SUPREME COURT LIMITS SEX REGISTRATION REQUIREMENTS

The Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), became law July 27, 2006. It requires all sex offenders to register. As part of the registration they must provide their name, address, business address, and school status. Everyone who has been convicted of certain sex offenses must register, regardless of whether the conviction predated or post-dated SORNA’s passage.

Those who are convicted after SORNA’s passage must register before getting out of custody. Those who are not given a jail sentence must register within three days of the conviction. The law does not specify when those who were convicted prior to the passage of SORNA must register. Rather the law authorizes the attorney general to determine the specific registration conditions for pre-enactment convictions.

The question before the Supreme Court this week in Reynolds v. United States is a rather limited one. But it has created a fair amount of debate among the courts of appeal which have spit their decisions. It is whether those convicted prior to the attorney general issuing his specifications had to register after the passage of the act but before the attorney general issued his specifications.

The Supreme Court ruled that there was no requirement for pre-enactment convictions to register prior to the isuance of the attorney general’s specifications. Since the attorney general must set the registration specification for a subset of those required to register (pre-enactment convictions) the court found it reasonable to believe that the condition for the attorney general to set the registration specifications modified the registration requirement for pre-enactment convictions. SORNA attempts to unify many different state registration laws. Different states require different people to register and provide time periods for this to happen. According to the Supreme Court, Congress could have felt that by putting off pre-enactment conviction from having to register until after the specifications were issued many problems could be avoided. Finally Congress did not specify a time line for pre-enactment registration it only reasonable to wait until after the attorney general general’s specifications are listed to require registration for pre-enactrment convictions.