A federal appeals court in St. Louis has declared that Minnesota's sex offender treatment program is constitutional -- handing a major victory to the state but potentially derailing long-awaited reforms to its system of indefinite detention for sex offenders.
In a decision released Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower-court ruling and found that Minnesota's system of committing sex offenders beyond their prison terms serves a "legitimate interest" in protecting citizens from dangerous sexual predators.
The ruling is a major setback for civil rights attorneys and a host of lawmakers who have spent much of the past five years pressing for reforms that would put offenders on a faster path toward release from the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP). The appellate panel essentially has given Minnesota's program a clean bill of health, relieving immediate pressure on state officials to make major reforms to a program that has long been criticized as inhumane.
A class of sex offenders sued the state in 2011, arguing during a prolonged trial that Minnesota's system violated their due-process rights under the U.S. Constitution by depriving them of access to the courts and other basic safeguards found in the criminal justice system.
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1 comment:
Sex offenders are never officially cured or rehabilitated. We should give them an option: incarceration or castration. The only way to fully cure them, is to eliminate their sexual urges. See how many might volunteer for that instead of jail. Could save a ton of money, too.
I can think of a lot of women who would volunteer to perform the procedure!
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