restricting a wide swatch of constitutionally protected activities.
Arthur compared the social networking ban to laws barring sex offenders from school property and other places frequented by kids. Only in this case, he said, the place is virtual.
Similar social networking bans have been struck down in two other states.
In February, U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson found that Louisiana's prohibition was too broad and "unreasonably restricts many ordinary activities that have become important to everyday life."
Louisiana lawmakers passed a new law this month that more narrowly defines which sites are prohibited. News and government sites, email services and online shopping are excluded from the new rules, as are photo-sharing and instant-messaging systems. The measure takes effect Aug. 1.
In Nebraska, a federal judge in 2009 blocked part of a law that included a social networking ban. A second legal challenge by an Omaha-area sex offender is set for trial in July. ..Source.. by CHARLES WILSON
Wal-Mart withdraws from conservative group ALEC
5-31-2012 National:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has withdrawn its membership in a conservative political group that has come under fire as part of the Trayvon Martin case, saying it has strayed from its core mission to advance free-market principles.
The group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, is made up of a group of lawmakers and private sector officials and has become a lightning rod for political debate in recent months. Wal-Mart has been a member since 1993.
Liberal activists complain that ALEC, which has been around for nearly 40 years, improperly influences legislation around the country by allowing corporate leaders to develop model legislation alongside state lawmakers. They also point to some of the laws that ALEC has helped spread around the country, such as ID rules for voters and the so-called "Stand Your Ground" self-defense law that's at the center of the Florida case in which teenager Martin was killed.
For its part, ALEC has said that it is being unfairly targeted as part of a broader campaign against its conservative agenda. It also says efforts to tie it into the Martin case are unfair. In April it said it would it was eliminating its public safety task force that had dealt with the "Stand Your Ground" law and said it was refocusing those resources on economic matters.
Late Wednesday, Maggie Sans, Wal-Mart's vice president of public affairs and government relations, sent a letter to ALEC leaders saying it has previously expressed concern about ALEC's decision to weigh in on issues that "stray from its core mission 'to advance the Jeffersonian principles of free markets.' "
"We feel that the divide between these activities and our purpose as a business has become too wide," said Sans, who has served as ALEC's Secretary of the Private Enterprise board. "To that end, we are suspending our membership in ALEC."
Wal-Mart's decision follows several other companies' withdrawal from the group, including Amazon.com, Coca-Cola Co., Kraft Foods Inc., McDonald's Corp., PepsiCo Inc. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
ALEC said in a statement it is "disappointed" in Wal-Mart's decision but understands "the unique pressures they are under."
"However, as we announced in April, ALEC is solely focused on limited government, free-market solutions in the states that create jobs and improve the economy," the statement read.
The decision came in the run-up to Wal-Mart's annual shareholder meeting at its Bentonville, Ark., headquarters on Friday.
Wal-Mart's shares rose $1.11 to $66.55 in midday trading. ..Source.. by Politico
How Many Innocent People Have We Sent To Prison?
5-31-2012 National:
When Beverly Monroe met her new neighbors in the free world after spending seven years in a Virginia prison for a crime she didn’t commit, she spoke candidly about her past. “I said I’d been through a crisis,” she says. “People immediately think a divorce or you lost your husband or something like that, which is all terrible enough.”
Monroe did lose her longtime boyfriend, Roger de la Burde, who was found shot to death with his own handgun in 1992. An overzealous state police agent suspected foul play, even though officials initially believed that de la Burde had shot himself. Monroe’s statements to police, which were deemed to be self-incriminating, coupled with an informant who received a deal from the prosecution in exchange for her testimony, formed the basis for the case against her.
At 54, the mother of three was charged and convicted of murdering de la Burde and sentenced to twenty-two years at the Pocahontas Correctional Center. Monroe might have served the whole sentence had her attorneys not discovered a collection of concealed exculpatory documents, including a crucial medical examiner’s report from 1999 that strongly suggested that de la Burde had indeed committed suicide. In 2002 a US District Court judge vacated the conviction.
Now in her 70s, Monroe works as an administrative assistant. The lost income and lack of savings from her years behind bars have made retirement a distant dream. “I’ll have to work until I’m 105,” she says. Virginia has not compensated her for the years lost to prison or for her legal expenses. (Her trial cost nearly $200,000.)
“Being innocent in prison is real torture,” Monroe says. “It’s a lasting kind of trauma…. You’re released, and you realize that it didn’t just happen to you—it’s happened to other people who have had it so much worse.”
How many other people? No one knows. The Bureau of Justice Statistics doesn’t track exonerations, so for years that task has fallen to lawyers, academics and activists relying on news reports and legal filings. While the Innocence Project and the Death Penalty Information Center track exonerations, neither group’s database is complete. No single resource has amassed all of the known exoneration cases.
Until now. On May 21, the University of Michigan Law School, in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, released the first-ever National Registry of Exonerations. The searchable online database is the most credible and comprehensive resource on wrongful convictions in the United States. Peter Neufeld, the co-founder and co-director of the Innocence Project, has called it the “Wikipedia of Innocence.” The registry, which can be viewed at exonerationregistry.org, currently counts 891 cases since 1989, the year of the first exoneration achieved using DNA. ..For the remainder of this story: by Liz Webster
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Public-Place Laws Tighten Rein on Sex Offenders
The real issue here has nothing to do with public safety, it is simple banish former sex offenders because of the label which is falsely promoted by by politicians and the like as people who are dangerous. The real answer is, impeach folks who create hysteria and falsely label people!5-30-2012 National:
HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. — Convicted sex offenders are barred from surfing at the famous pier in this Orange County city.
In nearby Dana Point, they are prohibited from casting a fishing line in the harbor.
