"A regulatory regime that severely restricts where people can live, work, and “loiter,” that categorizes them into tiers ostensibly corresponding to present dangerousness without any individualized assessment thereof, and that requires time-consuming and cumbersome in-person reporting, all supported by—at best—scant evidence that such restrictions serve the professed purpose of keeping Michigan communities safe, is something altogether different from and more troubling than Alaska’s first-generation registry law. SORA brands registrants as moral lepers solely on the basis of a prior conviction. It consigns them to years, if not a lifetime, of existence on the margins, not only of society, but often, as the record in this case makes painfully evident, from their own families, with whom, due to school zone restrictions, they may not even live. It directly regulates where registrants may go in their daily lives and compels them to interrupt those lives with great frequency in order to appear in person before law enforcement to report even minor changes to their information."Obviously this is a Michigan registry and a Sixth Circuit case. It is still an important one because hopefully lines are being drawn as sex offender registries get more and more onerous on our clients. Also important in this decision is that an Ex Post Challenge was effective. While it has seemed like these challenges were dying on the vine, maybe there is still some room left.
Also important is that the Sixth Circuit put weight in the research that shows that maybe these registries aren't as effective as we thought/hoped they would be. It appears from the opinion that the government was not very effective at proving that they were. Good to see a court looking into the evidence to support such a registry.