Sex-Offender Notification Laws Raise Complex Issues

Virginia Doyle’s 6-year-old was emptying his backpack the other day--hockey team schedules, fliers from school clubs, lunch menus--when out came a sealed, official-looking envelope that he handed her with purpose. “They said to make sure you see this,” he said.

Doyle expected to find a letter from a teacher or perhaps a report card when she pulled out what resembled a wanted poster saying, “SEX OFFENDER RELEASE NOTICE,” in inch-high letters. Underneath were a photograph, name and description of a convicted sex offender living near her children’s school.

Even before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Feb. 23 to let stand New Jersey’s “Megan’s Law,” the template for sex-offender notification statutes in effect in 47 states, authorities here and nationally began moving aggressively to alert communities to sex offenders in their midst--and tapping an ever-expanding array of communications networks to do so.

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As a result, thousands of children, parents, employers, landlords and neighbors find themselves in a new, information-drenched world in which names of sex offenders are being delivered to their front doors by police, posted on the Internet, e-mailed across campuses, displayed on telephone poles, published in newspapers and, in New Jersey’s latest variation on the theme, sent home like a report card in a child’s backpack.

Differences in laws from one state to the next are raising widely varying issues--from Louisiana, where newspapers are required to publish photographs of released child sex offenders, to New Jersey, where residents are explicitly warned of prosecution for leaking notices to the press.

At the Doyle household 25 miles east of Philadelphia, the entry into this new world went fairly smoothly, despite warnings from the law’s critics that it would incite panic and vigilantism. Doyle said she and her three children sat down for a long, difficult talk about 7-year-old Megan Kanka of central New Jersey, the law’s namesake, who was kidnapped, raped and murdered in 1994 by a released sex offender who had moved in across the street.

Doyle and several other parents interviewed said they welcome the chance to reinforce safety precautions with children. “I feel more comfortable, knowing they’ll be aware,” Doyle said. But several said they would have been horrified if children had read the notices on their own.

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New Jersey is one of 18 states sending pictures and addresses of all known high-risk sex offenders directly to area homes and businesses, usually via police officers.

In other states, notification is more passive. In California, residents can go to sheriffs’ offices and view a database of more than 60,000 sex offenders by ZIP Code. In New York, a 900 number soon will offer residents information for $5 on sex offenders living nearby. Florida, Kansas, Alaska, Indiana, Georgia, Michigan and Oregon have World Wide Web sites with offenders’ names, addresses and photos.

New Jersey passed its Megan’s Law in October 1994, four months after Megan’s murder, and in 1996 Congress passed a federal version requiring states to pass sex-offender notification laws or risk losing federal law enforcement money. Only Kentucky, New Mexico and Nebraska have yet to enact laws, but legislatures there are considering them.

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New Jersey’s system, revised by several court rulings, is unique, said Todd Mitchell of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Arlington, Va., because it joins the most aggressive notification technique with the most aggressive privacy protections for offenders.

The unusual combination reflects the collision of a powerful parents’ right-to-know movement with a state Supreme Court long known as a civil liberties bastion. It requires that notifications go only to those “likely to encounter” high-risk offenders. Notices are hand-delivered by police to homes and businesses in a court-approved radius--from a few blocks to two miles--but also are sent outside it to parents whose children attend school within it.

Offenders designated by prosecutors as “high risk”--which triggers a door-to-door notification--or “moderate risk” can challenge the designation before a judge, as well as the scope of the notification. Moreover, every notice comes complete with warnings that anyone who leaks them to the press or even “beyond your immediate household” could be prosecuted.

The limits already have raised 1st Amendment questions. In January, the Home News Tribune in East Brunswick, N.J., published a front-page picture and article on the first sex offender in the area whose neighbors were notified. Local prosecutors immediately launched an investigation to find the leak, so far without result, and Atty. Gen. Peter Verniero summoned newspaper executives to warn against “abuse” of the law.

“After all the court challenges we’ve had, I felt they could have jeopardized our law,” said Maureen Kanka, Megan’s mother, who also spoke out.

The Home News Tribune stood firm. “Megan and Megan’s Law are huge stories in New Jersey, and this was the first notification and in our opinion that made it news,” said managing editor Teresa Klink. “We take the position it is not up to prosecutors to decide what news is. That’s what editors are for.”

More recently, WPVI-TV of Philadelphia obtained a leaked notice about the Pemberton Township flier and aired it Feb. 25.

The experience here is significant because the Center for Missing and Abused Children, which helped the Kanka family campaign for notification laws, views New Jersey’s law as “a model for other states to emulate,” Mitchell said, because it is “battle-tested” by state and federal courts and “looks like it balances” interests of children and parents with rights of offenders.

Critics of the laws say, however, that the incidents here raise questions about whether the balancing act can work.

“How do you have a uniformed officer show up at the door to tell people about a high-risk person and then say, ‘Don’t let us catch you talking to the press or neighbors?’ ” asked Ed Martone of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey. “I think we’re in the early stages of seeing this just isn’t something government can do.”

A Pemberton mother, who insisted on anonymity for fear of being prosecuted for even talking to a reporter, said she supports Megan’s Law but feels “very uneasy about this order not to talk. So much has changed since I was a child. You never locked doors; now you lock every door. Maybe this is just something else we have to learn to live with.”

The New Jersey system is proving to be extremely labor-intensive. All 21 New Jersey counties have a “Megan’s Unit” in the prosecutor’s office to coordinate registering released offenders, assessing their risk, litigating their court challenges to risk rankings and notification plans and then overseeing police, schools and community leaders who disseminate notices.

“We have a five-person unit, three lawyers, a detective and a secretary, and this is all we do, full time,” said assistant Union County prosecutor Maureen O’Brien in central New Jersey.