Banning Sex Offender E-mail Addresses

The Justice Department on Friday allowed states to exclude certain personal information about sex offenders from public notification websites in a move to increase compliance with the law.

Under the new rules, jurisdictions would be free to choose whether or not to post information regarding juvenile offenders. The new regulations also would ban states from publishing any offender's e-mail address on public websites.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. issued the new guidelines in a Federal Register notice:

While the [law's] guidelines endeavored to facilitate jurisdictions' compliance with this aspect of [the law], resistance by some jurisdictions to public disclosure of information about sex offenders in this class has continued to be one of the largest impediments to [the law's] implementation.

The change would create an optional, not mandatory, exemption from online disclosure, according to the notice. States can still post details concerning juvenile sex offenders "if they so wish," it states.

Although states would be barred from posting offenders' e-mail addresses on public websites, officials could exchange that kind of contact information with anyone through other channels.

"This change does not limit . . . the discretion of jurisdictions to include on their public websites functions by which members of the public can ascertain whether a specified e-mail address or other Internet identifier is reported as that of a registered sex offender . . . or to disclose Internet identifier information to any one by means other than public website posting," Holder's notice reads.