Mitchell Hamline School of Law

Sex Offense Litigation and Policy Resource Center

Law Review

Beyond Strict Scrutiny: Forbidden Purpose and the “Civil Commitment” Power

Posted: June 29, 2018
Sex offender civil commitment (SOCC) is a massive deprivation of liberty as severe as penal incarceration. Because it eschews most of the "great safeguards" constraining the criminal power, SOCC demands careful constitutional scrutiny. Although the Supreme Court has clearly applied heightened scrutiny in judging civil commitment schemes, it has never actually specified where on the scrutiny spectrum its analysis falls. This article argues that standard three-tier scrutiny analysis is not the most coherent way to understand the Supreme Court’s civil commitment jurisprudence. Rather than a harm-balancing judgment typical of three-tier scrutiny, the Court’s civil commitment cases are best understood as forbidden purpose cases, a construct that is familiar in many areas of the Court’s constitutional analysis...

Beyond Strict Scrutiny: Forbidden Purpose and the “Civil Commitment” Power

Fourth Amendment Constraints on the Technological Monitoring of Convicted Sex Offenders

Posted: June 29, 2018
More than forty U.S. states currently track at least some of their convicted sex offenders using GPS devices. Many offenders will be monitored for life. The burdens and expense of living indefinitely under constant technological monitoring have been well documented, but most commentators have assumed that these burdens were of no constitutional moment because states have characterized such surveillance as “civil” in character — and courts have seemed to agree. In 2015, however, the Supreme Court decided in Grady v. North Carolina that attaching a GPS monitoring device to a person was a Fourth Amendment search, notwithstanding the ostensibly civil character of the surveillance. Grady left open the question whether the search — and the state’s technological monitoring program more generally — was constitutionally reasonable. This Essay considers the doctrine and theory of Fourth Amendment reasonableness as it applies to both current and envisioned sex offender monitoring technologies to evaluate whether the Fourth Amendment may serve as an effective check on post-release monitoring regimes.

Fourth Amendment Constraints on the Technological Monitoring of Convicted Sex Offenders

Challenging the Punitiveness of ‘New-Generation’ SORN Laws [Law Review]

Posted: June 29, 2018
Sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws have been in effect nationwide since the 1990s, and publicly available registries today contain information on hundreds of thousands of individuals. To date, most courts, including the Supreme Court in 2003, have concluded that the laws are regulatory, not punitive, in nature, allowing them to be applied retroactively consistent with the Ex Post Facto Clause. Recently, however, several state supreme courts, as well as the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, addressing challenges lodged against new-generation SORN laws of a considerably more onerous and expansive character, have granted relief, concluding that the laws are punitive in effect. This symposium contribution examines these decisions, which are distinct not only for their results, but also for the courts’ decidedly more critical scrutiny of the justifications, purposes, and efficacy of SORN laws. The implications of the latter development in particular could well lay the groundwork for a broader challenge against the laws, including one sounding in substantive due process, which unlike ex post facto-based litigation would affect the viability of SORN vis-à-vis current and future potential registrants.

Challenging the Punitiveness of ‘New-Generation’ SORN Laws [Law Review]

Topics

Jurisdiction

Constitutional Issues

Substantive Issues

Actual Innocence Administrative exhaustion Administrative Procedures Act AEDPA Antisocial Personality Disorder Apprendi / Alleyne As-Applied AWA Burden of Proof Churches Civil Commitment Collateral Estoppel Conditions of Confinement Conditions of Release Daubert Deregistration Evidentiary Standards Expungement Extraterritorial Registration Failure to Register Familial Relationships GPS Halloween Hearsay Heck bar Homelessness Housing HUD Immigration Ineffective Assistance International Travel Internet Identifiers Internet Restrictions Jury Instructions Juvenile Registration Mental disorder Non-Sexual Offense Notification Out-of-state Offense Paraphilia Diagnosis Pardon Parole Personality Disorder Plea Agreement Plethysmograph PLRA Polygraphs Preemption Presence Restrictions Procedural Default PROTECT Act Punishment Qualified Immunity Recidivism Reclassification Res Judicata Residential Banishment Retroactive Application (Non-EPF) Revocation of Supervision Risk School Property Second / Subsequent Offense Sentencing Sexual Predator designation Sign Posting Special Needs Supervised Release SVP Tiering / Classification Tolling Transitional Release Travel Travel Restrictions Treatment Programs