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Comment by jadence | Hacker News Reader

IMO the sex offenders list is crap as it lumps a large range of offenses together.

Caught urinating in public? Had consensual sex at age 17 with your high school sweetheart^? If you got caught doing either one you end up on the same list as the child molesters and rapists. Lucky you.

And the sad thing is I don't see this changing anytime soon as any politician who tries to tackle this will be clobbered by his opponents for being lenient on those evil sex offenders.

^Given sexual trends among teens I'm guessing a ridiculous portion (I'd venture over 80%) of the people in America should be on the sex offenders list.

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I think the only real chance of that happening is for the courts to strike these things down as cruel and unusual punishment, which I firmly believe they are.

It's why this isn't a story he can laugh about later:

http://www.recordcourier.com/article/20090703/NEWS/907029986...

Dude's life is ruined because there happened to be kids there.

Yes, those poor children, scarred for life because they saw some genitals.

Americans at the dutch beaches invariably are absolutely shocked when I take them there on a visit. There is more casual nudity there (and these are the 'regular' beaches) than on the average porn site.

Being a 'sex offender' for something like this completely degrades the term, it is supposed to be reserved for sexual predators that make a career out of stalking the defenseless, not for an act of stupidity or sillyness.

While I agree mostly with your view, I just spent quite a bit of time looking over the local sex offender lists of several cities I've lived in, and I can say for sure that at least in these random samples, the outliers you mention (public urination, high school sweethearts separated by too many years, etc) are nowhere to be found on any of the lists I have looked through.

I think it's strangely primitive and archaic for this sort of public humiliation to exist in our modern society either way, but a few moments of clicking around these samples at random goes to show that a vast, vast majority of these people have been convicted of what most would consider "serious" sex crimes.

At least with a custom app you can filter the database and only show cases that seem relevant to you.

While I don't care atm, to be very honest, if I had little children running around outside, I would probably take a look at that database.

I am sorry for the humiliation these people go through. I consider their predicament a disease and I truly feel sorry for them. However, as long as we can not cure that illness (and we can't afaik), the safety of my children and relatives comes first. I believe the point of laws and crime deterrents should not be to "even out the guilt", it should be to prevent crimes from happening (Edit: that's of course a broad generalization, a balance has to be found between preventing crimes and overly restrictive laws. Hopefully the experts on psychology etc. can find the appropriate judgement).

(Note: obviously I don't talk about urinating in public and kissing your sweetheart when you were 17).

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