Two new TV ads hit the airwaves today, “Safe” from the Senate Leadership Fund and “Kelly” from the Burr campaign. As reported by the News & Observer, the ads target Deborah Ross for her opposition to the North Carolina sex offender registry:
“In a memo Ross wrote to ACLU members while leading the group in the mid-1990s, she said the registry ‘would make it even harder for people to reintegrate into society and start over and could lead to vigilantism.’”
In addition to the 1995 memo, a story by Politico pointed to a previously unreported interview between Deborah Ross and the Salisbury Post in 2000 which furthered her arguments against the sex offender registry:
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“Not everyone who is a sex offender is a serial offender.”
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“There are some weird things in our laws that make people sex offenders, including statutory rape situations, where it might be consensual, but because of the age it is a crime.”
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“People have the false impression that all sex offenders do it again and do it on repeated occasions, while the majority of sex offenders involves people within families.”
- "Two bad things happen for society through sex offender registry. First, when they don’t want to register it kind of pushes them under ground and it makes them more violent. And that gives a false sense of security of who the people are that you should be aware of. It also keeps them from reintegrating the community and society. Psychological factors are they feel separated from society and this makes them feel more, kind of, isolated and unable to experience normal human interaction.”