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Sex-offender registry office is not just a ‘data collector,’ though

Being found responsible for sexual misconduct by a college that deprives accused students of basic due process can already ruin your life. What if these decisions are centralized and searchable across the country?

That’s not what the Justice Department is planning to create as part of a new program to collect information on “how institutions of higher education share, respond and coordinate information to prevent sexual assault perpetration.”

The Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking in the department told Ashe Schow at The Daily Wire that its Federal Register notice earlier this month was more limited than its language might suggest.

The SMART office is seeking public comment through Friday on whether its “proposed collection of information” is necessary for its functioning and whether the information “will have practical utility.”

It also wants commenters to evaluate the “validity of the methodology and assumptions” it’s using to estimate how burdensome collection will be, and how the “quality, utility, and clarity” of collected information can be enhanced.

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The office plans to circulate a 15-minute questionnaire to 50 colleges on their “policies and practices” for not only dealing with “registered sex offenders who may be students or employees,” but also for reviewing “disciplinary sexual misconduct history of prospective or current students.”

To some observers, this sounds like a parallel sex-offender registry for students who were found responsible for sexual misconduct based on a low evidence standard, without an opportunity to meaningfully cross-examine their accusers or witnesses, without knowing the specific charges or evidence against them until late in the adjudication process, by officials who aren’t even following their college’s rules.

Schow seized on the mission of the SMART office – which includes running “grant programs related to the registration, notification, and management of sex offenders” – to warn about a potential registry for colleges:

There are already enough problems with sex offender registrations; add into that the poor training, political agendas, and low standard of evidence used in campus procedures, and you’re looking at a registry filled with students who had consensual sex but for various reasons — spite, jealousy, regret — were accused of sexual assault, and some legitimate perpetrators.

But a representative for the DOJ office later told Schow that a registry was not on the table, and that collected information on college policies and procedures wouldn’t be shared with other departments or agencies.

Not mentioned in its budget request

The Independent Institute’s Wendy McElroy, whose appearance at Brown University triggered students because she calls “rape culture” a “big lie,” is still skeptical about the aims of this new SMART effort.

Writing in The Daily Caller, McElroy notes the SMART office was created as part of a 2006 law that requires states to “post the personal data of [sex] offenders in their jurisdictions online, including addresses and photographs.”

The office requested up to half a million dollars last year to research “expanded sanctions” for perpetrators of campus sexual assault, which “seems to belie SMART’s passive role as data collector,” McElroy says:

Clicking on the grant request link leads to a description, which reads, “To develop and provide alternative sanctions to campus administrators and/or disciplinary boards to utilize for those individuals found responsible for sexual assault on campus.” The initiative has not been closed. Nevertheless, the 2017 grant request is not among those listed or cross-linked on the SMART website.

SMART been involved in campus sexual assault issues for at least three recent budget years – supporting programs to “enhance sex offender management practices” – yet its proposed “Campus Information Sharing and Response Project” is neither mentioned on any DOJ website nor listed in the office’s fiscal-year 2019 budget request, “which means the Project is operating without Congressional oversight,” McElroy writes.

If this program is to move forward, she says, SMART at least needs to lay out its definitions for campus sexual misconduct, which “can range from verbal sexual harassment, including off-color jokes, to brutal rape.”

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Defense attorney Scott Greenfield also doesn’t buy the SMART office’s denial:

It may well be that there are no plans, at this time, to take the information they’re collecting to the next step, but then, why bother collecting the information at all? Campus policies are in a constant state of flux, particularly as colleges have their practice held unconstitutional by federal courts nationwide …

Yet, they are creating a reporting system between colleges and DoJ to no apparent end? To include a list of names of offenders would require one additional question once the system is in place. Not a big burden. But more significantly, the disavowal of any intention to create a secondary sex offender registry, or worse yet, to add students held “responsible” by campus adjudications to “real” sex offender registries, might be true for the moment, but staffs change, administrations change, and they can always change their mind if the winds blow the right direction.

Greenfield called the law that created SMART “one of the most dangerously destructive schemes created by government,” and says the office has no plausible reason under its mandate to get involved in campus adjudications:

Once someone realizes they’ve created the pathway to collect the names of campus “sex offenders,” it’s merely a baby step to doing something with it. Indeed, government often finds itself incapable of restraint once it has the means to do damage.

Read the Federal Register notice, Schow’s report, and analysis by McElroy and Greenfield.

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IMAGE: infomatique/Flickr

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