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Registration form is biased against homeless sex offenders, court rules

By Jacqueline Dowd

The registration form sex offenders must fill out when they notify the state of their whereabouts is biased against the homeless and must be rewritten to take into account their transient lifestyles, the Massachusetts supreme court has ruled.

The court reached its decision while overturning the conviction of Angelo Rosado, an intermittent guest at the Pine Street Inn shelter who was found guilty in 2006 of violating sex-offender registration requirements.

?Because homeless sex offenders, by the very nature of their situation, lack a permanent residence, they have little control over where they live,? the court ruled. "Where the Inn distributes beds based on a lottery system, the defendant may have attempted to secure a bed but was just not selected."

The court also said that the registration form should be changed so homeless sex offenders can explicitly record that they do not have a fixed address.

Read the Boston Globe story here.

Full post as published by the 13th juror on February 15, 2008 (boomark / email).