Some to be removed from sex offender registry in South Carolina
By Rochelle Dean . . . In a settlement agreement with South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson along with State Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel those wrongly convicted of sodomy in the state of South Carolina will now be taken off of the Sex Offender Registry in the Palmetto State.
The announcement comes after arguments in Mary Geiger Lewis’s courtroom Friday, and argued in conjunction with a 2003 ruling from the United States Supreme Court in the case of Lawrence v. Texas that threw out anti-sodomy laws so they were no longer deemed unconstitutional.
According to Allen Chaney, the Director of Legal Advocacy for the American Civil Liberties Union, over the past two decades, South Carolina has used the Sex Offender Registry to “track, shame, and ostracize” people who he argued have been involved in behavior protected by the constitution, and acts that are between consenting adults. Chaney adding in a statement released to ABC Columbia News, “I am pleased that the State agreed to settle the case, but discouraged that we had to sue at all.”
Read the full piece here at ABC Columbia.
What is useful here is the fact that these men went to the record to prove the unconstitutional nature of state’s use of the sex offender databases. “Registry” is a marketing driven choice of word. Simply put, it is a government database. And it is intended to impose broad affirmative restraint, making it very similar to the intent of incarceration. The men involved in this case report “A profound impact” from the peoples database regime. However, the profound impact of the database driven infrastructure upon the people is not limited to the sex offender. The sex offender was merely the first group to be enslaved to the machine’s maintenance for life. Too bad the people were so easily convinced to swear off the sovereignty of the sex offender just so the rest of their own liberty from government surveillance and intrusion went collateralized right along with the offender. If some doubt the DDI could be used to make surveillance saints appear falsely benevolent perhaps they should look to the Governor Whitmer kidnapping conspiracy saga as an example. That jury will disagree.
It would be great if Texas would honor what they agreed to also. Retroactive laws and rules should be illegal. It was a bait and switch. It’s not right and they need to correct it.