sexual-predator law

sexual-predator law, statute that mandates lengthy periods of civil commitment for habitual sexual offenders and sexual psychopaths beyond the completion of their criminal sentences. Sexual-predator laws became popular in the United States in the 1990s, and their passage raised constitutional questions about double jeopardy and the balancing of the rights of offenders against those of the wider community.

During the 1930s and ’40s, many U.S. states adopted a civil commitment procedure for dangerous sexual offenders who had been designated sexual psychopaths; under these laws, offenders were incarcerated until they had been judged not to pose a public danger. Subsequently, similar laws were adopted in Canada and in other countries, especially in Scandinavia. However, in the 1960s the U.S. laws were invalidated by federal courts.

A series of horrific cases of child murder in the United States in the early 1990s alarmed the public and legislators and raised doubts about the adequacy of existing laws aimed at protecting children from sexual abuse. Beginning in 1990, state legislatures passed new laws mandating the long-term civil commitment of serious sex offenders. The impetus for these laws was the widespread belief that sexual offenders are essentially incorrigible and that individuals who commit a sexual offense are likely to repeat their crimes after their release from prison. The laws typically made the long-term civil commitment incarceration of an offender contingent on a court finding that he had a mental illness that was likely to cause him to commit additional offenses after he was released from prison. In such cases, the state could detain the offender, treating him until he was judged to have been cured of his illness.

Opponents of the laws argued that they violated the principle of due process and the ex post facto clause of the United States Constitution and that they constituted double jeopardy. In 1997, however, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld Kansas’s sexual-predator law, which was ostensibly more objectionable on constitutional grounds than most other such laws because it required only that the state prove mental abnormality—rather than mental illness—in order to detain an offender. In 2010 the court ruled that a federal sexual-predator law passed in 2006 was a legitimate exercise of legislative authority under the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution, which authorizes Congress to enact laws in furtherance of its explicitly enumerated powers.

Another type of sexual-predator law (see Megan’s law) was adopted by many jurisdictions in the United States and Europe starting in the mid-1990s. These statutes typically required that convicted sex offenders register with the police in their communities and that police notify schools, day-care centres, and other residents of the presence of offenders.