‘People in the lobby were staring at me. Women and men backed away, and a pathway straight to the door was cleared. I suddenly realized what had happened. I’m a sex offender. I mean, they think that I’m a sex offender. “It’s not me. There is someone else with my same name and birthdate. I promise. This has happened to me at the border several times. Please, check again. Run my license number rather than just my name. Check whatever you have to check. It’s not me.”’
Read the article by David Miller in the San Diego Reader.
“There will always be cases where circumstances call for, if not practically compel, sentences which exceed the standard guideline recommendations,” Judge Bender wrote, noting that trial judges have wide discretion. “However, we expect that sentencing courts understand that a standard range sentence is the norm and, consequently, that sentences which exceed (or fall below) the standard recommendation should be relatively infrequent by comparison.
‘Prescott told Quartz those findings shouldn’t be surprising. Policies like alerting people to the presence of sex offenders or restricting where they live would intuitively seem to decrease risk. But that’s a static way of looking at the problem, he says—those policies themselves can make returning to prison look more desirable since ex-offenders find it hard to get housing, find a job, and form social bonds. “We have an anti-reentry policy for sex offenders,” Prescott says.’
