Megan's Law

• DATE: First law enacted in 1994

THE LAW: Combination of statutes requiring sex offender registration and community notification regarding sex offenders that were passed in New Jersey in 1994 and then adopted on the federal level.

SIGNIFICANCE: The landmark legislation passed in New Jersey served as a prototype for many US state statutes concerning sex offenders as well as for federal legislation aimed at addressing the problem of sex offender recidivism.

Megan’s Law helped to increase the powers of US states that had already established sex offender registries by extending the work of the agencies in charge of the registries beyond simple registration into the realm of various forms of notification. To meet basic registration requirements, sex offenders, upon release from prison or some kind of community placement, must provide local law-enforcement authorities with their names, descriptions of the crimes of which they were convicted (which, because of plea bargaining, may well be very different from their actual offenses), and their new addresses. Most laws also require released sex offenders to provide authorities with regular updates of their address information.

Notification goes beyond registration in that it involves informing the public of the locations of released sex offenders living in their areas. This in turn usually involves some type of assessment of offender risk level. Offenders may be assessed by crime type (pedophilia automatically requires some type of notification, for example), or law-enforcement authorities may use a formal risk assessment instrument that considers prior criminal record. In some communities, prosecutors are responsible for assessing and classifying released sex offenders; in others, these duties are carried out by officials serving on the board of the sex offender registry.

Offender Classification

Sex offenders are usually classified in terms of a three-tier risk system that has implications for the type of notification the public receives. Level I offenders are those who present a relatively low degree of recidivism and dangerousness. Information about such offenders is typically not available to the public; only the personnel of law-enforcement agencies, correctional institutions, and departments of youth or social services have access to this information.

Level II offenders present a moderate degree of recidivism risk and dangerousness. Members of the public have access to information on these offenders through requests to their local departments or sex offender registry boards, and information about Level II offenders may automatically be sent to certain institutions, such as schools.

Level III offenders pose a high degree of recidivism risk and dangerousness, and information on these offenders may be presented to the public without request, through press releases, mailings, or Internet postings. Offender risk level also has implications for the length of the registration period. Level III offenders must meet registration and address change notification requirements for the remainder of their lives.

Background

Megan Kanka was a seven-year-old girl living in New Jersey with her family when she became a victim of child sexual molestation and in July 1994. The offender, Jesse Timmendequas, invited her into his home, purportedly to see his puppy. He then molested Megan and strangled her with his belt. Timmendequas lived across the street from the victim’s family with two other sex offenders, and he had previously served six years in a secure sex offender treatment center in New Jersey. After these facts were reported following Megan’s death, members of the community were outraged that they had not been forewarned about Timmendequas’s presence in their midst; in response, they conducted mass demonstrations and petitioned the governor for a change in the law. Shortly after the incident, the New Jersey state legislature passed the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act, which was known as Megan’s Law. It included both registration and notification requirements for dangerous sex offenders.

The Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act, part of President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Act, required states to establish effective registration systems for convicted child molesters and other sexually violent offenders. Offenders in these categories had to register for ten years, and those assessed to be “sexually violent predators” had to continue to register until they were no longer placed in this category. The states were required to release this registration information to law enforcement and to the public when warranted.

A federal version of Megan’s Law, passed in 1996, incorporated a form of mandatory community notification to ensure public safety. The federal law also created a financial incentive for states to set up sex offender registration and tracking systems: They were given until September of 1997 to do so, or they risked losing 10 percent of an antidrug allocation from a state and local law-enforcement grant program. The Pam Lyncher Sexual Offender Tracking and Identification Act, passed in October 1996, required the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to establish a national sex offender registry and to strengthen the earlier registration requirements. Aggravated offenders and recidivists, as well as sexually violent predators, had to register for life. The Departments of Commerce, Justice, and State, the Judiciary, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 1998 amended the law, adding all state offenses comparable to the offenses in the Wetterling Act to the federal standards, requiring registered offenders to register when they moved to another state and register in the state where they work or attend school if it is not their state of residence. It also required states to participate in the National Sex Offender Registry, establish a system to register federal offenders and those sentenced by court-martial. The Bureau of Prisons was required to notify state agencies when federal offenders were released or paroled. The 1998 Protection of Children from Sexual Predators Act instructed the Bureau of Justice Assistance to help states comply with registrations.

With the Campus Sex Crimes Prevention Act, which was part of the 2000 Violence Against Women Act, registered sex offenders were required to notify the state of institutions of higher education they attended or worked of a change in their employment or enrollment status. The 2003 Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today (PROTECT) Act required states to maintain registry websites. The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 changed the notification standards and sex offender registration baseline; included 212 federally recognized Native American tribes in the definition of jurisdiction and expanded the number of sex offenses in which registration had to be implemented to all federal, military, state, territory, and tribal jurisdictions; and created the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (SMART Office) and the Sex Offender Management Assistance Program in the Department of Justice. It also ordered the Department of Justice to create a single site, the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website. In 2008, the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Predators Act (KIDS Act) required jurisdictions to collect internet identifiers of sex offenders. The Military Sex Offender Reporting Act of 2015 required the Department of Defense to provide information about convicted sex offenders. The Internation Megan's Law, passed in 2016, required registered sex offenders to notify authorities if they planned to travel internationally and required jurisdictions to provide this information to federal authorities.

