RE-BOOTED REGISTRY

They are easy to hate, yet last week several sex offenders stood before a legislative committee and told their stories. Their testimony, following the killing of two registered sex offenders Easter morning, should prompt changes in the state’s on-line sex offender registry. The key to lawmakers’ deliberations is weighing public safety vs. mere convenience.

Putting the mug shots and addresses of all the state’s registered sex offenders on a Web site is a convenient way for the state to believe it is meeting a public reporting duty. This approach raises the larger question of whether the registry is meant to be part of an offender’s punishment.

If so, should that punishment be the same for all offenders no matter the severity of their crime and whether they have just one or repeat convictions? Now an 18-year-old who had consensual sex with a minor girlfriend is treated the same as someone who has repeatedly raped young children. This makes no sense.

In 1994, Congress required states to register sex offenders and revised the law in 1996 to make the information available to the public. Since then, all but four states have created online registries. Maine is among the 31 states that include offenders’ photographs and addresses on the Web site. Accessing a registered offender’s address in Maine requires the user to provide a name and address, although this can be made up.

Federal legislation recently signed by President Bush is expected to include more registry requirements. The details of the new law won’t be known until federal agencies write new rules to implement it.

Meanwhile, the Legislature’s Criminal Justice Committee is reviewing the state’s sex offender registry and considering changes. They are doing so because two men on the state’s on-line listing, Joseph Gray of Milo and William Elliott of Corinth were killed in April by a Nova Scotia man who apparently had no ties to the men but simply found their names and addresses on the web. Stephen Marshall, who shot himself when police stopped the bus he was riding in Boston, had looked up 32 other offenders in Maine.

Lawmakers are rightly considering ways to differentiate between low- and high-risk offenders. Massachusetts, for example, has a three-tiered registry, with only the information about the highest-risk offenders available to the public online.

Recent events don’t excuse in any way the crimes the sex offenders committed and it doesn’t at all say that continued local notification isn’t necessary. It says that if the state is going to take action against citizens, which it does when creating an Internet sex-offender list, it has a duty not to endanger them.

Changes that move Maine’s system closer to that balance would be welcomed.