a public defender

Clarification: John Doe isn’t asking to be found “no longer a sex offender,” he’s petitioning to have the new “offender against children” label removed. The OAC label is fairly new, and is assigned based upon conviction alone, regardless of when the conviction occurred. The law also permits an OAC for its removal after ten years of offense-free living in the community.

Even that law is a constitutional mess, though. The Indiana Supreme Court upheld retroactive registration a few years ago because, according to the state’s argument (mirroring the successful SCOTUS argument), inclusion on the registry was not an indication of dangerousness, and thus there was no due process violation. However, the OAC label is automatically assigned, and to get it removed the registrant must prove he/she isn’t dangerous. The registrant must disprove something the state has said it doesn’t need to prove.

So even if John Doe is successful in proving he isn’t a danger to the community, he will remain on the public registry and still be subject to all other requirements. No appeals process exists for that.

Ilah, thanks for the clarifications. Don’t know how I messed that up.

Easy to do, and in this case, the more you know about the laws the easier it is to get them confused. Indiana also made the legislative decision to apply the “Sexually Violent Predator” label to certain crimes retroactively, and some of those crimes also make a registrant an OAC. And both SVP and OAC are subject to some of the same restrictions.

There is a seperate process to get the SVP label removed, so I suppose one could get the OAC label removed but not SVP, or SVP removed but not OAC, and then there wouldn’t be a difference in the restrictions.

Just to make it more interesting, the law now says that anyone who wasn’t incarcerated, or on probation/parole in 1994 can apply to have pre-2007 requirements/restrictions rather than the current ones–even if they have the label of SVP or OAC.

All of that was in the same bill. All of them, in one place or another, overlap and sometimes contradict each other.

[quote comment="3097"]Easy to do, and in this case, the more you know about the laws the easier it is to get them confused. Indiana also made the legislative decision to apply the “Sexually Violent Predator” label to certain crimes retroactively, and some of those crimes also make a registrant an OAC. And both SVP and OAC are subject to some of the same restrictions.

There is a seperate process to get the SVP label removed, so I suppose one could get the OAC label removed but not SVP, or SVP removed but not OAC, and then there wouldn’t be a difference in the restrictions.

Just to make it more interesting, the law now says that anyone who wasn’t incarcerated, or on probation/parole in 1994 can apply to have pre-2007 requirements/restrictions rather than the current ones–even if they have the label of SVP or OAC.

All of that was in the same bill. All of them, in one place or another, overlap and sometimes contradict each other.[/quote]
Sigh.

So I’d be correct in assuming that the SVP restrictions are stricter than the OAC restrictions?

Not neccessarily. SVP is the same for OAC in most non-registration issues. But SVP must report to LE at least four times a year, and submit to at-home and at-work verification four times a year, with most SVPs getting at-home verification visits on a monthly basis. (And that applies to those who aren’t on probation or parole. Those folks have to meet the registration/verification stuff AND their parole/probation checks.)

Additionally, anyone designated SVP must submit a travel itinerary to law enforcement in their county of residence if they’re going to be absent from them home for 72 hours or more. (That would include hospital visits, too.) And they must inform their destination county of their arrival. As far as I can tell, that law has also been applied retroactively.

Just to muddy the waters even more, (!) SVP used to be used solely for registrants who had been determined by a court and clinical examination to have a mental abnormality that made it likely to reoffend. SVP still covers that, but now so much more. Prior to the law’s change, there were fewer than 50 SVP in the state. Now the public has no way to know who those folks are.