Two 14 year olds must register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives because of a schoolyard horseplay. Time to rethink Megan's Law?

Wall Street Journal

By Ashby Jones

In John Hughes’s classic 1985 movie “The Breakfast Club,” Andrew Clark (played by Emilio Estevez, pictured) is forced serve an entire Saturday in detention for, in the character’s words, taping “Larry Lester’s buns together.”

We wonder how Clark would have been treated had he pulled such a stunt in present day New Jersey. Judging from this story in the Newark Star-Ledger, we think there’s a good chance that, in addition to having to write an essay in a high -school library, he might have been forced to register as a sex-offender.

Let us explain: On Monday, a three-judge appellate panel in New Jersey ruled that a pair of 14-year-old boys in Someret County committed a crime in 2008 by sitting on the faces of a pair of 12-year-olds with their bare buttocks, and will be forced to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives.

According to the story, in a decision handed down Monday, the three-judge panel acknowledged the severity of its decision, but said it was bound to uphold the law.

“We are keenly aware that our decision may have profound lifelong ramifications for these two boys as well as others similarly situated,” Judge Jose Fuentes wrote.

One of the boys, whose case went to trial, said he had pulled the stunt because “I thought it was funny and I was trying to get my friends to laugh,” he told a family court judge.

But according to the Star-Ledger:

An act is considered criminal sexual contact if it is done for sexual gratification or to degrade or humiliate the victim, and punishable by lifetime registration — even for juveniles — under Megan’s Law, which requires a person convicted of a sex crime against a child to notify police of changes of address or employment.

The trial judge concluded the teenager intended to humiliate or degrade his victims and found him guilty of criminal sexual contact. The second teenager who was implicated pleaded guilty to criminal sexual contact, and received the same penalty.

The convictions were appealed, and the attorneys for the teenagers argued that their behavior amounted to horseplay, which other appellate court panels had exempted from Megan’s Law.

But on Monday, the panel noted that its hands were tied. “Although we are not unsympathetic to the arguments criticizing the application of the lifelong registration requirements in (Megan’s Law) to 14-year-old offenders, we are bound to uphold such application because that outcome is mandated by the Legislature,’’ the court said in its ruling.