Megan's Law
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.
How do states register sex offenders under Megan's Law?
Its been a piece meal process, and since it's a new concept of taking a criminal justice database and making it available to the public so the public can protect itself, it has not been implemented as well as it should have been in many communities. For instance, in California they've been registering sex offenders since 1946 and they made the law retroactive so that the entire list of individuals has to be made available to the public. Well we're talking, at this point, about something like a hundred thousand registered offenders in the state of California, and number one, they had to figure out how to classify them. Had they exposed themselves to young girls walking to school? Were they guys that'd been busted at two o'clock in the morning? So, they created a voluntary system and basically left it up to the offenders to come in to the law enforcement agency and register, and then subject themselves to the judgement of the public. What has happened is that a good twenty to twenty-five percent of those individuals, and often times the worst ones, have failed to comply with that law, and the penalties for failure to comply have really been nothing more than a slap on the wrist in most jurisdictions within the country. So, changes have been made in that law recently so that across the country it's going to be mandated that they register before they get out of prison; they'll be registered on a three-tiered system, making the third tier the absolute worst of the worst, and they'll have to comply with the law or go back to prison. The state or the government, governments I should say, then have found that the best way to impart that information is via the internet. So, any citizen can go onto any state's Megan's Law website, and then they are able to find out that information; they're able to search using a variety of criteria. They can do it by name or alias, they can do it by physical characteristics, they can do it by race, they can do it by zip code, they can do it by address, and it's really a very good system. Now, if one doesn't want to go search for all of the states' Megan's Laws websites, they can log onto the Klaas Kids Foundation website, klaaskids.org, and go onto our Megan's Law page and we have that entire list.
How can I use Megan's Law to protect my children?
In order to use Megan's Law to protect your children, what you want to do is find out the identity of offending individuals, and then make sure your children don't have contact with those individuals. There are any number of scenarios where using Megan's Law will work. Megan's Law can certainly work in athletic leagues. It can work at school. It can work within your neighborhood itself. One interesting scenario would be a single mother who is interested in having a romantic relationship with an individual. It never hurts to go on the Megan's Law website to see if that individual is a registered offender, as in fact he may be using that mother to get close to the children. That has happened time and time again. So there are a million ways to use Megan's Law to the advantage of possibly vulnerable children. What we have to be careful with with Megan's Law is that we don't use it to extract vigilante retribution. That is the big "if" with Megan's Law, and has always been the argument. But, historically, with ten years of Megan's Law being policy, we find that there is very little of that kind of activity, that people are actually using it for the intent that it was set up.
What do I do if I learn that I am living next to a sex offender?
I think probably the best think to do is to knock on their door, and say, "I know who you are, and I know what you did, and I don't want you anywhere near my children". Unfortunately, in a lot of states, it is against the law for you to take information that you've found, and share it with your neighbors. So I think what you then do is suggest to your neighbors that they go into the Megan's law website and start looking around to see if there's anyone they know in there.
Should I "drive out" sex offenders living in my neighborhood?
People often find out that there are sex offenders in their neighborhood. But, there are half a million sex offenders in this country so everyone probably has one in their neighborhood. Everyone has to live somewhere, so 'driving out' sex offenders probably is not the answer because they will move to someone elses community. So, as long as their not breaking the law then use that to your benifit and that is to avoid contact at all costs.
Is my child safe if there are no registered sex offenders in my area?
One of the disadvantages to Megan's law is that it can offer a false sense of security. Maybe only 20% of individals who are committing sexual crimes against children have ever been convicted for those crimes. We also know from studies that over the course of a lifetime, a sexual offender will commit crimes against a number of children (150-450 children). So you can never be completely safe. You can never be completely sure that there is not a sexual offender in your neighborhood unless of course you're living at the North Pole and you don't have any neighbors.
