Sex offender law upheld

JUNEAU -- A legal challenge to the Alaska law involving sex offender registration reached its conclusion March 18 when a federal appeals court upheld the existing state law, which requires offenders to register with the state upon conviction and requires the state to make their information publicly available. The opinion issued Thursday in the case of Doe v. Tandeske said the law does not violate the due process rights of convicted sex offenders.

Attorney General Gregg Renkes represented the state in the case. "This decision by the federal appeals court confirms what we have been saying for years, that the state is not violating any of the rights of convicted sex offenders by keeping track of them and by giving information about them to the public," Renkes said.

The plaintiffs in the case, two unidentified sex offenders, made two claims, namely, that the state could not require them to register without proof that they constituted a danger to the community, and that the current law infringed upon their fundamental rights to life and liberty. The Ninth Circuit Court rejected both these claims, stating that the existing law performs its primary function of protecting the public, and that convicted sex offenders are not free of the registration and public notice requirements stipulated in this law.

Currently, the state requires sex offenders to register with the Department of Public Safety, and states that these records shall be made available to any interested party, a distinction that includes placing sex offender information on the Internet.

The objections made in the most recent case were directed not toward the necessity of sex offender registration, however, but toward the public registration of all sex offenders regardless of the potential threat they pose to the public.

"What they were saying in this case was basically, 'We don't think it's fair to put names on the Internet without performing individual assessments of danger to the public,'" said Dean Guaneli, chief assistant to the Attorney General. The sex offender registration Web site is among the state's most widely-used sites.

Guaneli said that the failure of this action, coupled with the failure of a similar case involving sex offenders in Connecticut, likely signifies the suit is approaching its conclusion. "It seems to me like the handwriting is on the wall," he said.

Assistant Attorney General Ken Rosenstein, who handled the case, said he believes that the decision should effectively bring the long-contested matter to a close. However, Guaneli said the ruling doesn't necessarily sound a death-knell for the case as a whole. "Our experience in the past is that [the challengers] won't give up very easily," he said.

Verne Rupright, a Wasilla attorney who handled the challengers' case, offered no comment at press time.

If this ruling is indeed the final word on the subject, it brings to a close a series of nearly 10 years of challenges to the current system of registration. Last year, Rupright and Anchorage attorney Darryl Thompson represented two offenders who were convicted of sex offenses prior to 1994, when the state began requiring public registration. The issue in that case was the registration system's levying of ex post facto punishment on offenders who had committed their crimes prior to 1994.

An Alaska state court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in this case, but the ruling was appealed by the defendants and sent to the Supreme Court, which upheld the existing law.

According to Renkes, the issue at stake in the recent case was not the sex offenders themselves, but the safety of those around them. "The public has a right to information needed to protect itself," he said.

Contact Daniel Spoth at daniel.spoth@frontiersman.com.