Michigan Supreme Court Removes Nearly Twenty Thousand Sex Offenders From Public Registry

People all over Michigan are asking and questioning why nearly 20,000 registered sex offenders have been removed from the Michigan sex offender registry after a recent ruling from the state Supreme Court.

A report is coming out talking about this puzzling subtraction from the sex offender registry, which the Supreme Court says is simply a matter of registration requirements not being able to be applied to offenders whose crimes happened before July 1 in 2011.

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Now the state police are saying that the nearly 43,000 offenders who were registered and required to be registered before have now gone down to about 23,000. This ruling has drawn heavy criticism, especially from Kent County prosecutor Kris Becker:

Obviously disappointed in the decision, especially since the Court took this important step of removing thousands of people from the registry, without hearing oral arguments on it, as is normally done in important cases. I agree with Justice Brian Zahra that the Court is using judicial fiat to change laws that should be left to the legislature.

Unfortunately, as of now, you can’t find any of the offenders that were removed from the public registry, as they’ve been completely purged from the public database, and you only find people with qualifying convictions that were dated after July 1 of 2011 as public knowledge.

However, even though they’ve been removed from the registry, that doesn’t remove their historical criminal convictions, which are public record and can be requested from a local court clerk, but who seriously has time for that?

There’s zero logical reason why more than 20,000 sex offenders should have their information removed completely. The entire point of building a databases so that we can look these people up when we are forced to live near or interact with them.

If nothing else, they should at least have a separate website where their information is readily available.