The Crossed Pond

The Wisconsin Supreme Court looks at the case of a 17-year-old boy who forced another 17-year-old boy to accompany him as he went to collect a debt. The boy was charged with falsely imprisoning a minor, and in Wisconsin that’s classed, automatically, as a sex crime, despite the fact that in this case there was no sex involved anywhere. So, when the boy failed to register as a sex offender, making the pretty reasonable assumption that that designation didn’t apply to him, he was arrested again. The court reviewing this arrest took a rational basis approach, and concluded that the purpose of sex offender registration isn’t really about sex – it’s about protecting the public and assisting law enforcement. In this case, even though the boy didn’t commit any sexual crimes, if the law putting him on the sex offender registry might concievably protect children from him, it’s kosher.

So, there you have it. Sex offender registries: not just for sex offenders anymore.

I always think of this thing when I hear about the ticking time bomb scenarios and things that fall under the rubric of “protecting our security”. Like “thinking of the children”, “protecting our security” winds up meaning different things to different people, usually defaulting, as time goes on, to a more and more expansive definition. But nobody wants to be seen as protecting child molesters and terrorists, so we refuse to impose strict definitions and limits and, before you know it, teen thugs are classed as sex offenders and journalists critical of the United States and who publish classified documents wind up being classed as terrorists. Because think of the children/security.