On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that a North Carolina preventing sex offenders from accessing social media and other websites – without any attempt to tailor restrictions to potential contact with minors – violated the First Amendment. But restrictions on the freedom of speech aren’t the only unconstitutional deprivations sex offenders face.
In 1994, Minnesota passed what has become arguably the most aggressive and restrictive sex-offender civil-commitment statute in the country. The Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) provides for the indefinite civil commitment of “sexually dangerous” individuals, over and beyond whatever criminal sentence they may have already completed.
And while there is technically a system in place whereby committed individuals can petition for release or a loosening of their restrictions, in the more than 20 years that the MSOP has existed, only one person has ever been fully discharged (someone in the program for offenses committed as a minor, and he was only discharged after a court challenge). As Craig Bolte, one person committed in the MSOP, has testified, there is a distinct feeling that “the only way to get out is to die.”
The Supreme Court has held that states have the authority to commit individuals against their will outside the traditional criminal justice context, but only for the purpose of keeping genuinely dangerous people off the streets while undergoing rehabilitative treatment. Punishment and deterrence are legitimate goals exclusively of the criminal justice system, so any deprivation of liberty for either of those two purposes must follow only from that system, with all the procedural protections our Constitution requires.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/even-sex-offenders-have-constitutional-rights
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