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MySpace Gets False Positive In Sex Offender Search
gbulmash writes "In its eagerness to clear sex offenders off its site and publish their identities, MySpace identified an innocent woman as a sex offender. She shares a name and birth month with a sex offender who lives in a neighboring state and that was apparently enough to get MySpace to wrongly brand her and completely ignore her protests."
You also ignore that the register sex offender was registered in Utah and that the woman whose page was taken down lived in Colorado and Florida previously, but not in Utah. so your same place argument falls too.
Did you RTFA before spouting off? Oh wait
This is the premise, but the problem is it isn't really true. Pedophiles who target victims outside of their own family are much more likely to re-offend than most other criminals. Other sex offenders are not. Published sex offender registries are not restricted to the class of sex offenders that are much more likely to re-offend.
Of course, there is also the problem that the registries, even where they list people who are more likely to reoffend, do little to actually protect anyone.
As other people have pointed out your are COMPLETELY wrong about your recividism statistics, which are meaningless themselves unless broken down by type of crime committed. "Sex offender" is a meaningless title because the crimes that fall within its umbrella are extremely varied. Peeing in an alley (indecent exposure) and rape (of any age) are both "sex offenses". So is "producing child pornography" by the child him/herself for his/her own use read this /. post
And you altogether miss the point: Sex offender registries are made to make people feel safe. But how about the great majority of sex offenders who just have not been caught yet? The pool of potential offenders is large enough that rates of sexual crimes don't go down when you lock up the ones you catch.
As a parent, I don't give a shit about the registries. I make sure my kids don't come into contact with any adults they don't know, expect of course in group situations like school or sports where they are not alone. When it comes to my wife, she takes general precautions to keep herself safe. What the hell am I supposed to do with a map showing all the sex offenders living around me? Knock on their doors and ask them to be nice? Tell the guy my daughter can't go to his house?
Its easy to say that sex offenders have a high recidivism rate, but what facts do you have to support it? There are a number of studies showing sex offenders as have the second lowest recidivism rate of all offenders (homicide being lowest).
Want proof? There are 11884 registered sex offenders in the state of North Carolina (tally up the offenders from this page http://www.ncfindoffender.com/stats.aspx). Now do a search of recidivist http://www.ncfindoffender.com/search.aspx and there are only 71. Sorry, that is not a high recidivism rate.
I also had my account deleted from MySpace. I am actually a registered sex offender. I also play music. I had a page for my music. I'm not going to cry about it because MySpace can allow and kick off who they want to. The thing that bothers me is the ignorance that is floated as fact about sex offenders. It ultimately does less to protect children. The truth is you have more concern about your child being a victim of a family member than someone on the registry re-offending.
From the perspective of a past offender, I'm glad I was caught and convicted (I ended up being incarcerated for 15 months). It gave me the chance to get into therapy, deal with the screwed up things in my life. I now life a very happy, healthy and productive life.
Really? You have evidence of any major news outlet going to court and admitting they intentionally lied to viewers and that it was legal for them to do so? I'd like to see some citation of that.
See CBS News, where Dan Rather insisted for several days after the documents were posted to LGF and other blogs that there was no evidence of forgery in the Killian memos.Googling for that story I find:
Although CBS and Rather defended the authenticity and usage of the document for a two-week period, continued scrutiny from independent and rival news organizations and independent analysis of other copies of the documents obtained by USA Today raised questions about the documents' validity and led to a public repudiation on September 20, 2004. Rather stated, "if I knew then what I know now - I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question,"CBS did not defend their right to lie in court and neither did Dan Rather. They claimed that as soon as they found reliable evidence that the documents were faked they admitted to that and they claim that if they knew they were fake they would not have published the story. They did not say they knew they were fake but that it was okay for them to publish them anyway because they have no legal responsibility to not tell lies.
Sorry, your comparison is way off. That is not the same issue at all. CBS at least publicly claims they will always print what they think is the truth. They have never openly defended intentionally lying to the audience.
I frequently see this claim as a justification for demonizing sex offenders, but I've never seen any hard data to back it up. And the U.S. Department of Justice seems to disagree.