Opinion ID: 1518571
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Historical treatment

Text: In considering history, we are aided by the treatment given New Jersey's community notification provisions in the majority and dissenting opinions of the Third Circuit's Verniero decision. See Verniero, 119 F.3d at 1097-1101 (concluding that New Jersey's statute's objective purpose is remedial); id. at 1115-22 (Becker, J., concurring and dissenting) (opining that the statute's objective purpose is to punish). The Verniero panel majority rejected the appellants' proffered analogies to the punishments of public shaming, humiliation, and banishment as those practices were employed in colonial times, and cited instead to United States v. Criden, 648 F.2d 814 (3d Cir.1981), in which the court approved post-trial rebroadcast by the media of video and audio tapes played to the jury during a criminal trial. The Criden court had concluded that, although widespread publicity concerning a crime could adversely affect the accused or his relatives, such side effects were an inevitable consequence of public disclosure of accurate criminal information, which is highly valued by our society. Thus, the Criden panel explicitly rejected the district court's attempt to analogize rebroadcast to holding the defendant up to public ridicule by placing him in a cage or in stocks. See id. at 824-25. The Verniero majority then reasoned that, likewise, dissemination of accurate public record information regarding criminal histories has never been regarded as punitive. In this regard, the majority observed that governmental compilation and distribution of what it termed rap sheet information, to regulatory agencies, prospective employers, and interested members of the public, constitute far more compelling analogies than the stocks, cages, and scarlet letters referenced by appellants. Verniero, 119 F.3d at 1100. The panel majority ultimately determined that governmental warnings of threats to public safety which are designed to allow members of the public to take steps to protect themselvessuch as wanted posters, warning posters regarding escaped prisoners, and quarantine notices concerning individuals with infectious diseasesoffered a closer analogy to sex-offender public notice provisions, which also reflect a governmental purpose to alert the public to a risk of harm, and that the negative effects of such measures have not historically been regarded as punishment. See id. at 1101. The Verniero dissent criticized the majority's reliance upon Criden, pointing out that that case involved private actors seeking to publicly distribute the criminal information at issue, whereas in Megan's Law governmental authorities are appointed to the task. The dissent viewed this public/private distinction as controlling, see id. at 1115 (Becker, C.J., dissenting), and, unlike the majority, opined that shaming punishments, because they were carried out by the authorities, did indeed provide an apt analogy to public notification under Megan's Law, particularly as those punishments, like Megan's Law notification, served to warn the community that the individual might re-offend. The dissent, moreover, was unconvinced by the majority's comparisons to warning/wanted posters and quarantine notices, observing that such measures involve no judicial endorsement by a disinterested magistrate, but rather, proceed from other public agencies, id. at 1117, and are more limited in the scope of information revealed. See id. at 1118. Additionally, the dissent noted that the type of information subject to public disclosure under Megan's Lawincluding the offender's identity, description, address, and place of employmentis effectively the same as that which was disseminated in colonial public shaming punishments, inasmuch as the offender in colonial times would have been known to those who witnessed the shaming. There is certainly validity to the dissent's critique of the Verniero majority's analogies to warning/wanted posters and quarantine notices. Such notices are intended to facilitate capture or quarantine of the persons involved, and hence, they do not threaten to disrupt an individual's right to quietly live his life in the midst of his community. [16] Still, it is not clear that Megan's Law notification is analogous to shaming punishments either, as such measures were directly aimed at stigmatizing offenders. The fact that the offender in colonial times would have been known to his community, as the Verniero dissent pointed out, supports the position that such punishments were carried out primarily with a punitive intent. By contrast, the disclosure of factual information concerning the local presence of a potentially harmful individual is aimed, not at stigmatizing that individual, but at allowing potentially vulnerable members of the public to avoid being victimized. The critical issue for our present purposes is that, even to the extent that notification under Megan's Law II may have some punitive effect in terms of shaming the sex offender, such effect has not been demonstrated to be sufficient in itself to render the challenged measures criminal punishment for constitutional purposes. For one thing, whether a sanction constitutes punishment is not determined from the defendant's perspective, as even remedial sanctions carry the sting of punishment. Department of Revenue of Montana v. Kurth Ranch, 511 U.S. 767, 777 n. 14, 114 S.Ct. 1937, 1945 n. 14, 128 L.Ed.2d 767 (1994). Equally important, any punitive effect that results from being designated a sexually violent predator is not gratuitous, but rather, an inevitable consequence of the effectuation of the law's remedial objective of protecting vulnerable members of the public. See United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739, 747, 107 S.Ct. 2095, 2101, 95 L.Ed.2d 697 (1987) (Unless Congress expressly intended to impose punitive restrictions, the punitive/regulatory distinction turns on whether an alternative purpose to which the restriction may rationally be connected is assignable for it, and whether it appears excessive in relation to [such] purpose. (internal quotation marks omitted)). Thus, unlike shaming punishments such as stocks and cageswhere there would have been alternative means of notifying the community that a certain individual had committed a particular crimethe notification provisions of Megan's Law appear to be reasonably calculated to accomplish self-protection only, and not to impose additional opprobrium upon the offender unrelated to that goal. See Poritz, 662 A.2d at 372 (concluding that the Constitution does not prevent society from attempting to protect itself from convicted sex offenders, no matter when convicted, so long as the means of protection are reasonably designed for that purpose and only for that purpose, and not designed to punish); Roe v. Office of Adult Probation, 125 F.3d 47, 55 (2d Cir.1997) (Modern day community notification measures serve vastly different purposes than those served by [traditional stigmatization penalties or banishment], operate without the physical participation of the offender, and lack the general social significance accompanying traditional shaming and banishment penalties.); see also Smith, ___ U.S. at ___, 123 S.Ct. at 1150 (rejecting any analogy to colonial shaming punishments, and noting that in [i]n contrast to [such punishments], the State does not make publicity and the resulting stigma an integral part of the objective of the regulatory scheme). The counseling requirement likewise does not implicate traditional methods of punishment. The trial court observed that mandatory, periodic counseling may be a condition of supervision incident to probation or parole, see Trial Court op. at 11, and Appellees presently note that probation has historically been a form of punishment. It does not follow, however, that the counseling requirement under Megan's Law II is historically analogous to punishment. Primarily, counseling does not serve punitive ends notwithstanding its use as a condition of probation or parole. While probation itself may be a form of punishment, probation conditions are imposed specifically to insure or assist the defendant in leading a law-abiding life. 42 Pa.C.S. § 9754(b); see also Commonwealth v. Quinlan, 488 Pa. 255, 258, 412 A.2d 494, 496 (1980) (stating that parole and probation are primarily concerned with the rehabilitation and restoration to a useful life of the parolee or probationer); Commonwealth v. Kates, 452 Pa. 102, 115, 305 A.2d 701, 708 (1973) (observing that the basic objective of probation is to provide a means to achieve rehabilitation without resorting to incarceration). Indeed, counseling, by its very nature, is rehabilitative and not retributive. This is significant because the requisite historical analysis focuses upon whether the provision itself has traditionally been regarded as punishment, not whether it is an incident of other measures historically associated with criminal punishment. See Gaffney, 557 Pa. at 334, 733 A.2d at 619; Artway, 81 F.3d at 1263. Therefore, this factor supports a conclusion that the Act is non-punitive.