[quote=all][quote]all, I don’t care what you saw on the Megan’s Law website when you decided to purchase your house.[/quote]How much don’t you care?[/quote]
I don’t care, because what is shown on the ML website to the public is essentially useless data. The REAL circumstances of the crime can be found only in the complaint and/or information and the change of plea or verdict stored in the records or archives of the state court in which they were convicted.
The vast majority of these individuals were required to register under CA law due to being turned in by a family member for an isolated incident and who later pled guilty or were found guilty of CA Penal Code section 288 on a family member who usually resided within the home.
Secondly, a person could have been required to register simply because they were over 19 years old and their (consensual) sex partner was 16 at the time of their arrest and the parents of the 16 yo decided to press charges, causing the 19 yo to be convicted of a felony (a 3-yr difference in age).
Thirdly, a LARGE portion of these PC 290 registrants are now more than 70 years old and a portion of them are in failing health.
And, fourthly, CA PC 290 registrants are required to re-register every time they move, but many who are staying temporarily with a friend or relative don’t … and are no longer required to report to a parole or probation officer. And there may be a delay in both re-registering on the part of the registrant AND reporting from the state registration database to the ML website. So there may actually be registrants from another address living in a given area who do not yet show up on the site.
Young parents shopping for houses are reading wa-a-a-ay too much into the skimpy public info provided on these cases when it is likely that no threat to their children exists if they were to buy a particular property. If they don’t do their homework on these cases, they are, by their ignorance, effectively discounting a perfectly good family home for an invalid reason during a prolonged period of poor inventory to choose from.
And that, of course, is their choice. If they don’t yet have a home for their families, they can continue to rent.
I’m not condoning these behaviors but only saying that without further research, a person relying on the ML website really doesn’t have any idea if a prospective “neighbor” or even an individual residing one or more miles away (from the listing they are interested in making an offer on) will actually be a threat to their children. The presence of a sex registrant needs to be further researched if the idea of one living nearby really bothers a potential buyer.
