Some states slow to comply with sex offender regulations

BALTIMORE - By ISAAC WOLF
Scripps Howard News Service

Four years ago, federal lawmakers thought they had addressed a significant national problem: A hodgepodge of state rules for overseeing convicted sex offenders was helping helps the criminals evade authorities.

Even worse, that patchwork of oversight also was resulting in sex offenders seeking out states to live in based on the jurisdictions' perceived lax rules.

But the federal law passed by Congress in 2006 has hit a major snag: States have blown deadline after deadline to upgrade their sex offender tracking systems.

As of September, only four states and two Indian tribes had satisfied the federal requirements to comply with the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA). The law calls on states to do the heavy lifting, generally including updating state laws and spending significant resources to revamp their reporting systems.

The requirements come as part of the 2006 Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act -- the landmark law aimed at addressing sex offenders. The rules call on states to largely synchronize their sex offender registries and rules overseeing convicted offenders. Once states follow the uniform rules, sex offenders will have a more difficult time crossing borders to evade investigators.

“It’ll be more difficult for them to slip through the cracks,” said Scott Matson, Senior Policy Advisor of the U.S. Justice Department’s Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering and Tracking (SMART) Office. Matson’s office is working with states and other jurisdictions to craft their rules.

SORNA focuses on creating national baseline standards for state sex offender registries, which can then be made even more stringent by state authorities.

Specific provisions include:
-- Requiring more information from sex offenders;
-- Specifying three tiers of sex offenders, based on the severity of their offense
-- Keeping offenders on the registry for at least 15 years, 25 years, or life, depending on the seriousness of the crime.

When the Adam Walsh Act was first passed, it gave states until July 2009 to meet the new rules. But July 2009 came and went without even one state fulfilling its obligation.  Two months later, Ohio became the first state to satisfy its federal requirement. Then, the deadline for other states was reset as July 2010, according to SMART Office documents.  Three other states -- Florida, Delaware and South Dakota -- have since complied.

Now, the Justice Department has set a new deadline for July 2011, and jurisdictions face a potential penalty of lost grant dollars if they miss it.   Matson says it’s too early to tell how many states and other jurisdictions will meet next year’s deadline.

But the broken deadlines aren’t just a bookkeeping matter. The effect of having uniform oversight rules will be better sex offender tracking, Matson says.  “All of those things are meant to shore up inconsistencies that exist now so an offender can’t move just to evade registration requirements,” Matson said.