Convicted Sex Offenders Triumph in Case to be Removed from Register

by Katy Murcutt - Paralegal

04 May 2010, filed under Consumer

Two convicted sex offenders have one their case that challenged their insertion on the Sex Offender’s Register in England and Wales.

The Supreme Court, who’s ruling that the offender’s details may be removed from the register, may generate further cases by sex offender’s wishing to have their details removed from the register.

The two offenders, a teenager convicted of rape and a fifty-nine year old man convicted of indecent assault fulfilled the criteria to be included on the sex offender’s register.

The teenage male was jailed for thirty months in 2005 when aged eleven years after raping a six year old boy. The fifty-nine year old man, Angus Thompson, was jailed in 1996 for five years.

Offenders are placed on the sex offender’s register for life if they are sentenced to at least thirty months in jail. There are currently just under thirty-three-thousand sex offenders recorded on the sex offender’s register in England and Wales.

Each offender stated that their inclusion on the register was disproportionate to the crime they had committed because there was no review procedure in place for good behaviour. The offender’s based their respective cases on the interference with their family lives in accordance with Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – the right to respect for private and family life.

In the case of the teenage offender, the requirement for him to be monitored under the register prevented him from being able to travel abroad on holiday with family and playing league rugby.

The earlier decision of the Court of Appeal was upheld by the Supreme Court judges finding that the lack of review procedure for sex offenders on the sex offender’s register was incompatible with Article 8 of the ECHR.

The result of these two cases will have an impact on the winning party of the general election on 6th May 2010 as the Sex Offenders Act 2003 will need to be reviewed in light of these two cases and amended.

The five judges in the Supreme Court concurred that keeping sex offender’s on the register is a waste of tax payers money and is inconsistent with registers kept abroad, where a monitoring scheme is already in place in countries such as Spain.

The sex offender’s register also applies in Scotland, however the position in Scotland may differ to that of the Supreme Courts’ decision for England and Wales as there is currently a similar case that has been brought in Scotland which has not yet been decided. This is because Scotland does not come under the jurisdiction of the laws of England and Wales as they operate as a separate legal entity, meaning the result of the case being heard there may differ greatly to that of the Supreme Court’s.