WASHINGTON The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that states may put pictures of convicted sex offenders on the Internet without unconstitutionally punishing them twice, a victory for states that use the Web to warn of potential predators in neighborhoods.
Finally! Some sense has been made.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for six justices, said that the law is not punitive, and therefore it does not punish the inmates after the fact.
“Our system does not treat dissemination of truthful information in furtherance of a legitimate governmental objection as punishment,” he wrote. “The purpose and the principal effect of notification are to inform the public for its own safety, not to humiliate the offender.”
Yep.
In a dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that “however plain it may be that a former sex offender currently poses no threat of recidivism, he will remain subject to long-term monitoring and inescapable humiliation.”
Justice Ginsburg, them’s the breaks. There is no class of criminal I think more richly deserves such humiliation as someone who would sexually abuse and (in some recent cases) murder a small child. No matter how much you reform and apologize and try to make it up, you’ve destroyed at least one life and ruined countless others. It would not bother me one whit to see states make child molestation a capital offense. A few justifiable hangin’s and Amber Alerts would be few and far between.
You can talk all you want about a free society and fairness and unlikelihood of recidivism, but most child molesters ARE recidivists. It’s a sickness, and the only way to cure it is either to make damn sure that everyone keeps an eye on the sicko and prevents him from striking again, or to simply execute him as being unfit for human association. TOUGH. SHIT. If I had a minor daughter or son and one of these assholes got within spitting distance of her or him, both barrels of my 12-gauge would be a-firin’ in his general direction. BELIEVE IT.