Sex Offender Registries: Who Has to Register

Every state in the United States has a sex offender registry. The purpose of the registry is to make citizens aware when they have a convicted sex offender living in their neighborhood. Many parents rely on the registries to alert them to the presence of convicted sex offenders in their neighborhood in an effort to keep their children safe. The registries are good tools- however, they are not exhaustive lists of every possible predator and parents must know the limitations of the registries.

In Missouri alone, there are over eleven thousand registered sex offenders. Persons who are required to register are those who have been convicted of, found guilty of, plead guilty to committing or attempting to commit or pled nolo contendere to an offense under Chapter 566 RsMo. This chapter includes child molestation, forcible rape, forcible sodomy, statutory rape and statutory sodomy. Other offenses outside of Chapter 566 that require registration are kidnapping, felonious restraint, promoting prostitution, sexual exploitation of a minor, promoting child pornography, possession of child pornography, furnishing pornographic material to minors, public display of explicit sexual material, coercing acceptance of obscene material, promoting obscenity, incest, use of a child in a sexual performance, promoting sexual performance by a child, sexual contact with a resident of a nursing home and genital mutilation of a female child. Persons who have been found not guilty of one of these offenses by reason of mental disease or defect are required to register as are persons who have been committed to the Missouri Department of Health as a criminal sexual psychopath.

The law in Missouri requires sex offenders to register anywhere from every ninety days to every six months. Every offender must register in the month of his birth and every six months thereafter. Predatory or persistent offenders, offenders whose victims were less than 18 at the time of the offense and offenders who have been convicted of failing to register previously must register every ninety days. Additionally, the law in Missouri requires an offender to register within ten days of moving to a new address and prohibits sex offenders from moving within a thousand feet of a school or childcare facility.

There are exceptions to these laws that most people are unaware of. For example, the law has always stated that offenders convicted before June 1, 1979 were not required to register. Most recently, the Missouri Supreme Court excluded those convicted of their crimes prior to January 1, 1995 from registration. Additionally, if a school or childcare facility is built after the offender has already established residency, the offender is not required to move.

There is another class of sex offender registration as well: juvenile registration. Juvenile sex offenders are juveniles who were not certified as adults by the criminal court that have committed a sex offense. By Missouri law, the juvenile sex offender registry is confidential and only open to persons or agencies authorized to receive juvenile court information. This means that individual citizens do not have the right to know who is a registered juvenile sex offender. Further, juveniles are no longer required to register after the age of 21.

Finally, individuals may also petition to have their names removed from the sex offender registry. In order to do so, they must notify the prosecutor in the county where the petition is file and the prosecutor is to make reasonable efforts to contact the victim that the offender wishes to remove their name from the registry. It is then up to the judge to decide whether that offender's name remains on the registry. A person under the age of 19 who has been convicted of statutory sodomy in the second degree, with a victim over the age of 13 who was not threatened with physical force and no physical force was used, may petition to have his or her name removed from the registry after two years.

The sex offender registry is a good tool for those who know how to use it and who understand its limitations, but it is no substitute for knowing who your child is associating with.