What is "Megan's Law"?
Megan's Law is a very interesting concept. Just as the Amber Alert was produced due to an individual case, Megan's Law was produced due to an individual case. A little girl named Megan Kanka in Trenton, NJ was playing in her front yard one day. She was seven years old. And when her mother came out to call her inside, she was no longer there. They found little Megan's broken body in a park nearby three days later. It turned out that a sexual predator, a twice-convicted sexual predator, who lived across the street, had lured, kidnapped and raped the little girl, by asking her to come help him search for his puppy, so that was basically the end of Megan. Her mother made a very compelling and profound plea to newspaper reporters from her porch, and said, "If I'd known that there was a sexual predator living across the street from me I never would have allowed my daughter to be in the front yard by herself. Why are his rights to privacy more important than my daughter's rights to safety?" That plea resounded through the country like very few pleas ever have. Within two years there was a national policy that one: every state had to register individuals who had been convicted of sexual felonies and two: those states then had to find a means of communicating that information to the public so that the public could use that information to protect their children. Those are the basics of what is know as Megan's Law.
