Megan's Law and the 1996 legislation

Megan's Law

On July 29, 1994, paroled sex offender Jesse K. Timmendequas lured his seven-year-old neighbor, Megan Kanka, into his house with the promise of showing her a puppy; one inside, Timmendequas raped and murdered the little girl. One month after the murder, the New Jersey State Assembly passed a law requiring sex offenders to register with a new, statewide database and to inform their neighbors when moving into a neighborhood. This became the basis of the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act (the Wetterling Act) that was passed as part of the omnibus Federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Despite some problems implementing this law, it is a sensible piece of legislation that would undoubtedly be passed today.

The bill that came to be known as Megan's Law was officially titled House Resolution 2137 and was sponsored by Republican representative Dick Zimmer (NJ-12). The bill was introduced on July 27, 1995 and was unanimously approved by the House the following May. On May 9, 1996, the Senate approved the bill and, eight days later, it was signed into law by then President Bill Clinton (Peters, 8). This bill differs from the New Jersey bill on which it is based in a number of important ways. For instance, unlike the New Jersey bill, the federal bill does not mandate "active notification," meaning that law enforcement and/or the paroled sex offender are not legally required to notify local residents when a paroled sex offender relocates to the area. In addition, the federal version of Megan's Law leaves many of the decisions regarding penalties for violating the law up to the states. In other words, while Megan's Law is a federal law, much of the law's substance is left to the individual states, a reflection of traditional American federalism.

In large part, laws like Megan's Law were elements of a "get tough" approach on crime born out of the public perception that crime rates were going up (Hohenberg, 16). Though in reality the rate of crime declined during the 1990s, a number of sensationalized crimes gave Americans the opposite impression, and both state legislatures and Congress responded by passing, or attempting to pass, a series of laws designed to increase criminal penalties. Another example of "get tough" legislation from this period was Washington state's "Three Strikes Law," which mandated life imprisonment for anyone convicted of three felonies; this law was the first of a wave of such laws, the most famous of which is California's, passed in 1994 (Zimmring, 15).