April 9, 2019 | By Aaron Marcus
Two years ago, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court shook up long-settled orthodoxy by ruling that the state’s sex offender registration law, otherwise known as SORNA (Sexual Offender Registration and Notification Act) was punishment. The case, Commonwealth v. Muniz, 164 A.3d 1189 (Pa. 2018), presented the Court with two questions: whether people who committed their crimes before the adoption of the law could continue to be registered without running afoul of the state Constitution’s Ex Post Facto Clause, a fairness doctrine that prevents governments from retroactively applying greater punishments to conduct than could have been applied at the time of the crime; and, second, whether the law more broadly violates due process by unfairly labeling a person as sexually dangerous without first proving that fact and without giving the person an opportunity to challenge that message. While the Court answered the first question with a resounding yes, it punted on the second.
The effect of that decision meant that although Pennsylvania was forced to reduce the length of registration for many people who had committed their crimes many years before, or in many cases remove them from the registry altogether, it did little to change how the law would be applied moving forward. SORNA was largely left undisturbed for the roughly 1500 new people added to the registry every year. The due process issue left undecided by the Pennsylvania high court in Muniz is now again before that court, and this time it will be harder to avoid deciding it.
One of the first people to be required to register under the new law was the defendant in Commonwealth v. Torsilieri. Torsilieri was convicted by a jury of a non-consensual sexual offense. He had no prior record, the jury acquitted him of the most serious charges, and according to the trial judge he did not pose a risk of committing other crimes. Yet, SORNA automatically required him to register for the remainder of his life. He is now 27. Not willing to accept that consequence, Torsilieri filed a pre-sentence motion seeking to bar his registration under nine different theories. Specifically, he relied on the Pennsylvania Constitution’s Declaration of Rights, which treats the right to reputation as fundamental and deserving of the same protections our federal constitution affords to life, liberty and property. He also raised other claims under the state and federal constitutions, notably that SORNA is overbroad on its face and therefore cannot be applied to anyone without violating their rights to due process.
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