The Scarlet Letter of The Twenty First Century

Original Article

10/01/2014

By Emily Kristoffersen

We as humans like to take pride in our centuries of supposed social evolution. We claim we are no longer the people in the dark ages of our ancient past, however, even in our modern advanced age of the 21st century we are still labeling people in our society with a form of a scarlet letter. Sex offenders seem to get the brunt of it, being treated as the social undesirables. With this form of labeling they are treated as a form of an untouchable creature and the worst of the worst, in many, if not most cases, they are doomed to wear this label for life. This modern day form of labeling can in ways be compared to the treatment of the characters Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale in the classic novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne titled ‘The Scarlet Letter’, or possibly the letter or band many lesser valued peoples of Adolf Hitler’s time were forced to wear during WWII. Are we now reverting back to this uncaring and uncompassionate form of behavior we claim to have conquered almost 100 years ago?

After WWII Americans forced Germans to view how the horrors of the holocaust had affected so many innocent victims. The reason given for this forced viewing was said to be that if the Germans would see how the people had suffered from this it would help prevent the same thing from happening in future generations. Apparently this so called cruelty prevention actually never really worked for those trying to teach the lesson. Americans act as if they have learned nothing from the history of that era. That time in history was when Germany started to take away the rights of some of its citizens simply because the people in power felt some of the citizens were considered of lesser value. We here in America now seem to be acting in this same manner of our treatment to many others.

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Residency Restrictions - A bigoted idea that is illegal and true Americans should be ashamed of

Original Article

02/03/2014

By Robert Wolf

Through our elected representatives efforts, they have legally created a class of people and that class is registered citizens. What does this mean as far as our judicial system is concerned. It means that this group of people are now able to stand on the same ground to fight their battles as anyone else, that is been discriminated against because of race, color, creed, religious views, disabilities, or ethnic background. One of the things to realize is that denying this group of citizens the ability to travel freely to use public facilities to choose where to live or to denying them work is in fact a form of segregation. No different than denying members of a ethnic group from living in certain communities using publicly funded facilities or services. Make no mistake denying any group of people the ability to live or work where ever they choose or the use of public facilities that are available to everyone else. Is a form of segregation no matter what some may use as an excuse for the justification of the segregation.

The job of a politician is to uphold the constitution’s of both the state they represent, and our federal government. They take an oath to do this, but how many of these politicians today realize that the primary reason for our constitution is to protect INDIVIDUAL rights; Not the majority’s rights, and not the government’s rights to exist. Our founding fathers recognized the possibility of the government’s growing in power to such a point that individual freedoms would be lost. That is why on the 4 March 1789. They added the Bill of Rights to the constitution guaranteeing individual freedoms to the people in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of the government’s powers. Today the people holding government offices rather elected or employed have shown a total disregard for those individual rights. As our founding fathers looked down upon this country I’m quite sure that they have tears in their eyes because of the loss of so many individual rights that they fought so hard to establish.

How many laws have been passed in the last 100 years that have been found by our court systems to violate the principles of our federal and state constitutions? For example the Jim Crow laws or laws passed in the McCarthy era as well as laws requiring businesses to implement unneeded measures, increasing the cost of goods and driving some companies out of business. Consider the cost of implementing those unconstitutional laws, and the costs of defending them in court only to have them proven to be unconstitutional. Now add in the cost of removing the law and the mechanism that they created and you soon realize that these mistakes have cost us the taxpayers billions of dollars. Also consider the cost in taxpayers dollars and an individuals pain because public employees have stepped outside the boundaries of the laws designed to protect individuals rights.

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Risk of Erroneous Deprivation

Original Article

01/26/2014

By Robert Wolf

The current procedures under the public notification provisions of the law are extremely broad and contain absolutely no safeguards to prevent erroneous deprivations of a registrant’s liberty interests. Without any preliminary determination of whether and to what extent an offender represents a danger to society, the level of danger to the public posed by any particular sex offender, if any, remains unknown. Surely, not all offenders present a significant danger to the public. Yet, the law currently deprives all offenders — including those who present no danger to the community and are not likely to recidivate — of these interests automatically, for life. Therefore, persons convicted of crimes listed under the law who do not pose a significant danger to the community are at substantial risk of being erroneously deprived of their liberty interests.

A weighing of these factors leads us to conclude that, at a minimum, the plaintiff should be entitled to notice and an opportunity to be heard prior to public notification of his status as a sex offender. In other words, the State must allow a registered sex offender a meaningful opportunity to argue that he or she does not represent a threat to the community and that public notification is not necessary, . Because the law provided the plaintiff with neither notice nor an opportunity to be heard in a court room prior to notifying the public of his status as a convicted sex offender Its due process clause prohibits state and local governments from depriving persons of life, liberty, or property without certain steps being taken to ensure fairness. This clause has been used to make most of the Bill of Rights applicable to the states, as well as to recognize substantive and procedural rights.

Its Equal Protection Clause requires each state to provide equal protection under the law to all people within its jurisdiction. Th state can not assume guilt and force the defendant to prove his innocence If the reason for the law is to protect against the offenders that pose a high risk to re offend at the present time then the state has a responsibility to the citizenry to prove on an indivisible basis that a person is dangerous. Since the data shows that 85-97% will not re offend it is the states responsibility to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a person falls within that 3-15% before the re-registration and the notification

Conclusions based on the state of Hawai Supreme Court decision in State versus Bani

CO - Denver Post article, shows eight amendment violation, for lack of treatment

Original Article

11/05/2013

By Will Bassler

An article in the Denver Post on November 3, 2013 was titled “Unintended effect of 1998 Colorado law: More sex offenders in for life”. This article brought to light that Colorado has not been offering treatment, as is required by law to people who have been sentenced for crimes. These people can only be released after receiving effective treatment and the state is not offering that treatment supposedly because of facilities and financial issues.

I responded back to the writer of the article, in hopes that he would do a follow-up article showing that the state of Colorado is not only acting irresponsibly but they are also opening themselves up to multimillion dollar lawsuits based on prior federal court decisions.

In reading your recent story in the Denver Post “Unintended effect of 1998 Colorado law” I thought about posting a response in the comments section , but realized my response would be way too long, especially considering I would be using direct quotes from a federal case stating that the state of Colorado cannot use the excuse of the necessity of funds, facilities or staff to justify lack of treatment. Also, the fact that in the same case the federal court has stated that just because someone commits a crime you cannot declare them mentally ill and require them to be in treatment.

The second part of this is the fact that there is a constitutional issue here that most people don’t want to deal with. Because of the Constitution and Bill of Rights of this country you’re allowed to dislike, even outright hate, a person or group that is all well and good. You have that right under the Constitution, what you do not have is the right force your ideas or Moral values, on other individuals. Just because of your dislike or fear of a group of people this does not give you the right to take away their constitutional protections. As soon as you start doing that you are destroying the very fabric that this country was built on and you become as un-American as somebody in another country burning an American flag or flying a plane into the World Trade Center. Think about it, if you want to retain your constitutional rights you have to fight to make sure that everyone keeps theirs, even the people that you dislike or hate.

Consider this information from federal cases.

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