Online Registry Or Target List?

A Stranger Kills Two Sex Offenders Among 34 He Looked Up in Maine

BOSTON, April 19 -- The man who shot William Elliott and Joseph Gray did so without a word, leaving their homes in northern Maine as much a stranger as when he arrived.

So far, police have come up with only one connection between the apparent gunman, Stephen A. Marshall -- who committed suicide after the attacks -- and the two victims: Both were among 34 former sex offenders that Marshall had looked up using Maine's online sex offender registry.

The killings have alarmed some defense attorneys and advocates for sexual offenders, who say this crime is among the darkest examples of the harassment and threats that have followed the rapid rise in registries that publicly identify offenders.

"We've spent a great deal of public and private energy demonizing these types of offenders," said William Buckman, a criminal defense attorney in New Jersey who said the house of one of his clients was burned down, while garbage was thrown on the lawn of another. "So it's predictable that they will be the victims of violence and vigilantism."

The idea of public identification for sex offenders was popularized in the mid-1990s, after 7-year-old Megan Nicole Kanka was raped and murdered by a neighbor in New Jersey. Her parents had not known that the man had a sexual crime on his record.

Now, there is some sort of sex offender registry in all 50 states and the District, with many of the databases accessible online. The laws that established the registries have been celebrated as an invaluable tool for parents, and have withstood several court challenges, including a U.S. Supreme Court case decided in 2003.

But criminologists say an unintended result has been threats or harassment directed at the offenders whose photos and addresses are publicly available. A study by Richard Tewksbury at the University of Louisville found that 50 percent of all registered offenders had been harassed in person, and more than 25 percent had received threatening calls, letters or e-mail.

"It does indeed, inadvertently, give some people the message that these people are criminals, and even if they're free, they're still criminals," said James A. Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.

Violent attacks on offenders are rare. In 2003, a New Hampshire man stabbed one offender he located through a registry and started fires at two buildings where others lived. In August, a Washington man posed as an FBI agent to enter the apartment of three registered offenders near Seattle. He later killed two of them, authorities said.

Supporters of the registries said this week they were saddened by the Maine case, but noted that many states -- including Maine -- place warnings on registry sites that harassment or intimidation of offenders is illegal. They said that removing offenders' home addresses, as some critics of the registries suggest, would leave them less useful to parents.

"I think we need to be really careful before we start turning the perpetrators into wholesale victims," said Marc Klaas, who became a victims' rights advocate after his 12-year-old daughter, Polly Klaas, was kidnapped and murdered in California in 1993. Still, he said, vigilante violence could threaten the legitimacy of the laws behind the registries.

"If we abuse Megan's Law," he said, using the name of the New Jersey law that served as a model for other states, "then we're going to lose it."