High court strikes down youth-sex-offender rule

Associated Press

COLUMBUS

Requiring juvenile sex offenders convicted in juvenile courts to register as sex offenders for life amounts to cruel and unusual punishment and violates young offenders’ due-process rights, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in striking down another portion of a 2007 get-tough sex offender law.

The 5-2 decision overturned the mandatory lifelong notification requirement imposed on a 15-year-old Athens County boy convicted in 2009 on juvenile charges of raping a 6-year-old relative.

Not only is the requirement unconstitutional, it also defeats the purpose of the juvenile court system, Justice Paul Pfeifer said, writing for the majority.

The mandatory registration “undercuts the rehabilitative purpose of Ohio’s juvenile system and eliminates the important role of the juvenile court’s discretion in the disposition of juvenile offenders and thus fails to meet the due- process requirement of fundamental fairness,” Justice Pfeifer wrote.

He also said it defeats another goal of the juvenile court system: cloaking children in confidentiality and allowing them to avoid stigma once they have served their time in the juvenile system and become adults.

“Confidentiality promotes rehabilitation by allowing the juvenile to move into adulthood without the baggage of youthful mistakes,” Justice Pfeifer said.

An attorney for the Athens County boy told the court that a judge had ruled that the boy could be fairly treated as a juvenile. Yet the 2007 law “conferred on him an automatic, public, and lifetime penalty, typically reserved for adult offenders,” according to a Sept. 30, 2010, filing by Brooke Burns, an assistant state public defender.