Huntington Beach Man to Test Megan’s Law

SANTA ANA — A man who once pleaded guilty to oral copulation with a minor has alleged in a preliminary lawsuit in federal court here that Megan’s Law, which allows police to warn neighbors about registered sex offenders, is unconstitutional and should be struck down.

Mark A. Wilson, a 29-year-old unemployed Huntington Beach man representing himself is asking the U.S. District Court to waive the fee for filing the suit. If the waiver is granted, allowing the suit to be formally placed before the court, it would become the first legal challenge to the state law named for a New Jersey girl who was raped and strangled by a repeat sex offender living across the street.

The law has gained immense public support throughout the state, but has posed a quandary for police agencies struggling to balance the public’s right to know and the rights of sex offenders to go on with their lives after serving their prison sentences.

Wilson argues in his suit that the public’s interests do not outweigh “the sex offender’s inherent rights to protection of their persons, property and private affairs in so much as they are law abiding.”

Although the law forbids using information about the sex offenders to discriminate or commit violence, Wilson maintains the safeguards do nothing “to alleviate the true and real threat of retaliation and vigilante justice that such disclosure promotes.”

Wilson contends that Megan’s Law also violates the sex offenders’ right to privacy, does not allow due process and is a form of cruel and unusual punishment.

Bob Stutzman, spokesman for state Attorney General Dan Lungren, said he hasn’t seen the lawsuit and could not comment on the specifics, but said several general issues addressed by Wilson do not appear to have merit.

Stutzman said Megan’s Law is not punishment, therefore it cannot constitute cruel and unusual punishment. “There’s no punitive intent,” he said. “It’s merely intended to provide information to the law-abiding public so that they may be safer in knowing who and where registered sex offenders are.”

Besides public notification, police agencies serving areas of at least 200,000 people also must provide the public a CD-ROM with information about registered sex offenders considered high-risk or serious by the state, according to the law. A copy of the CD-ROM is to be unveiled in a Los Angeles news conference Friday, Stutzman said.

In Orange County, police have notified neighbors of three sex offenders who are considered “high-risk,” meaning they have been convicted of three or more violent crimes, at least one of which is a sex crime.

Public protests prompted one offender to move, and two others have since landed back behind bars.

Sidney Landau is in prison on a parole violation after striking a television cameraman. James Crummel was arrested on suspicion of molesting three boys nine years ago and named in an arrest warrant in connection with the murder of 13-year-old James Trotter, who disappeared in 1979. His body was found by Crummel during a 1990 hike.