And if they wander into a public park in Mission Viejo, they could be shipped back to jail for six months, following the City Council’s vote this year to ban them from a host of places where children congregate.
“We need to protect our kids,” the Orange County district attorney, Tony Rackauckas, had told the Mission Viejo City Council. “The danger is very real.”
Orange County finds itself at the enter of a new wave of laws restricting the movement of sex offenders. The county government and a dozen cities here have banned sex offenders from even setting foot in public parks, on beaches and at harbors, rendering almost half the parks in Orange County closed to them. Ten more cities are considering similar legislation.
And Orange County is far from alone. In recent years, communities around the country have gone beyond regulating where sex offenders can live and begun banning them outright from a growing list of public places.
From North Carolina to Washington State, communities have designated swimming pools, parks and school bus stops as “child safety zones,” off limits to some sex offenders. They are barred from libraries in half a dozen Massachusetts cities, and from all public facilities in tiny Huachuca City, Ariz.
“Child safety zones are being passed more and more at the city and county level,” said Elizabeth Jeglic, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “It’s becoming more and more restrictive. They’re not only limiting where sex offenders can live, but they’re limiting their movement as well.” ..For the remainder of this article: by IAN LOVETT
Sex offenders fight for right to use Facebook
Lets get Robson's comment in the correct context "no matter what the crime is OR was" as is the case with former sex offenders.5-30-2012 National:
Registered sex offenders who have been banned from social networking websites are fighting back in the nation's courts, successfully challenging many of the restrictions as infringements on free speech and their right to participate in common online discussions.
The legal battles pit public outrage over sex crimes against cherished guarantees of individual freedom and the far-reaching communication changes brought by Facebook, LinkedIn and dozens of other sites.
"It's going to be really, really hard, I think, to write something that will achieve the state's purpose in protecting children online but not be restrictive enough to be unconstitutional," said Carolyn Atwell-Davis, director of legislative affairs at the Virginia-based National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Courts have long allowed states to place restrictions on convicted sex offenders who have completed their sentences, controlling where many of them live and work and requiring them to register with police. But the increasing use of social networks for everyday communication raises new, untested issues. The bans generally forbid offenders to join social networks or chat rooms or use instant-messaging programs — just a few of the online tools that civil liberties advocates say have become virtually indispensable to free speech.
After hearing challenges, federal judges in two states threw out laws or parts of laws that they deemed too stringent. In Nebraska, the decision allowed sex offenders to join social networks. And in Louisiana, a new law lets offenders use the Internet for shopping, reading news and exchanging email. A case filed against Indiana's law is under review.
Authorities insist the bans address a real problem: the need to protect children from pedophiles who prowl online hangouts visited by kids.
"It's hard to come up with an example of a sexual predator who doesn't use some form of social networking anymore," said Steve DeBrota, an assistant U.S. attorney in Indianapolis who prosecutes child sex crimes.
Ruthann Robson, a professor of constitutional law at the City University of New York, said the bans could eventually be taken up by the Supreme Court if the justices decide there's a constitutional question.
"If we think that the government can curtail sex offenders' rights without any connection to the actual crime, then it could become a blanket prohibition against anyone who is accused of a crime, no matter what the crime is," Robson said.
Supporters of the bans say they target repeat offenders such as a Maryland man charged with extorting a 16-year-old girl Indiana girl to perform sexual acts during video chats. He was free on bond when he was accused of doing the same thing to more underage girls.
Trevor J. Shea, 21, of Mechanicsburg, Md., was sentenced to 33 years in federal prison in January after pleading guilty to seven counts of production of child pornography.
Xavier Von Erck, founder of Perverted Justice Inc., a group devoted to exposing online sexual predators, said it doesn't make sense for judges to let pedophiles troll the Web for more victims but revoke the voting rights of people convicted of lesser crimes. He called that "judicial hypocrisy."
The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, which is challenging Indiana's 2008 law, argues that it's unconstitutional to bar sex offenders who are no longer in prison or on probation from using basic online services.
"To broadly prohibit such a large group of persons from ever using these modern forms of communication is just something the First Amendment cannot tolerate," said Ken Falk, legal director of Indiana's ACLU chapter.
The case is scheduled for a court hearing Thursday. The main plaintiff, referred to in the suit only as "John Doe," was convicted on two counts of child exploitation in 2000 and released from prison in 2003, according to federal court documents.
The man cannot send questions to televised debates or comment on news stories on local websites because doing so requires a Facebook account, the ACLU contends. Neither can he communicate with his out-of-state family members using the social network or post his business profile on LinkedIn.
The plaintiff is also forbidden to supervise his teenage son's Internet use or investigate questionable friend requests sent to his child, the ACLU claims.
Prosecutors argue that social networking sites aren't the only forms of communication.
"The fact is that telephones still work. People including registered sex offenders may still congregate, discuss, debate and even demonstrate," Indiana Deputy Attorney General David Arthur wrote in a brief.
Television and radio are still widespread and offer numerous call-in shows. Newspapers still accept letters to the editor, he added.
The ACLU says precedent is on its side. The lawsuit cites a February ruling in Louisiana in which U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson found that the state's prohibition was too broad and "unreasonably restricts many ordinary activities that have become important to everyday life."
Louisiana lawmakers passed a new law this month that more narrowly defines what sites are prohibited. News and government sites, email services and online shopping are excluded from the new rules, as are photo-sharing and instant-messaging systems. The measure takes effect Aug. 1.
But courts continue to wrestle with the issue in Indiana and Nebraska, where a federal judge in 2009 blocked part of a law that included a social networking ban. A second legal challenge by an Omaha-area sex offender is set for trial in July.
"I think policymakers are struggling to come up with the right policy that makes sense," Atwell-Davis said. "There's no silver bullet." ..Source.. by Charles Wilson
