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Monday, May 04, 2009

Ind. Law - "Deputies hunt for sex offenders who hide out on Web"

A companion piece to the story Saturday in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, reported by Rebecca S. Green, headlined "Rulings affect sex offender state registry," is this lengthy story today by reporter Green, titled "Online, a game of cat, mouse: Deputies hunt for sex offenders who hide out on Web." Some quotes:

Under 2008 changes to the laws governing Indiana’s Sex and Violent Offender Registry, offenders are required to provide local law enforcement with their online identities – e-mail addresses, chat room IDs and any social networking site identities, such as Facebook and MySpace. And state law prohibits sex offenders convicted of child solicitation and attempted child solicitation from ever being on social networking sites.

But enforcing the ban can be extremely difficult because, unlike a physical address, online identities and online addresses can be assumed and changed quickly, without anyone knowing. Free Internet sites offer little or no checks on the identities of those creating e-mail accounts, making it possible to create dozens of accounts using a myriad of fake names or other identifiers.

“It’s not impossible to enforce it, but it makes it difficult because we first have to know that they have an e-mail address,” [Allen County Sheriff’s Department Detective Jeff] Shimkus said. “It’s almost like an honor system.”

He likens it to speeding – hard to enforce when you can’t have an officer on every road, in this case every stop on the information superhighway.

“It’s difficult to enforce because we don’t have the technology or the right,” Shimkus said, adding that police officers cannot search a sex offender’s computer merely to look for e-mail addresses.

Garza’s recent arrest makes him the first in Allen County charged with failing to register his online addresses, Shimkus said.

But the detective has four other cases on his desk demanding his attention, in spite of the difficulty in policing this aspect of the registry, some generated by tips. “The public’s out there watching,” he said.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on May 4, 2009 09:59 AM
Posted to Indiana Law