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Hit list: deadly sex offender registries.


ON EASTER Sunday, Stephen A. Marshall, a 20-year-old Cape Breton The term Cape Breton appears in several different things: Geographic locations
  • Cape Breton Island, a Canadian island on the Atlantic Ocean coast
  • Cape Breton Highlands, a mountain range in northern Cape Breton Island.
 dishwasher visiting Maine, borrowed his father's truck, rifle, and two handguns, shot and killed two men in two different towns, then boarded a bus to Boston, where he was approached by police and shot himself. Marshall's motive for the murders is still unclear, but his method of selecting victims is not: He found them on Maine's online registry of sex offenders.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia District of Columbia, federal district (2000 pop. 572,059, a 5.7% decrease in population since the 1990 census), 69 sq mi (179 sq km), on the east bank of the Potomac River, coextensive with the city of Washington, D.C. (the capital of the United States).  maintain Web sites providing information on convicted sex offenders who have been released from prison. States differ in how much information they provide. Maine's registry provides users with home addresses, employment addresses, photos, and legal descriptions of the crimes that landed offenders on the registry.

The justification for maintaining such public lists rests on the presumption that sex offenders have higher recidivism recidivism: see criminology.  rates than other criminals--though Bureau of Justice statistics Noun 1. Bureau of Justice Statistics - the agency in the Department of Justice that is the primary source of criminal justice statistics for federal and local policy makers
BJS
 indicate that rapists are substantially less likely than other violent and nonviolent criminals to be rearrested for the same crime. The psychological theory that pedophilia pedophilia, psychosexual disorder in which there is a preference for sexual activity with prepubertal children. Pedophiles are almost always males. The children are more often of the opposite sex (about twice as often) and are typically 13 years or age or younger;  is a lifetime condition carries more weight with the public, but registries do not distinguish among varieties of sex offenders. As it happens, one of Marshall's victims, 24-year-old William Elliott William Elliott may refer to:
  • Air Chief Marshal Sir William Elliott (1896–1971), senior RAF commander during WWII
  • William Yandell Elliott (1896–1979), American historian and presidential political advisor
, was registered for the crime of having sex, at the age of 19, with a girlfriend who was two weeks shy of her 16th birthday.

You can decide for yourself whether such a man deserved to be marked for life, let alone murdered. Meanwhile, the registries create a conundrum: If the offenders are still menaces to society, why have they been released from prison? And if they are not, why is the state blocking their attempts to return to society?
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Title Annotation:Stephen A. Marshall kills sex offenders
Author:Cavanaugh, Tim
Publication:Reason
Article Type:Brief article
Geographic Code:1U1ME
Date:Aug 1, 2006
Words:284
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