Maryland HB 2

Just in case you were wondering about the 2006 Emergency Maryland legislative session, sex offender registration laws, and collected criminal, public safety, corrections, probation and parole stuff, here is what the legislature accomplished in the emergency 2006 session (HB 2).

You can also read what the legislature proposed and did not pass, which is lined out, in the Unofficial Copy of the enrolled bill (at the link above).

Here you can read my earlier post on problems unique to registrants and the registry.

If you check out the following tags from the list available on the sidebar, you can pick up some additional info: Banishment, sex offenses.

(You may have to hunt a little within the postings that come up under the tag, because I have lumped brief references and newsy shorts into those posts that I now refer to as the Crows Nest, contrasted with more substantive comments that I try more or less to maintain as beefier individual entries.)

Corey Young at Sex Crimes and Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy (See Best Prison and Crime Law at the right) also have up to the minute info on these and related topics.

Policy Recommendations

Regarding changes in the law, and policy, my first question is, do we really need, "a long term, systematic, comprehensive, institutionalized counterterrorism policy for the United States" as Kenneth Anderson suggests here? If anything, my preference is to reduce bureacratization. The constitution adequately provides for practically anything, we already have a gigantic court system, including a counter-terrorism or FISA court, and our policy toward terrorists and terrorism is very clear already if not constantly evolving. An "institutionalized" policy sounds too much like a new cabinet level or deputy level position, sort of like "drug czar" and I'm not convinced that Anderson's reasons are good ones. The political argument seems to be that once Congress has acted courts must lay off, and that is simply not the way we work. Or is it?