Sex offender registry designed to inform public

The system was not built to deter future crimes.

By Jared Grafman

Published Feb. 7, 2011

Sex offender registries are easily accessible to the public as a tool for awareness but are not designed to prevent crime, MU Police Department Capt. Scott Richardson said.

“We have a separate sex offender list that we keep for people that are on campus,” Richardson said. “It notifies the community of people who are sex offenders. I don’t know if the list serves as prevention, other than knowing when that person is on campus or maybe working on campus.”

Richardson said MUPD’s list is available at its records department for anyone who would like to see it.

Many different crimes require a person to register as a sex offender, Boone County Sheriff's Department detective Andrea Luntsford said. All the offenses that require registration under state laws are listed in the Missouri Revised Statutes.

“It used to be that any crime against a child, any felony against a child that involved any sexual contact, that sort of thing,” she said. “Abuse of a child, if it was in a sexual nature, endangering a child in the first degree will require you to register.”

A growing world of technology required additional offenses to be added to the list of sex crimes.

“Recently we’ve added a lot of the whole technology crimes, the possession of child porn, obscene materials and talking to them over the Internet and all that kind of stuff, the enticement crimes,” Luntsford said. “All of those would get you put on the registry, if you’re convicted or plead guilty.”

Streaking could also land a person on a sex offender list, depending on the witnesses, under second-degree sexual misconduct, Luntsford said.

“The only thing that fits under for us is sexual misconduct,” she said. “So depending on who witnessed it, if it was a child who witnessed it, and depending on how it pleads out, it could get you put on the list. If it was just adults then it probably wouldn’t.”

The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, a federal law passed in 2006 and enacted in 2009, upset many people who were previously not required to register as sex offenders, Luntsford said. The federal mandate overturned a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that had excluded offenders convicted before 1995 from registering.

“For example, if it’s 1993 and your lawyer says ‘just plead guilty and you’re done, pay a fine,’ and you do that, then a few years later you’re told you have to register for the rest of your life,” she said. “Those people might have done something different if they knew that was a condition.”

The Walsh Act established a three-tier classification system for convicted sex offenders, which may include minors as young as 14 years old, according to the act. Tier 1 offenders must register each year for 15 years, and tier 3 offenders must register every 3 months for the remainder of their life.