Nearly eight years ago, Bucks County resident Steve Gordon left state prison after completing a 10-year sentence for sexually assaulting a woman, but he was not quite a free man.
His conviction for aggravated indecent sexual assault meant that Pennsylvania State Police would be keeping tabs on him for another decade.
A little more than five years ago, though, Gordon, now 71, suddenly had state police monitoring him for the rest of his life, after state lawmakers replaced the previous Megan’s Law with a new tougher federal version.
The new law, known as the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, expanded and reclassified crimes requiring sex offender registration that was applied retroactively. It added an estimated 2,000 individuals to the sex offender registry and for roughly 4,500 ex-offenders, like Gordon, turned a 10-year registration into a lifetime obligation.
Then, last year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the Adam Walsh Act cannot be applied to individuals convicted before the law took effect on Dec. 20, 2012. But the high court did not provide any guidance for how the decision should be applied or what happens to the offenders retroactively added to the registry.
Now Pennsylvania lawmakers have proposed another overhaul of the sex offender law to prevent thousands of the roughly 22,000 ex-sex offenders currently on the Megan’s Law registry from being removed, including roughly half of the 500 Megan’s Law offenders in Bucks County. House lawmakers unanimously passed the bill in December and the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on it Monday.
The proposed legislation would turn back the clock for ex-offenders convicted before the 2012 law took effect, but still require they finish any original registration obligation under the old version of Megan’s Law, which was either 10 years or a lifetime. The bill also would loosen some burdensome requirements including giving offenders with lifetime registration obligations the ability to get off the registry.
The bill also would add a registration exemption for interference with custody of children if the defendant is a parent or other legal custodians of a victim child. The exemption was added as a result of a 2017 investigation by this news organization that found at least 34 people, most parents, were registered sex offenders despite never being charged with a sex crime.
The proposed exemption for parents and legal guardians convicted of interference with custody of children “more or less” is supported by the legislature, Aaron Zappia, chief of staff for Senate Judiciary Chairman, Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, R-Upper Moreland. Last year Greenleaf introduced a separate Senate bill to eliminate the same crime as a sex offender registration offense.
But other aspects of the bill could face scrutiny from committee members, Zappia said.
“There are a lot of questions about the 17,000 people that would be kept on the registry because of this legislation. My understanding is that some are sexually violent predators, some are not,” he added.
A step backward
Rep. Ronald Marsico, a Dauphin County Republican who drafted the new House bill as well as the House version of the Adam Walsh Act, believes removing sex offenders from the registry is the wrong direction for public safety.
“To allow potentially dangerous sex offenders to escape registration, as the (Supreme Court) decision provides, does not move the Commonwealth forward,” he wrote in a co-sponsorship memo. “Indeed, the decision is a step backward in terms of the safety and security of the Commonwealth’s citizens.”
Marsico believes mandating ex-offenders finish pre-2012 registration periods meets the constitutionality test since the state’s high court has upheld the requirement previously. The legislation also addresses a Superior Court ruling that found the process for declaring an offender a sexually violent predator unconstitutional.
The legislation does not address what will happen with ex-offenders who did not have to register before the effective date of the current law. This news organization was unsuccessful in attempts to reach House leadership spokesman Steven Miskin or Marsico’s chief of staff, Autumn Southard, for clarification.
Available studies show post-prison release recidivism rates for sex offenders are 5 percent or less years later. Additionally, researchshows that individuals convicted of sex offenses have the overall lowest rate of repeat offending among all crime categories.
Locally, none of the 28 Bucks County defendants convicted in 2016 of various sexual crimes involving children were registered on Megan’s Law prior to their arrest, according to a comparison of court records and the Megan’s Law registry. Three defendants pleaded guilty to sexual crimes that don’t require registration.
Attorney Aaron Marcus of the Philadelphia Defenders Association believes state House lawmakers missed an opportunity with the bill to bring the state into line with research-based validated strategies for managing sex offenders and determining who is at risk for reoffending that “actually make us safer.”
“There are dangerous people. We need to monitor them or incapacitate them when they do terrible things, which when done right, is done by the court at sentencing and probation or parole after release,” Marcus said. “Not a single study suggests schemes like this (proposed bill) work to reduce sexual violence.”
Marcus called the proposed registration exemption for interference with custody of children “silly.” He noted that the change offers no protection to other non-custodial relatives of a victim child, including grandparents, who could still be forced to register as sex offenders for non-sexual conduct, he said.
“Frankly, even for total strangers, if the reason for taking the kid is not sexual, you shouldn’t be a sex offender. It seems pretty simple to me,” Marcus added. “This (exemption) is not better, it’s just slightly less stupid.”
He added that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s latest decisions, bundled with its past rulings declaring other aspects of Megan’s Law unconstitutional, show a growing awareness among the judiciary that these laws are “garbage,” and courts are feeling more comfortable labeling them as punitive.
“I am not so sure if the evidence we have now is presented to a court, even (the previous version of Megan’s Law) wouldn’t be found punitive,” he added. “I think it would.”
For now, Gordon said he has moved on with his life over the last eight years. He has two part-time jobs. He takes care of his elderly mother, whom he lives with. He has avoided legal trouble. He has a longtime girlfriend.
The sex offender label has been a weight around his neck, he said, adding he’d be happy to go back to his old registration requirement, which he’d complete in two years.
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