Kansas Supreme Court Justice Lee Johnson repeatedly compared the state’s sex offender registry to “The Scarlet Letter” on Friday in a series of 4-3 opinions that determined lifetime registration for sex offenders is not cruel and unusual punishment and a 2011 law cannot be applied retroactively to defendants who committed sex crimes before July of that year.
In 2011, state law was amended to require people convicted of sexually violent crimes to register for 25 years rather than 10 years. The new law applied to anyone convicted of such a crime prior to April 15, ...