Poignant Yet Perplexing Statement by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Thank you Justice Sotomayor for bringing the issue front and center.

ARNOLD, MO, UNITED STATES, March 1, 2022 /EINPresswire.com/ -- “It plays like a movie,” says Vicki Henry, President of Women Against Registry. Based on a true case in Minnesota a law enforcement list of those convicted of a sexual offense was assembled. Years later it was determined the perpetrator was not on the list. Notice should be given to a study indicating the recidivism rate began dropping in 1994 prior to the first ‘list’ yet in 2022 the proposed laws are flooding the state legislatures. During election cycles, public safety is always a great campaign strategy. Hence the registry is nearing one-million men, women, and children who are listed on the registry.

An alarm was sounded recently by Justice Sonia Sotomayor¹ involving a New York case before the U.S. Supreme Court where they could either accept or deny a Writ of Certification (cert). In Justice Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion² she blatantly called attention to New York’s residential prohibition, as applied to New York City, ‘raises serious constitutional concerns.’

“Rather than tailor its policy to the geography of New York City or provide shelter options for this group, New York has chosen to imprison people who cannot afford compliant housing past both their conditional release date and the expiration of their maximum sentences,” she wrote. Yet they declined to correct a mistake involving a human being’s liberty.

This practice by New York and some other states continues the invisible binding of those who have paid their debt to society and trickles down to their family and is a factor in our country being known as ‘the incarceration nation’ with 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s incarcerated.

Against this backdrop, Sonia Sotomayor notes, multiple scholars, courts, and law enforcement agencies have all acknowledged that residency restrictions do not reduce recidivism and could actually increase the likelihood of reoffending.

Thank you, Justice Sotomayor, for bringing the issue front-and-center to our nation. Hopefully, the Court will begin hearing cases and give state legislators assistance in finding the ‘point of correction.’

Of note is an empirically reviewed research paper made available in 2021. The Effectiveness of Sex Offender Registration and Notification³: A meta-analysis of 25 years of findings. It examined 25 years of "Sex Offender" Registration and Notification (SORN) evaluations and their effects on recidivism.

"We relied on methodology guidelines established by the Campbell Collaboration for meta-analyses to systematically synthesize results from 18 research articles including 474,640 formerly incarcerated individuals."

The random-effects meta-analysis model demonstrated that SORN does not have a statistically significant impact on recidivism. This null effect exists when examining a combined model and when disaggregating studies by sexual or nonsexual offenses, or conceptualizing recidivism by arrest or conviction.

Supreme Court nominee Jackson maintained that "even in the face of understandable public outrage over repeat sexual predators, a principled prevention/punishment analysis evaluates the effect of the challenged legislation in a manner that reinforces constitutional safeguards against unfair and unnecessarily burdensome legislative action."

We are proud to say the researchers, women of the Court like Justice Sotomayor, and recently nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace retiring Justice Breyer to the bench are the truth seekers who are brave enough to see a wrong and seek to correct it.

Conclusions - SORN policies demonstrate no effect on recidivism. This finding holds important policy implications given the extensive adoption and net-widening of penalties related to SORN.

J. J. Ribardi
Women Against Registry
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¹ http://courthousenews.com/sotomayor-sounds-constitutional-alarm-on-ny-residency-law-for-sex-offenders/
² https://ww1.womenagainstregistry.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/ORTIZ-v-BRESLIN-SCOTUS-2_22_2022.pdf
³ https://ww1.womenagainstregistry.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/The-effectiveness-of-Sex-Offender-Registration-and-Notification-A-meta-analysis-of-25-years-of-findings.pdf