Parents Rights to the Sex Offender Registry

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Author: ivlrjw

Started: October 30, 2008, 10:27:03 pm

Target: House of Commons Ottawa, Canada

Category: Government & Politics

Supporters:

1,468

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Goal Met!

VANCOUVER - B.C.'s highest court has dismissed a challenge to the federal sex offender registry.

The B.C. Court of Appeal has ruled a convicted sex offender's Charter rights weren't being violated when he was ordered to add his name to the registry almost two years after he was sentenced.

The sex offender - identified as S.S.C. in the judgment released Thursday - was sentenced in May 2003 to six months in the community and two years' probation after pleading guilty to sexual touching involving five girls from the ages of seven to 12.

When the Sex Offender Information Registration Act came into force in December 2004, the man was still serving his sentence and was required to add his name to the registry for life. He applied to a lower court for an exemption and mounted the appeal after his exemption was refused.

The man argued the legislation was overly broad because it involves lifetime registration of low-risk offenders, which offends his liberty and privacy interests.

But the court quashed the appeal, ruling the legislation is neither overly broad or disproportionate, in part because it is available only to law enforcement agencies.

The sex offender registry has survived a number of constitutional challenges since it came into force Dec. 15, 2004.

An Ontario appeal court justice ruled in April 2008 that the public's right to safety trumps any potential infringements on an offender's freedoms, saying appearing on the list doesn't impede a person from "doing anything or going anywhere."

In June 2007 a B.C. Supreme Court judge dismissed challenges from three convicted sex offenders who objected to registering under the act.

One argued registration was a punishment over and above the sentence for his crime and infringed on his Charter rights; another argued the requirement to register creates a reverse onus that is contrary to the principles of fundamental justice.

We need a data base to see where these offenders are, they have had their names in the public already so why not on a governemt site were we can see what city they are in and to make sure these sex offenders IP addresses are tracked so when they register on a site like Facebook or MySpace they are denied entry to sites where our children might be.

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Added by ivlrjw @ January 21, 2009, 10:22 pm
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The man who created a detection system used by MySpace to track and expel 29,000 American-registered sex offenders from the online social network site says Ottawa's information laws are preventing detection verification companies from tracking Canadian offenders.

"We can't even work with any private companies or law-enforcement agencies because we simply can't get hold of the data," said John Cardillo, CEO of Sentinel Tech, who said predators are more free to use Canadian social networking sites to lure young victims.

The public does not have access to the national sex offender registry -- a database that provides Canadian police services with information to investigate crimes of a sexual nature.

MySpace, which has an estimated 180 million profiles, announced Wednesday it had "partnered with Sentinel Tech to build technology to remove registered sex offenders from our site." The new measures do not apply to Canada.

"Through this innovative technology, we're pleased that we've successfully identified and deleted these registered sex offenders and hope that other social networking sites follow our lead," Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace's chief security officer said in a release.

Speaking from his company's offices in Miami, Fla., Cardillo said keeping sexual predators off the Internet is no longer a technical challenge, it's become a political challenge, with only the United States freeing up information to companies like his to integrate a database of predators into a detection system.

"I'm hoping something breaks to use this data," he said about the policies of government's such as Canada.

"It's going to take a few daring members of Parliament to change this," the former New York City police officer said.

Cardillo said Sentinel takes records of offenders, released by the U.S. federal government, puts them into a database and makes them searchable by various criteria such as name, or, using photo recognition technology.

"When the bad guys have to cover their tracks, they get caught," Cardillo said, who added it was only in May that MySpace began to use his Sentinel Tech's technology, after signing a seven-figure deal reached with MySpace's owners, News Corp.

But because Canada's federal government has not publicly released the names of registered sex offenders, those people are able to travel on the information highway, virtually undetected, Cardillo said. "We can't see who they are so we can't see where they are."

Canada's sex offender registry came into effect in 2004 and as of April, 2006, contained the names of some 12,000 sex offenders.

The Conservative government has said it would not make the registry publicly available.