Sex Offender Case Law Update (Part I)

Update: As discussed on Professor Doug Berman’s Sentencing Blog, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts recently determined that the GPS monitoring law in that state is punitive in effect, and therefore may not be applied to defendants initially placed on probation for acts committed before the law’s enactment. The court’s opinion in Commonwealth v. Cory is available  here. It’s interesting that the Massachusetts regime was deemed punitive even though offenders there are monitored only for the duration of their probation, whereas North Carolina’s regime, in which monitoring can continue well beyond a defendant’s formal supervision period, was deemed nonpunitive in Bare and Anderson. Original Post: In the past month or so our appellate courts have issued several opinions related to sex offender registration and monitoring. I'm not sure we've reached the point where we have more answers than questions, but I thought it might be a good time to recap what the courts have said thus far. I'll start today with a recap of two recent satellite-based monitoring cases, and then follow up with Part II discussing two cases regarding changes of address for sex offender registration purposes. I wrote earlier about State v. Bare, the case decided June 16, 2009, in which the Court of Appeals rejected the defendant's argument that North Carolina's satellite-based monitoring (SBM) regime, as applied to a defendant whose crime occurred prior to the law's enactment, violated the ex post facto clauses of the North Carolina and United States constitutions. The defendant claimed that the SBM [...]