Registered sex offenders

[shipwreck]

I agree, if you want to really know, you should look at their offense in the penal code, and read their birthdate and age of victim at the time of the crime. Did you know mooning someone is a sex crime?

21.08. INDECENT EXPOSURE

Indecent exposure is a misd in Texas and while someone may be ordered to sex offender counseling - they do not have to register for this offense. It is felony sex crimes that require registration - at least in TEXAS.

[Charles L. Cotton]

T If this study is legit, it's going to turn forensic science on it's ear and it'll take criminal jurisprudence with it.

Chas.

Do you truly believe that will happen? I hope it does, but I would not ever seeing it happen unless something like DNA, but can be applied to every case comes along, and it is incredibly accurate.

Honestly no I don't. If this report is accurate, and I believe the portions presented in the news story are, then it would mean that few criminal trials will have sufficient evidence to convict. We already know that eye witnesses, once considered the best trial evidence, are horribly unreliable. If fiber evidence, shoe prints, hair "matching," and other non-DNA evidence is inadmissible, it's going to be very hard to get someone convicted and even harder to uphold it on appeal. Society wants convictions first, with convicting the right person coming in a close second. A conviction makes us all feel safer and satisfied that justice was done.

Lest anyone think I'm a bleeding-heart liberal (don't get mad at me Nitrogen ), I'm a lifelong conservative, law and order, death penalty supporting, Republican. But I am a little picky, I'd like to know we are convicting and/or executing a guilty person.

I have a very good friend, a man I respect immensely, who works for the Galveston County Medical Examiner's Office. He has told me the tremendous pressure on his office caused by unrealistic expectations created by what is known in the industry as "The CSI Effect." People expect magic! And they don't like it when my friend's office tells them, "sorry, that's just TV, you can't really do that."

Regardless how accurate the Study is, I don't think it will have much impact. As a society, we would have to admit that most crimes are not capable of proving "beyond a reasonable doubt."

Chas.

[Liberty]

Lest anyone think I'm a bleeding-heart liberal (don't get mad at me Nitrogen ), I'm a lifelong conservative, law and order, death penalty supporting, Republican. But I am a little picky, I'd like to know we are convicting and/or executing a guilty person.

Actually I thought you were a closet libertarian who hasn't quite realized it yet.

[gregthehand]

I have known a few on the list that didn't need to be there as well. The attorney's negotiate really horrible plea bargains that land these guys on this list. To me it's a knee jerk reaction that should have been avoided. I think rapists, pedophiles, etc etc deserve to be on it. But sometimes people get put on the list that just don't need to be.

[jbirds1210]

<snip>It was scary, very scary. It determined that fiber analysis, hair "matching," tire prints and most other forms of forensic "evidence" other than "perfectly performed DNA testing" were unreliable. There simply is no evidence, or insufficient evidence, of reliability and too much is left to personal opinion or speculation. The study even called fingerprints into question! If this study is legit, it's going to turn forensic science on it's ear and it'll take criminal jurisprudence with it.
Chas.

Opinions scare me.

Jason

“Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces the same effect as if you worked a love-story into the fifth proposition of Euclid.”
Arthur Conan Doyle, Sr.

[ELB]

If you want to hear something really scary, just ask an attorney that does family law how many times a spouse (usually the wife, but not always) throws in a bogus allegation of child abuse or sexual abuse of a child in a petition for divorce.

Scary, but not surprising. I truly believe the court system is biased against men in divorce proceedings. I've seen perfectly good guys slapped with court orders ordering them to stay away from the wife, forbidding any attempt to contact or find her (e.g. if she ran off with all the tax returns)...but also forbidding him to change the locks on the house, so she can come in while he is at work at take out more appliances, furniture, etc. One of my military buddies temporarily lost his security clearance because his soon-to-be ex-wife and her mother called the AFOSI and told them he was a religious nut. So the USAF had to investigate that, and he had to go to a military psychiatrist for an evaluation. He was rightly cleared, but the lying women of course did not suffer for that. Adding bogus sex- and wife-abuse charges seems to be part of the law, not an exception (a certain pastor's wife who shotgunned her sleeping husband comes to mind....)

... The study even called fingerprints into question! ...

Yes, I have read about this several times, that even after all these years, no one has undertaken to establish a true, scientific underpinning for fingerprint identification. The standards, e.g. number of matching points of comparison, seem to be whatever fingerprint "experts" have convinced legislatures/courts/police agencies is correct based on the expert's experience, rather than any repeatable study of the matter.

Lest anyone think I'm a bleeding-heart liberal (don't get mad at me Nitrogen ), I'm a lifelong conservative, law and order, death penalty supporting, Republican. But I am a little picky, I'd like to know we are convicting and/or executing a guilty person.

Yes, me too, on all those points. Our government and legal system seems to have the principle (I guess you call it) that it's better to let 10 guilty men go free than apply a government sanction against one innocent man (unless of course the one worked in or voted for the Bush administration! Then it's war crimes for everybody!) But there are two problems with that. One is you can keep extending that principle until why bother putting anyone in jail or under the needle -- let them all run free, then you never get it wrong. That leads to the second problem -- those 10 or 15 or 100 guilty men we let go don't all suddenly get religion and sin no more -- they go out and rob and rape and murder some more. Even if only 80% offend again, and do it only once each, we have now sacrificed 8 or 12 or 80 more innocent people in order to save one innocent person from the government, and we have eliminated any deterrence effect. This is not a good bargain in my opinion.

To get at least mildly back on track with the thread -- I am not thrilled with how the sex offender laws are used for minor league stuff (like prosecuting people who have slight age differences, etc) -- that is in a similar vein to kicking kids out of school because they have evil drugs like asprin or tylenol, or have mock rifles for the drill team in their car. A big part of the problem idiocy in implementing it. Certainly the prosecutorial world needs a close eye on it (e.g. Nifong, Sen Ted Stevens prosecutors, a certain ex-prosecutor of a certain south Texas big city)...

/rant off

[Abraham]

Given the crowd with pitchforks and torches mentality of some of these convictions i.e., convict em all and let God sort em out approach for anyone accused of sexual misconduct... be the reason some of our very liberal states aren't willing to pass "Jessica's Law"?

If so, it would seem they have a very compelling reason in trying to avoid the unjust hysteria associated in quickly convicting when common sense simply doesn't apply, as in the 19 year boy and 17 year old girlfriend scenario. (I married my 17 year old girlfriend when I was 20)

And who among us hasn't had an inconvenient call of nature and used the great outdoors with making certain we can't be seen, but yes, we were not using a bona fide tiled and porcelain facility?

Are the sexual crime laws skewed as badly as the examples above - potentially rendering one a sex offender? Or are they misleading anecdotes?

If true, how in the world did common sense get thrown so completely out the window?

[roberts]

Really? The girl is being charged with distributing/creating child pornography?

Who created it? Who distributed it? How can they charge him for possession if they don't charge her for making it and sending it to him?

I agree there's something wrong with laws that say it's legal for me to have sex with a 16-17 year old girl but it's illegal for me to have nude pictures she took of herself and sent me.

There's also something wrong with laws that say someone is old enough to operate dangerous machinery in public (drive) and possibly kill someone but they're not old enough to have sex.