Branded for Life: Convict registries

Pubdate: Tue, 27 Feb 2007
Source: Janesville Gazette (WI)Copyright: 2007 Bliss Communications, Inc
Contact: http://www.gazetteextra.com/contactus/lettertoeditor.asp
Website: http://www.gazetteextra.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1356
Author: Todd Richmond, Associated Press

STATES CREATE MORE REGISTRIES TO TRACK, DETER CRIMINALS
MADISON, Wis. - Police found 29-year-old Leah Gustafson in a pool of blood in her apartment last year. Next to her was her collector sword. She'd been stabbed through the heart.
A blood trail led police in Superior, Wis., to an apartment across the street, where her killer, Jason Borelli, had just gotten out of the shower. Borelli got life in prison.
"This is something nobody else should go through," said 32-year-old Kelly Ziebell of Superior, Gustafson's friend since high school. "It feels like an empty hole without her."
Motivated by the murder, Ziebell and others who knew Gustafson have spent the past year pushing lawmakers in Wisconsin and Minnesota to join a growing a number of states that have created a variety of databases to let the public know the whereabouts of criminals.
Modeled after the ubiquitous sex offender registries, the new online databases tell users whether the person mowing the lawn next door ever cooked methamphetamine, kidnapped a child or killed somebody.
Supporters say people deserve to know whether they might be in danger."That would make people more cautious about who their neighbors are," Ziebell said.
...

*****

Years ago in Law School I took a course in Chinese Law during the Rule of the Gang of Four (that lets you know a little bit about how old I am!). The professor, trying to demonstrate the cultural differences, told us of the Chinese idiom: "to cap someone as a criminal", and pointed out that in some Chinese institutions, those serving sentences actually wore caps like dunce caps. He contrasted that to the English/American idiom of "branding someone as a felon". That idiom, about three hundred years ago, was no idiom but a literal truth: convicts were branded (or had their ears cut off) as a permanent mark of their conviction.

Branding someone eliminates all possibility of change or reform; the brand remains. It's a life sentence with no possibility of parole.

Contrast that to our concept of measured sentences: incarceration is punishment, and the amount of punishment should be proportionate to the crime committed. Once the sentence is complete, then the obligations of the convict to the state are over and he is free to resume his life.

A lifetime branding, or registry, continues that obligation long past the time set by the convicting jury. The convict has to continue paying long after his debt has been discharged.

Have no doubt about it: a registration is a continuing punishment: it limits the places one can live. Landlords will refuse to rent (In my townhouse complex just this year someone posted the picture and registration information of a new tenant -- I guess that was so we would all gather with our torches, tar, and feathers to escort him from the premises). Employers will refuse to hire. Some businesses will refuse service. That is punishment.

And for what reason? So that people will be afraid of him and try to prevent him from committing another crime. If the recidivism rate was 100%, this kind of activity might be justified, but for the normal rates of criminal recidivism, this is merely punishing someone because we think he might commit a crime in the future. Does this meet the standards of due process?

Arguments are made that child sexual assaulters are sick, cannot control themselves, and cannot be cured. This statement like all universals, is overbroad. But even it were generally true, wouldn't a better approach be to use a civil committment process and require the state to prove that this individual (not this class of people in general) presents a real and current danger to others?

Please note how this hysteria contrasts to another, quieter, movement that has been going on across this country for several decades now. Historically, felony convicts forfeited their civil rights, including the right to vote. Almost all states have now returned at least some of those rights to them.

As for registering drug dealers? Maybe it would make them easier for would-be customers to find. It might be good advertising.