Sex Offenders to Register Emails in Virginia

Isaac Bowman writes "The Washington Post is reporting that Virgina has a proposed law that would require sex offenders to register their email and IM screen names in an attempt to monitor and control their presence on social networking sites like MySpace."

Comments

Re:Yes, that is right

[db32]

You mean like charging that one guy with tax evasion instead of all the murders, thefts, etc? It means if I catch Mr. Sex Offender IMing my daughter and it turns out he is a registered offender and didn't register that name...his ass his grass and he didn't even have to rape my daughter for me to be able to start the process of putting him away.

It amuses me how /.ers lament how broken our judicial system is, how lawyers can manipulate things to make the seemingly obvious charges turn into utter nonsense, how SCO and IBM have been battling the same insanity for years, how patents continue to wind up in court with armies of lawyers keeping the fight going for ages. I mean on some days everyone on /. understands how broken the system is and how a single seemingly obvious charge often won't work, yet something like this comes up and people start going on how stupid and pointless it is. It isn't stupid and pointless, its because the good lawyers know that 'silver bullet' method of doing things doesn't work, and if they stick to that one seemingly obvious charge all kinds of criminals will walk the streets because the lawyer at the other table will use 'reasonable doubt' to stop things. Or have we forgotten how OJ was innocent in criminal proceedings because of 'reasonable doubt', guilty in civil proceedings, and is now writing a damned book about "Well, I didn't do it, but if I DID do it, I would have done it like this".

Re:Security Theater.

[Deluge]

The registry is there so that rapists can be punished for the rest of their lives without having the state pay for them in prison. This is clearly the result of frustration over NOT being able to keep them locked up forever (or having them killed, or at LEAST castrated).

The problem with this is that for these types of criminals there's no such thing as having paid their debt to society. Wrecking someone's state of mind for the rest of their lives, be it a molested child's or a raped woman's, is not something that should be forgiven and forgotten, the way a theft can be. As a sexual offender, you don't deserve to 'start a new life' because your victim doesn't get to do that either. Your victim will likely have permanent psychological issues with forming relationships, trust, and a healthy attitude towards sex.

It's been mentioned before, but this kind of crime is much worse than simple murder. Murder inconveniences and temporarily saddens the victim's loved ones, but then they (in most cases) move on and all is more or less well. The victim's dead, they feel no pain. Sexual abuse victims have to live their lives out with a serious disturbance to their emotional health.

Sexual offenders deserve no leniency, no forgiveness, and certainly no one's pity for being exposed to their communities for what they are.

And before this gets modded troll or flamebait, relax, it's just my opinion.