Want To Hunt Sex Offenders On The Roads In Ohio?
March 1, 2007 (4 Responses)
LOOKS LIKE the great state of Ohio in the USA is intent on making a blood sport out of hunting down sex offenders on the road.
The legal beagles in Cincinnati want to force convicted sex offenders to use a fluorescent-green license plate on their cars so they can be easily identified. Yeah I know – my made up license plate isn’t fluorescent green – so sue me! 
There is some method to this madness… well sort of…
Thing is the crazy logic behind this might just catch on. The local plod over there reckon the green plates would allow them to track sex offenders, who are already required to register with the local sheriff’s office and are prohibited from living within 1,000 feet of a school.
Personally I reckon it will spawn a new form of entertainment on long road journeys. When you get bored with “I Spy” or “Twenty Questions” or even “Vegtable, Mineral or Animal” you can always resort to hunting down them thar sex offender critters and run them off the road. I’m thinking the cops won’t shed any tears and I’m pretty sure none of the other drivers will either.
Can you imagine being offered a lift on a rainy day by someone with these new license plates?
I see trouble ahead with this little piece of legislation… although it is America we’re talking about, Land of the Lawyers, Home of the Corporates; I suppose anything is possible over there these days.
This isn’t the only harebrained action on the molestation front.
Every county in the country has a database of molesters. Some counties require warnings to neighbors whenever molesters move in within so many feet of their house. I’ve heard schemes to make molesters wear radio bracelets, implant radio transmitters under their skin, keep them housed in some governmental hold that isn’t prison, but isn’t free either. There are proposals to chemically castrate all molesters before release.
On the other side there are lawsuits from the molester side asking how it is that if they did their time they can still have further punishments levied against them.
So in light of all that, I guess flourescent green isn’t the worst idea I’ve heard,
Well if this doesn’t invite vigilante justice I don’t know what does. Much as I agree with having a database of molesters to some extent, this is simply dangerous. I don’t believe anyone who committed a crime that our legal system deemed minor enough to allow back onto the street needs to have such a flag planted on him to invite “street justice”.
It’s one thing to maintain a database or even electronically tag someone – because it’s an implicit form of monitoring and control which doesn’t single them out to everyone they meet.
Sticking a bright green license plate on their cars is like getting them to wear bright orange boiler suits; everyone will just assume that whoever is in that car is a sex offender, just like they assume whoever wears that orange boiler suit must be a terrorist.
Street justice is inevitable – no matter how misguided. I’m quite sure there are some genuine horror stories and impacted families who would want to seek such justice, but there are also the ‘opportunists’ who would simply use this as a convenient excuse to go hunting because they chances are they would get away with it.
Perhaps we should confiscate the offenders cars and give it to the Afghanis. Better yet why do we donate them to an Iraqi family. I just hope the offender donates the car if this law happens before someone gets angry and detonates them here in our country. I see a whole new breed of American Jihadists growing in our own country. You can only pull a dogs tail so many times before it bites back. Lets not forget Tim MCVie or did we already?