SORNA Tier Chart

Over two years ago I said I would someday try to sort North Carolina’s reportable sex crimes into the tiers set out in the federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA). Today’s the day. The chart is available here. I’ve written about why SORNA offense tiering matters in many previous posts. Here is the short summary. A superior court judge cannot grant a sex offender’s petition to terminate registration if doing so would violate “the provisions of the federal Jacob Wetterling Act, as amended, and any other federal standards applicable to the termination of a registration requirement or required to be met as a condition for the receipt of federal funds by the State.” G.S. 14-208.12A(a1)(2). The most important federal standard that a judge must consider when hearing a petition to terminate registration is the length of registration that would be required for the offense under SORNA. Federal law sorts crimes into three tiers—Tier I, Tier II, and Tier III—that require registration for 15 years (reducible to 10 in certain circumstances), 25 years, and life, respectively. Without knowing the federal tier into which a state crime would fall, the judge hearing the petition would not know if the offender has been registered long enough to comply with the federal minimum registration period for that type of offense, and thus would not know whether granting the petition would comply with federal standards, as required by G.S. 14-208.12A(a1)(2). In the chart linked above, I attempted to place every reportable offense in North [...]