Court: Sex offender rules are not retroactive

LANSING, Mich. — Significant changes to Michigan’s sex offender registry law cannot be applied retroactively to potentially thousands of sex offenders because the revisions unconstitutionally stiffen the punishment of offenders after their convictions, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed part of a lower-court ruling, saying the state cannot impose harsher restrictions enacted in 2006 and 2011 on offenders who were convicted before the law was changed. The court said the revisions, which include restricting offenders’ movement near schools, penalize sex offenders as “moral lepers.”

U.S. District Court Judge Robert Cleland ruled last year that those changes could be imposed retroactively but declared portions of the law unconstitutional.

A spokeswoman for the Michigan State Police, which maintains the sex offender registry, said the agency was reviewing the ruling to determine its impact. The state attorney general’s office also was studying the decision, a spokeswoman said.

Michigan has the country’s fourth-largest sex offender list, with 42,700 registrants, including nearly 39,000 whose names and photos are shown on a searchable public website. It was not immediately clear how many could be affected by the ruling.

The state began prohibiting registrants from living, working or loitering within 1,000 feet of school property in 2006. Five years later, lawmakers required that offenders be divided into three tiers based on the seriousness of their crimes, rather than on individualized assessments.

Many offenders must be listed on the registry for life under the changes.

“As dangerous as it may be not to punish someone, it is far more dangerous to permit the government under the guise of civil regulation to punish people without prior notice,” Judge Alice Batchelder wrote for a three-judge panel, joined by Judges Gilbert Merritt and Bernice Donald.

Critics argued that the registry, initially created in 1994, lists so many people that it does not identify the truly dangerous offenders.