Must Sex Offenders Shirk Social Media?

The Supreme Court this week seemed ready to strike down a North Carolina law making it a crime for sex offenders to access social media sites, even years after they have served their sentences or completed probation, the Washington Post reports. Social media sites “have become embedded in our culture as ways to communicate and ways to exercise our constitutional rights, haven’t they?” Justice Elena Kagan asked North Carolina Deputy Attorney General Robert C. Montgomery during this week’s oral arguments. Kagan argued that restricting sex offenders’ use of the Internet was in violation of First Amendment rights. Montgomery countered by saying social media does not make up the entire internet. “This is a part of the internet, but it’s not the entire Internet that is being taken away from these offenders,” Montgomery said. “They can still have their own blog. They can read blogs. They can do podcasts.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg shot back: “[T]he point is that these people are being cut off from a very large part of the marketplace of ideas. And the First Amendment includes not only the right to speak, but the right to receive information.” Montgomery said that if states are allowed to keep sex offenders away from parks, schools and other places where children congregate, it should be allowed to keep them from “virtual places where children congregate online; specifically, commercial social networking websites.” The case before the Supreme Court concerns Lester Gerard Packingham. Fifteen years ago, when Packingham was 21 years old, he pleaded guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old and received a suspended sentence. Then, in 2010, Packingham wrote a post on Facebook in praise of Jesus and was found to have violated the state’s social media prohibition.