US Supreme Court to rule on sex offender sanctions

Listen to this article

The U.S. Supreme Court will decide if Congress has the power to impose criminal penalties for failing to register a new address on sex offenders convicted and released before the enactment of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act.

The case involves a sex offender who was convicted of failing to update his change of address pursuant to SORNA.

The defendant appealed, arguing that Congress did not have the power to criminalize his failure to register because he completed his sentence before SORNA’s enactment, and therefore it could not constitutionally reassert jurisdiction over his intrastate activities after his unconditional release from federal custody.

A panel of the 5th Circuit affirmed his conviction. But an en banc panel reversed, holding that under the facts of the case the defendant’s commission of a federal crime was an insufficient basis for Congress to assert unending criminal authority over him.

Neither the Commerce Clause nor the police power provided Congress with the power to impose criminal penalties for failing to register upon “former federal sex offenders who had been unconditionally released from federal custody before SORNA’s passage in 2006.”

“The statute is an unlawful expansion of federal power at the expense of the traditional and well-recognized police power of the state,” the court stated.

U.S. v. Kebodeaux, No. 12-418.