Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Administrative Law Blogs -> Within the Scope

Administrative Law

: Within the Scope

3rd Circuit: Disparate Process for Emigrating Sex Offenders Violates Equal Protection Guaranty

By E.L. Lipman

In an interesting opinion issued on Wednesday of this week, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held that a Pennsylvania law which subjected all sex offenders who emigrated to that state to community notification processes, while exempting many Pennsylvania sex offenders from these same processes, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

?John Doe,? a New Jersey resident and sex offender, challenged the Pennsylvania law that exempted Pennsylvania offenders who were not ?sexually violent predators? from the public notification process, but did not permit offenders who emigrated from other states, like Doe, to establish that they were similarly not a ?sexually violent predator? and likewise deserving of an exemption.

Dissenting, Circuit Judge Thomas L. Ambro concluded that the panel majority did not sufficiently credit the judgment of the Pennsylvania Legislature to the effect that offenders like Doe arrive in the Keystone State in a very different posture than local offenders ? at least with respect to the records that detail their offenses. Wrote Judge Ambro:

Even if the majority is correct that all the relevant information [about the out-of-state offender] is readily available [to Pennsylvania officials], which seems doubtful, this mistakes our judicial role. Under rational basis review, we do not pass on the ?wisdom, fairness, or (even) logic? of legislative decisionmaking. ?[T]he Fourteenth Amendment gives the federal courts no power to impose upon the States their views of what constitutes wise economic or social policy.? As long as there is ?any reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis for the classification,? we must uphold the statute against an equal protection challenge. If the ?question is at least debatable,? the Commonwealth?s classification survives rational basis review.

Likewise interesting, the decision details the intricate operation of the Interstate Compact for Adult Offender Supervision, the transfers between states of offenders who are under still under supervision and the intersections of state and federal law regarding these inter-state moves by offenders. Significantly, the panel majority concludes that emigrating offenders, like Doe, do not have a right to sue under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 to seek enforcement of the provisions of the Compact against the member states.

The analyses of both the majority and dissenting judges are accessible here.

Full post as published by Within the Scope on January 26, 2008 (boomark / email).