By Meg Kinnard . . . South Carolina’s Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that a state law requiring sex offenders to register for life, without prior judicial review, is unconstitutional.
In a unanimous ruling, justices wrote that “requirement that sex offenders must register for life without any opportunity for judicial review violates due process because it is arbitrary and cannot be deemed rationally related to the General Assembly’s stated purpose of protecting the public from those with a high risk of re-offending.”
Justices set a 12-month timeline to implement the ruling, to give state lawmakers time to “correct the deficiency in the statute regarding judicial review.”
The South Carolina Supreme Court, said in essence, that it’s not constitutional to arbitrarily require offenders to register for the rest of their lives based on a past offense that has been fully adjudicated for without periodic judicial review to determine if the offender continues to pose a high risk to re-offend.
Read the full article here at the AP News
I am very glad to see this coming. May your efforts prove successful for all those effected.
Thanks for your comment, Jeffrey! WVRSOL is actively pursuing the possibility of a similar constitutional challenge to West Virginia lifetime registration without any risk or ongoing risk assessments nor provisions to petition for removal codified as WV §15-12-4 Duration.
Has there been any progress regarding this pursuit?