Justice Served - The High Cost of Juvenile Sex Offender Registration 27 Developments in Mental Health Law 2008

27 Dev. Mental Health L. 33 (2008)
Justice Served - The High Cost of Juvenile Sex Offender Registration

handle is hein.journals/dvmnhlt27 and id is 109 raw text is: Justice Served? The High Cost of Juvenile Sex Offender Registration

By Phoebe Geer*

I. Introduction
After being convicted at the age of eighteen,
juvenile sex offender Alan Groome was
released from a Washington prison in 1994
when he finished serving a three year
sentence for raping two boys.1 He moved into
* J.D. Correspondence should be addressed to
ptg4m@virginia.edu. The author would like to
extend her thanks to Ashley George for her
valuable research assistance, to the two
anonymous peer reviewers who provided helpful
insights guiding the evolution of this document,
and to Thomas L. Hafemeister for his edits and
suggested revisions. All views expressed,
however, remain those of the author.
1 Stacey Hiller, The Problem with Juvenile Sex
Offender Registration: The Detrimental Effects of
Public Disclosure, 7 B.U. PUB. INT. L.J. 271, 287
(1998); Adam Shajnfeld & Richard B. Krueger,
Reforming (Purportedly) Non-Punitive Responses
to Sexual Offending, 25 DEV. MENTAL HEALTH L. 81,
81-82 (2006).
See also Emily Ramshaw, 'Sex Offender' Label
Makes No Distinction: For Many Men, Registry Has
Lasting and Devastating Effects, DALLAS MORNING
NEWS, Oct. 2, 2006, http://www.nacdl.org/sldocs.
nsf/freeform/sexoffender009?Open Document
(reporting accounts of several youth placed on a
sex offender registry and its deleterious impact on
their lives); Hanna Ingber Win, Is Ricky Really a
Sex Offender? California's Registry for Life May
Soon Include Promiscuous Kids, LACITYBEAT, Feb.
20, 2008, http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/
detail/is rickyreally_a sexoffender/6726/
(describing a sixteen-year-old boy, who went to a
teen club and met a girl who said she was the
same age as he was and with whom he eventually
had sex; the boy thought it was a pretty normal
high school romance, but the girl turned out to be
thirteen; the boy was arrested, tried as an adult,
and pled guilty to the charge of lascivious acts with
a child, which is a class D felony in Iowa; it was not
disputed the sex was consensual, but intercourse
with a thirteen-year-old is illegal in Iowa; the boy
was sentenced to two years probation and placed
on the Iowa online sex offender registry for ten
years; when he and his family moved to Oklahoma,
he was placed on and will remain on the state's

his mother's apartment in Olympia,
Washington. But Alan Groome's crime
followed him to Olympia. He was listed on a
state sex offender registry that made public
his residential information and criminal record.
Local police officers personally delivered fliers
to 700 of his new neighbors, informing them
that Groome, a registered sex offender, had
recently moved to the neighborhood. Shortly
after the fliers were distributed, Groome and
his mother were evicted from their apartment
by her landlord. They moved in with
Groome's grandmother, who consequently
also faced eviction when her neighbors
discovered her grandson was living with her.
Ultimately, Groome left the home of his
grandmother and moved into a homeless
shelter.2
For over a decade, every state in the United
States has had some form of sex offender
registration and notification law.3 The goal of
these laws is to track convicted sex offenders
and make public their identity, address,
criminal record, and various other information.
Known as Megan's Laws, they are usually
enacted with little-to-no resistance from state
legislatures or most citizens. They proclaim
increased child safety as their main purpose
and usually are named after the child victim of
a murder and sexual assault committed by an
adult predator.
But since the initial passage of these laws,
they have come to encompass an additional
population: namely, juvenile sex offenders.4
public registry for life; he and his family were
subsequently harassed and traumatized).
2 Hiller, supra note 1, at 287.
3 See People v. Ross, 646 N.Y.S.2d 249, 250 n.1
(N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1996) (listing sex offender
registration statutes in all fifty states and date of
enactment).
4 See Elizabeth Garfinkle, Coming of Age in
America: The Misapplication of Sex-Offender
Registration and Community-Notification Laws to

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