This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 7th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

John Doe is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The feds, specifically the U.S. Attorney General, say he has to register as a sex offender.

California says the case is over.

The offender has been reformed.

The record has been expunged and they won't let him register.

So now John Doe is guilty of a federal crime.

Caleb Kruckenberg of the Pacific Legal Foundation is representing John Doe.

We spoke last month in Chicago.

We're going to be talking about a difficult subject here, which is Sex Offender Registries.

And there have been a lot of problems with Sex Offender Registries over the years.

I talked about them with David Post a few years ago. You can

look through the Kator Daily Podcast Archive to listen to that conversation, but this is a

case where it seems clear based on your telling of it that this is a guy who

may or may not have done something wrong in the past but as a purely legal matter he's in the clear as far as the

state is concerned tell me about the the case well I think anytime you use the

term sex offender

when you talk about sex offenders,

courts, the public were really willing

to accept a reality that we wouldn't in any other context and that doesn't mean it's okay.

So I represent a client and he's unfortunately going by John Doe because he is facing the prospect of having to register for a crime that no longer exists on paper.

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