Monday, February 12, 2018

Resolution

All the laws requiring those convicted of sex offenses to put their names in a registry should be abolished.

For the affirmative:

Emily Horowitz is professor and chair of the sociology and criminal justice department at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York, where she founded a program that helps the formerly incarcerated complete college. She serves as a board member for the National Center for Reason and Justice, a national organization that advocates in criminal cases involving those falsely accused and wrongfully convicted of crimes against children, and the Alliance for the Constitutional Reform of Sex Offense Laws, an organization that educates and litigates laws that undermine the civil rights of those convicted of sex offenses and their families. Horowitz is the author of Protecting Our Kids?: How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us (2015) and co-editor of Caught in the Web of the Criminal Justice System: Autism, Developmental Disabilities, and Sex Offenses (2017). She has a PhD in sociology from Yale University.

For the negative:

Marci A. Hamilton is Fox Professor of Practice and Fox Family Pavilion Resident Senior Fellow in the Program for Research on Religion in the Fox Leadership Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the founder, CEO, and Academic Director of CHILD USA, which is dedicated to interdisciplinary, evidence-based research to prevent child abuse and neglect.  The author of God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Hamilton is also a columnist for Verdict on Justia.com. Her book, Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children advocates the elimination of child sex abuse statutes of limitations. She holds a JD from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.