SORNA Compliance Legislation

I’ve written before about how North Carolina’s law related to sex offender registration has changed over the years in response to federal mandates. In 2006 Congress passed the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, Title I of which is the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, or SORNA. SORNA includes a set of minimum standards related to sex offender registration that all states must substantially implement or lose 10 percent of their federal Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant money. (To give you a sense of scale, North Carolina’s JAG allocation in 2010 was about $8.7 million.) SORNA initially required jurisdictions to substantially implement its requirements by July of 2009. North Carolina—along with just about every other state—has received two one-year extensions, pushing our compliance deadline to July 27, 2011. With that deadline approaching, a SORNA compliance bill (HB 772) was introduced in the General Assembly a few weeks ago. I don’t generally want to offer much comment on pending legislation, but because some of the provisions in the bill would apply retroactively, people whose cases are pending now (who might, for instance, be in the midst of plea negotiations) may be interested to know how the law would affect them. A major change made in the bill is to eliminate the definitions of “aggravated offense” and “sexually violent offense” and instead classify offenses into three tiers as follows: TIER I OFFENSES Sexual battery (G.S. 14‑27.5A); Sexual servitude (G.S. 14‑43.13), where the facts of the case show the victim was not a minor [...]