kansascity.com: Kansas ponders adding prostitutes' customers to sex offender list.
Topeka- A bill passed by the Kansas House on Wednesday would land people convicted of hiring a prostitute on the state’s sex offender list for 10 years.
Many states, including Kansas, already require sex offender registration for those soliciting minors. Some states, such as California, give judges the discretion to require registration in solicitation cases. But adding solicitation to the crimes requiring offender registration would be a significant expansion of the offender registry, critics said.
Slattery’s amendment passed the House easily, but it’s likely to run into trouble in the Senate. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Tim Owens, an Overland Park Republican, worries that adding solicitation to the list of crimes requiring registration goes too far. “We’ve expanded it more and more and more,” Owens said. “It diminishes the impact. How far do we go?”
We are all for adding groups of citizens to online registries. This will join drunk driving, animal abuse, sex offenses, murders, gun crimes, child abuse and more as crimes deemed by our governments to be publicly shamed online. The more , the merrier. We have already diluted sex offender registries with almost one million offenders; most of whom pose little or no threat to anyone. With the online registries promulgating like this, they only become the butt of jokes, which will eventually kill them altogether.
