H.R. 5722, "International Megan's Law"

I am currently constructing this page, but at the moment, it is sufficient to say that H.R. 5722, dubbed the "International Megan's Law," will prevent sex offenders from leaving the United States. That means that if a sex offender wants to remove themselves from the country, they will now be blocked from doing so. This is bad for everyone in the country. Sex offenders who are being persecuted by ever-tightening United States laws can't leave the country to make a new life elsewhere, and families that fear sex offenders living in their neighborhood now have a guarantee that said sex offenders will be motivated to stay in said neighborhood because they will now have no hope of getting out of the country. If you fear sex offenders, you should fear this bill ten times more, because now they're stuck in this country. Sure, there's always a possibility that the country they want to go to will allow it, but do you honestly think that's going to happen? Hmm? In the meantime, feel free to distribute this flyer around your neighborhood. Also, here is a recent E-mail response I sent out (partially edited) when asked to clarify the problems with H.R. 5722:

H.R. 5722 is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to sex offender laws that violate human rights, but our legal system seems to be conveniently configured to exclude sex offender rights wholesale under the modus operandi "the State has a significant interest in the protection of its people." H.R. 5722 is a law which would be in direct violation of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, if only the United States actually was a signatory to it. Signatories would not be explicitly allowed to deny sex offenders entry into their borders, as one of the DHR's sections deals specifically with the "right to change nationality." In my opinion, the "right to leave" is more crucial than all other freedoms combined, because without the ability to legally expatriate, one cannot legally escape persecution by the government of the nation of origin. My problem with specifically discussing H.R. 5722 is that it shares a common set of serious issues with most other sex offender laws in the country. When I speak of H.R. 5722, I might as well be speaking of all the other laws in the same breath! The specific problem with H.R. 5722 is the "right to leave" and I don't think you'll be able to write 30 pages on it alone without writing on all the other laws that precede its proposition in Congress (and remember that it is merely a proposed bill at the moment which has seen essentially no debate). While the fear of sex offender recidivism is based entirely upon an outright lie and therefore has very little basis in reality, the fact remains that a huge population of people in this country fear sex offenders greatly. The process of indirectly stripping the sex offender of the ability to expatriate forces a sex offender to stay here, which is the polar opposite of what a parent who is scared completely out of his or her mind wants--every sex offender that is in the country is viewed as a threat, and with the increasingly punitive (yet ironically dubbed "regulatory" for ex post facto purposes) laws being passed to "crack down" on sex offenders, many would prefer to "get the hell out of here." Do you think that the people in this country will like Congress preventing a sex offender from leaving the United States when said offender would do so quite readily otherwise? Since my post on H.R. 5722, I have had MANY concerned former sexual offenders send me mail saying that they were going to leave the country, but that this new bill may essentially destroy that dream of a new life somewhere else in the world. I don't know the policy reasons other than the usual mantra: "tough on crime" and "crack down on sex offenders" and "we have to look like we're actually accomplishing something so we can buy up some more votes." The policy reasons are the polar opposite of the (government originated!) scientific research on sex offenders showing that all the things we've passed in the last 15 years only serve to CAUSE recidivism. The legal ramifications are that sex offenders stay at home even if they want to leave. It means more convicted sex offenders stay in the United States permanently. It means that once a sex offenders, always a sex offender AND always in the United Sta tes. That hurts both the ex-offender AND the frightened parents that want sex offenders to magically vanish, a lose-lose in the eyes of both groups. The bill is disturbingly fiscally irresponsible, because it calls for the United States to spend our taxpayer dollars to help OTHER countries set up similar systems for international sex offender notification, presumably so that the US can deny entry to the sex offender trying to legally visit the country. Why should we spend tax money we don't even have on other nations' criminal management systems without some hard evidence and studies on the subject showing that it WILL benefit us somehow? Given the low sexual offense recidivism rates for convicted sex offenders, I don't see how any such system will even make a statistically significant impact on sex crimes in this country, much less justify giving millions of dollars to other countries around the world! There is no Constitutional right to "get the hell out." However, leaving the country is far more fundamental of a right than those enumerated in the Constitution: if you are unable to relocate, you're not free in any sense of the word. How can one fully exercise rights enumerated in the Constitution and Bill of Rights without being allowed to move around freely? Isn't leaving one's country the ultimate exercise of one's own personal freedom?

Questions? Comments? E-mail the Offender and let him know what you think!

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