Sex offender lists: manditory or optional?

First of all, I think that Brad Holbrook got a very raw deal. The paragraph that I copied made me wonder whether she had been abused by her father. Little kids normally do not act in an overtly sexualized way unless they themselves have been subjected to sexual activity.

I think he got a raw deal too, Phoenix.

I can hardly believe I'm saying this but there really needs to be some leeway on who ends up on that list.

This one could have happened to anybody, i.e. a pure "there but for God's grace go I" deal.

Once again you see the bitter fruit of having professional prosecutors with a money and career incentive to put people in prison. We need to toss the entire "adversarial" system of justice and adopt something like the French use, which is called an "inquisitorial" system; in that system, the common incentive of all parties involved is to figure out what the **** actually happened, and then apply any applicable laws.

That's an interesting take on this, gungasnake.

Finding out what the **** actually happened should be the motivation.

I'm going to have to read up on the French criminal justice system!

Did you follow that Duke lacrosse "rape" case?

I mean, it's astonishing that one of those clowns finally did something so egregious that the entire legal establishment collectively washed their hands like Pontius Pilate and heaved his sorry ass under the bus. But the problem is, for every one case like that in which reality finally prevails sooner or later, there have to be twenty or thirty in which innocent people end up in prison, too often for shit which never even happened, to make somebody elses political career.

sex offender lists should not exist, there is no compelling interest in systematically treating the violators of sex crimes differently from the violators of other crimes. We could have list of certain severity of crimes, such as class a felonies. But to have lists based upon the type of offense is unconstitutional, based upon the concept that crime is punished by the severity of the crime not any other factor. There is no way that a 15 year old kid groping his girlfriend (for instance) warrants measures that inhibit the creation of a new life for which a murderer (for instance) does not. The public fears sex criminals, and politicians have responded by making them a special class of criminal, which is a miscarriage of justice. The correct responce would have been to deal with the citizen fear head on, to not pander to it.