Lifetime Sex-Offender Registration for Kids

Do you think sex-offender registration is punishment?

What if it’s for life?

What if it’s for a 12-year-old boy?

Last week, the California Court of Appeal ruled that it’s not punishment to call a kid a sex offender for life because of something he did when he was twelve years old.

According to the court, the boy’s early years were marked by extreme neglect and abuse. He was taken from his mother at age five and shunted from one foster home to another until he was adopted.

Then, when he was twelve, he was processed in juvenile court for pushing a five-year-old boy to the ground and committing a lewd act on him. He was put on probation and ordered to enroll in sex-offender treatment.

After that, he was found to have violated his probation three times: once for hanging out with other minors without adult supervision; once for touching his adoptive sister’s breast, after which he was sent to a group home; and once more for grabbing a boy’s butt there.

At that point, the court put him in juvie and ordered him to register as a sex offender. In California, that meant he would have to register as one for the rest of his life. Wherever he moved, he would have to register with the city police or the county sheriff. If he went to college, he would have to register there, too. Even if he never moved, he would have to register again every year within five days of his birthday.

He appealed on the ground that lifetime registration for kids was cruel and unusual punishment. He also argued that it hindered public safety rather than helped it because it hurt a kid’s chance to live a normal life. Even the juvenile court had acknowledged that it “mess[ed] up the rest of their lives by hanging this tag on them.” Of course, the same could be said for adults, as we’ve explained before.

But the appellate court held that it wasn’t even punishment, let alone cruel and unusual punishment. The court relied on prior cases by the California Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court to that effect. Although those cases didn’t address the question of kids specifically, this court wasn’t going to be the first to carve out an exception for them.

[Update: Beginning January 1, 2021, California will eliminate lifetime registration for many offenses, as we explain here.]