Megan's Law

Before Megan's Law, the federal Jacob Wetterling Act of 1994 required each state to create a registry for sexual offenders and certain other offenses against children. Under the Wetterling Act, registry information was kept for law enforcement use only, although law enforcement agencies were allowed to release the information of specific persons when deemed necessary to protect the public. Paul Kramer sponsored a package of seven bills known as Megan's Law in the New Jersey General Assembly in 1994. Before Megan's death, only five states required sex offenders to register with local law enforcement as required in Jacob Wetterling Act. International Megan's Law International Megan's Law to Prevent Child Exploitation and Other Sexual Crimes Through Advanced Notification of Traveling Sex Offenders was signed into a law by President Obama on February 8, 2016. International Megan's Law requires the notification to foreign governments when a citizen of the United States who is registered as a sex offender for sexual offense involving a minor is going to be traveling to their country. The law requires a visual "unique identifier" to be placed on the passports of covered registrants and requires offenders to notify law enforcement 21 days before traveling abroad. The law was challenged shortly after being enacted. ==Public notification==

States differ with respect to public disclosure of offenders. In some states all sex offenders are subject to public notification through Megan's Law websites. However, in others, only information on high-risk offenders is publicly available, and the complete lists are withheld for law enforcement only. Under federal SORNA tier I registrants may be excluded from public disclosure, with exemption of those convicted of "specified offense against a minor." Since SORNA merely sets the minimum standards the states must follow, many SORNA compliant states disclose information of all tiers. ==Criticism==

Evidence to support the effectiveness of public sex offender registries is limited and mixed. Majority of research results do not find statistically significant shift in sexual offense trends following the implementation of sex offender registration and notification (SORN) regimes. A few studies indicate that sexual recidivism may have been lowered by SORN policies, while a few have found statistically significant increase in sex crimes following SORN implementation. According to the Office of Justice Programs' SMART Office, sex offender registration and notification requirements arguably have been implemented in the absence of empirical evidence regarding their effectiveness. National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws, and Human Rights Watch, have called the law overbroad and an invitation to vigilante violence. Treatment professionals such as ATSA criticize the lack of evidence of the laws' effectiveness, the automatic inclusion of offenders on the registry without determining the risk of re-offense (by applying scientifically validated risk assessment tools), the scientifically unsupported popular belief in high recidivism, and the counter-effectiveness of the laws, which can actually undermine, rather than improve public safety by exacerbating factors (e.g. unemployment, instability) that may lead to recidivism. In addition, civil rights and reformist organizations highlight the adverse collateral effects on the family members of registrants, and question the fairness of the registries as indefinite punishment, and when applied to certain offender groups, such as juveniles and young adults engaging in consensual acts. Some victims' rights advocates like Patty Wetterling have presented similar critique. ==See also==