SJC set to hear case on registry

Fourteen months after Governor Mitt Romney vowed to post information about convicted sex offenders on the Internet, the state's highest court will hear arguments tomorrow on whether the plan would violate the rights of criminals.

Some 40 states, plus the District of Columbia, identify sex offenders online, but a similar effort in Massachusetts was derailed last year when public defenders representing poor clients won an injunction blocking the dissemination of the information. The Supreme Judicial Court will decide whether to rescind the order, in a case that weighs concerns about civil liberties against public safety.

The public defenders contend that the plan to post the identities and photographs of Level 3 sex offenders, considered the most dangerous and most likely to reoffend, would violate fundamental liberty and privacy rights in the state Constitution. They also say it could spur vigilantism and increase sex crimes by making it easier for pornographers and others with prurient interests to contact rapists and molesters.

But the state Sex Offender Registry Board, which classifies convicted sex offenders and would maintain the website, says fears of retribution are overblown and that putting the information online would alert people to dangerous criminals in their midst. The board denies that disseminating the information would violate anyone's constitutional rights given that the information is currently available at the board itself, local police stations, and other sources.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, 11 cities and towns, and a victims assistance group agreed. In a friend-of-the-court brief, they argue that public safety trumps the privacy rights of the criminals.

"Sex offenders . . . are likely to reoffend, and they are unlikely to be cured," the groups argue. "They prey on the innocent and vulnerable, and they wreak havoc as domestic terrorists. . . . It is a difficult task to determine how to balance society's need for protection against an individual's constitutional rights; however, [we] firmly believe that the Internet legislation meets the challenge."

The battle lines resemble those drawn in other states in recent years as online registries have become popular with citizens horrified by highly publicized sex crimes.

In 1996, two years after a 7-year-old New Jersey girl, Megan Kanka, was killed by a neighbor who had a record as a child molester, Congress began requiring states to establish sex-offender registries to track the whereabouts of criminals after they leave prison. But most states have gone further, putting the information gathered under so-called Megan's Laws on Web pages, along with photographs and graphic accounts of crimes.

The Romney administration has sought to post the name, home and work addresses, physical description, and photograph of anyone deemed a Level 3 offender on the registry's website. As of last Thursday, 973 of the state's 6,807 registered sex offenders fell into that category, according to a spokesman for the registry.

Romney announced in April of last year that the Sex Offender Registry Board would put the information on its website the following month. But the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the public defender agency, filed suit to block it, and a Superior Court judge issued an injunction.

Trying another tack, Romney introduced a bill, passed by the Legislature in November, to post the information on the website. But the public defenders again objected. A different Superior Court judge sided with Romney and Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly but agreed to keep the injunction in place until the matter was appealed.

The practice of identifying sex offenders through the Internet has withstood legal challenges in other states. But Carol A. Donovan, a lawyer for the public defender agency, which is representing five unidentified Level 3 sex offenders in the case before the SJC, said the outcome might be different in Massachusetts.

The SJC has signaled in earlier cases that sex offenders have constitutionally protected liberty and privacy interests and that the dissemination of information on them is justified only to the extent that the public is endangered.

By identifying offenders through the Internet, Donovan said in her brief, the state seeks nothing less than "worldwide dissemination" of information about people who are already "pariahs in their communities."

Her clients have been the targets of taunts, obscene phone calls, and vandalism as a result of information distributed by police in communities where offenders live or work through fliers, local cable television, and newspapers, she said. Identifying them on the Web, she said, "expands the pool of potential vigilantes from those in the community to those in nearby cities and towns who may easily find and terrorize them and their families."

But lawyers from Reilly's office, who are defending the plan, call such fears exaggerated. They say the public defenders have not cited one incident in the United States in which a sex offender was harassed as a result of being identified on the Internet, and argued that interest in the website would drop the further one is from Massachusetts.

"The plaintiffs simply assume that law-abiding citizens will suddenly become hostile and malevolent vigilantes bent on threatening and menacing sex offenders the moment the Board launches its website," the lawyers said in their brief. "While . . . Internet dissemination could have an unpleasant and embarrassing impact on sex offenders' lives, any such impact should not be blown out of proportion."

In addition, Reilly's lawyers said, the planned website features a warning that anyone who uses the information to engage in illegal discrimination or harassment can be punished with up to 2 years in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Although the SJC has recognized that a convicted sex offender has constitutionally protected liberty and privacy interests, Reilly's lawyers added, the high court has never elevated those to fundamental rights.

The Virginia-based National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the other groups who filed a friend-of-the-court brief agreed, saying public safety should be the court's preeminent concern.

"In a time of tight budgets, limited prison space, and growing public demand to address the sex-offender problem, Internet notification provides an inexpensive way . . . to comply with federal requirements and to keep public safety a priority," they said.

James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminal justice professor who is not involved in the case, said identifying Level 3 sex offenders on the Internet would probably make it harder for them to commit new sex crimes. But he feared that the state would ultimately expand the online registry to include less dangerous offenders.