Six years ago, Congress passed the Adam Walsh Act, aimed at setting up a uniform national registry to track known sex offenders as they move around the country. The law offers states federal funds to complete their part of the job, and 16 have secured Justice Department approval for doing it successfully. But most states have struggled to implement the law, and several have essentially abandoned efforts at compliance and left the federal money on the table.
States that did not implement their registries by July 27, 2011, face a 10 percent loss in federal justice assistance grants, which fund courts, crime labs, corrections and other law enforcement programs. The only way they can keep that money without meeting the deadline is to apply to use it for Adam Walsh Act compliance activities. Some 29 noncompliant states have agreed to do this.
But five states — Arizona, Arkansas, California, Nebraska and Texas — are simply saying “no” to the Adam Walsh Act, at least for now. They have neither complied with the law’s requirements nor applied to use their justice assistance grants to come into compliance. They have elected to forfeit 10 percent of their justice assistance funding for the coming year.
“We’re hoping that in the future, some of those five will indeed apply,” says Linda Baldwin, director of the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering and Tracking within the U.S. Department of Justice. Not applying to use the grant monies for compliance is “not necessarily a refusal,” Baldwin says. States will get another chance to use their grants for compliance in 2013.
But by then, there may be changes to the federal law, which is named for a child who was kidnapped and later murdered in south Florida in 1981. (The registry provisions of the Adam Walsh Act are formally known as the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, or SORNA.) In August, the U.S. House passed a reauthorization of Adam Walsh specifying that any penalty a state incurs for noncompliance with registry requirements won’t harm local law ...continued... by Maggie Clark
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