States have also amended their legislation on the subject, and some court rulings have affected the sex offender registry laws. For example, in 2024, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that some people who were juveniles when they landed on the state sex offender list were not required to be free of offenses for fifteen years after their conviction or release.

Impacts

Since the passage of these laws, a small but growing body of empirical studies has been conducted to evaluate their impacts. The studies have generally been exploratory in nature (that is, they have not been designed to test previously derived hypotheses) given that the laws themselves are still relatively new. Most have employed survey or archival data methodologies.

Some important general trends have been revealed by this research. One Massachusetts study focused on 136 sex offenders whose repetitive crimes resulted from mental disorders (but who were not legally insane). These subjects were randomly selected from four hundred offenders incarcerated in a maximum-security institution. Only 25 percent of the sample would have been eligible for the registry based on previous offense history (prior registry-eligible convictions). Preventive notification efforts obviously could have a chance of being effective only for this minority of offenders. However, 90 percent of the offenders with earlier sex crime arrests were eventually convicted of Massachusetts registry-eligible crimes.

This study also looked at twelve predatory stranger crimes to see if the Massachusetts law would have prevented them. The offenders’ work and geographic locations were analyzed, including the distance to their respective crime scenes. The researchers found a good chance for prior victim notification in four of the cases and a poor to moderate chance in two others. The “good chance” offenders lived close to their victims. Even in these cases, however, the effectiveness of the law assumes that police can be notified and that the potential victim receives the notification and acts on it. It further assumes that the victim’s actions are successful in eliminating the possible victimization. Even with all these assumptions satisfied, the end result may be a displacement of the sexual offender to another where he or she is not as well known and no notification is performed. This highlights the potential importance of national and international notification efforts.

Another study surveyed mental health professionals regarding their views about sex offender registry websites. This survey of 133 randomly selected members of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) produced very mixed projections about the impact of sex offender registries and notification efforts. More than 80 percent of the sample felt that community notification efforts through the Internet (arguably the most sophisticated and widespread form of notification) would not affect the number of child victims each year. It was noted that not all sex offenders appear in the websites of all states (some come from out of state, some are first timers, and in some states only information on the most serious offenders is posted online). In addition, pedophiles are strongly driven; their crimes are repetitive and compulsive, and they are not necessarily deterred by the threat or actualization of public notification.

As the researchers noted, not all potential victims have Internet access or use it frequently enough to stay on top of all the websites providing sex offender information. The sites may also engender a false sense of security—that is, site visitors may believe that if particular adults are not included on the sites, then they must be no threat. This study concluded that notification, like many other forms of technology with criminal justice applications, is a means to an end. It does not in and of itself explain why these crimes occur and how to deter or prevent them effectively.

In this sample of mental health professionals, 62 percent expressed fears about possible vigilantism against those appearing on the websites (from neighbors, employers, and even the police), but several other studies have found that less than 5 percent of registered sex offenders have reported any form of harassment. This does not, however, include unreported incidents.

Future Considerations

Observers have suggested that a need exists for more cross-jurisdictional sharing of sex offender registration and notification information over wider geographic regions. Some sex offender notification statutes may need to be revised to allow for this. The importance of sharing information across jurisdictions is highlighted by documented cases of offenders who have deliberately moved across state lines so that they can successfully “slip through the cracks” and not register at all.

A number of commentators have pointed out the need for sex crime investigation and therapy programs that go beyond registration and notification efforts. This is especially important given the research findings that indicate that many sex offenders were not registry-eligible before their current offenses were committed. The statutes alone, no matter how effective, do not address the problem of what motivates sex offenders to recidivate.

Bibliography

Beck, Victoria S., and Lawrence F. Travis III. “Sex Offender Notification: A Cross-State Comparison.” Police Practice and Research 7, no. 4 (2006): 293–307.

Biryukov, Nikita. "N.J. High Court Eases Test for Juvenile Offenders to Be Removed from Sex Offender List." New Jersey Monitor, 1 July 2024, newjerseymonitor.com/2024/07/01/n-j-high-court-eases-test-for-juvenile-offenders-to-be-removed-from-sex-offender-list/. Accessed 16 Aug. 2024.

Gaines, Jonathan. “Law-Enforcement Reactions to Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification.” Police Practice and Research 7, no. 3 (2006): 249–267.

"Legislative History of Federal Sex Offender Registries and Notification." US Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking, smart.ojp.gov/sorna/current-law/legislative-history. Accessed 16 Aug. 2024.

Levenson, Jill S., and Leo P. Cotter. “The Effect of Megan’s Law on Sex Offender Reintegration.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 21, no. 1 (2005): 49–66.

Meloy, Michelle L. Sex Offenses and the Men Who Commit Them: An Assessment of Sex Offenders on Probation. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2006.

Welchans, Sarah. “Megan’s Law: Evaluations of Sexual Offender Registries.” Criminal Justice Policy Review 16, no. 2 (2005): 123–140.

Zevitz, Richard G. “Sex Offender Placement and Neighborhood Social Integration: The Making of a Scarlet Letter Community.” Criminal Justice Studies 17, no. 2 (2004): 203–222.