1of16/ As . @G_Padraic noted, #RBG wrote dissent to the judgment that declared that registries aren't punitive. Below, I captured her dissent without all of the citations and extra legalese. I also took out the specific case referenced. What's left is a beautiful, stunning read.

2/ It is unclear whether the Alaska Legislature conceived of the State’s Sex Offender Registration Act as a regulatory measure or as dissenting penal law. Accordingly, in resolving whether the Act ranks as penal for ex post facto purposes, I would not demand “the clearest proof”

3/ that the statute is in effect criminal rather than civil. Instead, I would neutrally evaluate the Act’s purpose and effects. I would hold Alaska’s Act punitive in effect. Beyond doubt, the Act involves an “affirmative disability or restraint.”

4/ As Justice Stevens and Justice Souter spell out, Alaska’s Act imposes onerous and intrusive obligations on convicted sex offenders; and it exposes registrants, through aggressive public notification of their crimes, to profound humiliation and community-wide ostracism.

5/ Furthermore, the Act’s requirements resemble historically common forms of punishment. Its registration and reporting provisions are comparable to conditions of supervised release or parole; include “whether the sanction involves an affirmative disability or restraint, whether

6/ it has historically been regarded as a punishment, whether it comes into play only on a finding of scienter, whether its operation will promote the traditional aims of punishment—retribution and deterrence, whether the behavior to which it applies is already a crime, whether

7/ an alternative [nonpunitive] purpose to which it may rationally be connected is assignable for it, and whether it appears excessive in relation to the alternative purpose assigned.” Public notification regimen, which permits placement of the registrant’s face on a webpage

8/ under the label “Registered Sex Offender,” calls to mind shaming punishments once used to mark an offender as someone to be shunned. Telling too, as Justice Souter observes, past crime alone, not current dangerousness, is the “touchstone” triggering the Act’s obligations. This

9/touchstone adds to the impression that the Act retributively targets past guilt that it “revisit[s] past crimes [more than it] prevent[s] future ones.” Tending the other way, I acknowledge, the Court has ranked some laws civil and nonpunitive although they impose significant

10/disabilities or restraints. The Court has also deemed some laws nonpunitive despite “punitive aspects What ultimately tips the balance for me is the Act’s excessiveness in relation to its nonpunitive purpose. As respondents concede, the Act has a legitimate civil purpose:

11/ to promote public safety by alerting the public to potentially recidivist sex offenders in the community. But its scope notably exceeds this purpose. The Act applies to all convicted sex offenders, without regard to their future dangerousness. And the duration of the

12/ reporting requirement is keyed not to any determination of a particular offender’s risk of reoffending, but to whether the offense of conviction qualified as aggravated. The reporting requirements themselves are exorbitant: The Act requires aggravated offenders to engage in

13/perpetual quarterly reporting, even if their personal information has not changed. And meriting heaviest weight in my judgment, the Act makes no provision whatever for the possibility of rehabilitation: Offenders cannot shorten their registration or notification period, even

14/on the clearest demonstration of rehabilitation or conclusive proof of physical incapacitation. However plain it may be that a former sex offender currently poses no threat of recidivism, he will remain subject to long-term monitoring and inescapable humiliation. (opinion

15/concurring in judgment), I do not find the Court’s citations convincingly responsive to this point, dissenting to label him a “Registered Sex Offender” for the rest of his life. Satisfied that the Act is ambiguous in intent and punitive in effect, I would hold its

16/retroactive application incompatible with the Ex Post Facto Clause, and would therefore affirm the judgement of the Court of Appeals. -end - If only she had been in the majority. So many lives would be better today - for this case and many others. /end