CONCORD, N.H.—A Franklin city ordinance barring sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of a school is unconstitutional, a judge has ruled.

Merrimack Superior Court Judge Larry Smukler ruled last week that city officials failed to show that the restriction protects children.

Registered sex offender William Thomas and the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union Foundation sued Franklin city officials who sought to enforce the 2007 ordinance after Thomas and a companion moved to Franklin from Massachusetts in 2010.

Thomas was convicted 27 years ago of sexually assaulting a minor in Massachusetts and spent three years in prison.

When he registered as a sex offender in Franklin, officials told him that he had 30 days to move out of his apartment because it was within 2,500 feet of a school. He had signed a two-year lease and told his landlord he was a sex offender.

The court granted Thomas a preliminary injunction in December 2010. The court's ruling now makes that injunction permanent.

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January 20, 2012

DENVER (Reuters) - A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that a policy barring registered sex offenders from public libraries in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was unconstitutional, a decision that could have reverberations across the nation.

"The First Amendment includes a fundamental right to receive information," a three-judge panel of the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote.

"By prohibiting registered sex offenders from accessing ... public libraries, the city's ban precludes these individuals from exercising this right in a particular government forum," the court said.

But the panel left open the possibility of allowing restrictions less stringent than an outright ban.

The case stemmed from a 2008 "administrative injunction" by then-Mayor Martin Chavez, who ordered city libraries to send letters to registered sex offenders holding library cards to tell them they were no longer allowed in libraries.

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Hebephilia is too controversial for the government to use it to claim that a sex offender has a serious mental disorder meriting civil commitment in order to protect the public, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

Judge Terrence Boyle

In ordering the release of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Neuhauser, the judge also found that the government had failed to prove that the prisoner was at high risk to reoffend or would have serious difficulty controlling his impulses.

"The Court finds that it would be inappropriate to predicate civil commitment on a diagnosis that a large number of clinical psychologists believe is not a diagnosis at all, at least for forensic purposes," wrote Judge Terrence W. Boyle of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. "Although hebephilia has been proposed to be included as a mental disorder in the revision of the DSM, it has been rejected as a proper mental disorder by numerous psychologists.”

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Hebephilia, the controversial faux disorder proposed for the upcoming DSM-5, has been repackaged in the hopes that no one will notice its presence. Unfortunately for its survival, two newly published journal articles may make it harder to hide.

Jean Broc: The Death of Hyacinthos

The proposed label of "pedohebephilia” has been quietly discarded. Instead, hebephilia – defined as sexual attraction to young pubescents – has been buried in the text of revamped criteria for pedophilia. Presumably hoping it will go unnoticed, the web page authors do not mention the change.

The questionable diagnosis is the brainchild of a Canadian sex offender clinic with inordinate influence on the Sexual Disorders Workgroup of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 revision committee.

It is the last of three quacky sexual paraphilia proposals still standing. Overwhelming opposition derailed paraphilic coercive disorder (which would have turned rape into a mental disorder) and hypersexuality.

These victories notwithstanding, the developers of the DSM-5, due out in 2013, have been remarkably deaf to an ever-increasing roar of concern from allied professions in the United States and internationally. The revision process steamrollers on despite a mushrooming petition by a coalition of psychology organizations, a scathing critique by the British Psychological Society and, most recently, public statements of concern by the 154,000-member American Psychological Association and the 120,000-strong American Counseling Association . 

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