Many municipalities have recently been hampered in their attempts to keep registered sex offenders out of their communities due to our liberal justices overturning local ordinances concerning restrictions on where these offenders can reside.
This is typical of the situation that is occurring all over the state of New Jersey. The question is how did we even get to the point where a sex offender is being given more rights than the safety of our communities and more importantly the children who live in them? For that we have to go back to the history behind the passage of Megan’s Law.
Megan Kanka was brutalized and murdered by a convicted sex offender, in Hamilton Twp., Mercer County, NJ. The Legislature quickly enacted Megan’s Law.
Originally Megan’s law was one complete package which included both the registration of sex offenders and the idea of community notification once a sex offender moved into any community. Senator Peter Inverso and I were the original sponsors of this legislation. However, prior to coming to a vote, I started having reservations about the notification provision. Not because of the idea of notification, but because I was worried about the idea of what appeared to be a penalty added to a sentence after an offender was released from custody.
It would have been akin to a bank robber being sentenced to a minimum 10 years in jail, starting to serve their jail time and then having the sentencing statutes changed to a minimum of 15 years and having 5 years added to the sentence. The defense lawyers would have had a field day with it and the sentences would have been overturned and these folks would have been released.
Then, along comes Megan's law, which wanted to add notification to the penalty of the time served in jail. No one would argue the idea, but I thought that doing it after the fact would be a problem. So, after discussion, legislative leaders decided to break Megan's law into two sections, a registration provision and a notification provision.
Senator John Mathusen and I became the prime sponsors on the registration provision and my colleagues, Senator Peter Inverso and Senator Gerald Cardinale were as the prime sponsors on the notification provision. None of us saw what was coming next.
After the law was passed, both provisions were litigated virtually immediately. Ultimately, the registration provision was found to be within constitution boundaries and not deemed to be additional punishment. However, the notification provision was determined to be unconstitutional because it was adding punishment after the fact or, ex post facto. This now brings us to today.
Communities all across New Jersey are attempting to restrict where these sex offenders can reside. However, it is the same problem that was met with the notification provision. They will be deemed as punishment after the fact and when it goes to court, and it will, these provisions will be found unconstitutional.
The legislature can solve this. All they need to do is add notification to the sentencing penalty for "newly' convicted sex offenders. They then need to pass legislation allowing municipalities to restrict where these examples of human waste can reside. We can't allow future offenders to be unaffected by the lack of new and good laws that can be effective. Current offenders will always have to be watched and we can keep litigating, but we have to fix the fundamental problem.
The singular problem is that the solution can only be proactive, not retro-active because of how both the laws work and clearly how our liberal courts work. Unfortunately in this case, the courts are actually right about retroactive punishment.
I firmly believe that people who involve themselves in harming children and juveniles are the lowest form of human life and deserve the most severe punishment the law can provide. However, it is up to the legislature to craft and pass the appropriate laws and then up to the prosecutors to use these tools to their fullest extent.
Even the federal government has Megan's Law as do other countries. So, most of the world agrees with what needs to be done. But, clearly, we have a problem that has to be addressed and corrected here and now.
The lives of the innocent, such as Megan Kanka, cannot be simply cast aside because we are too lax to take the proper steps or too lazy to stay on the case or prosecutors too lazy to use all the tools at their disposal. This is all our responsibility. Call your legislator today and ask for action on these two ideas.
Do it now, before one of these scourges ends up living next to you.
