Supreme Court says federal law didn’t require Kansas sex offender leaving country to notify authorities
The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday a Kansas man was improperly arrested and convicted for violating a federal law that required him, as a sex offender, to notify authorities when he moved to another country.
The case involved Lester Ray Nichols, a registered sex offender who lived in Leavenworth. Nichols and another registered sex offender from Missouri moved to the Phillipines several years ago without notifying authorities of their decisions to re-locate.
The government claimed federal law required such notification. Both men were arrested and returned to the United States to face charges of violating the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, known as SORNA.
But a unanimous Supreme Court said Monday that sex offenders who leave the country could not be prosecuted under the law as it existed at the time. “SORNA’s plain text … did not require Nichols to update his registration in Kansas once he no longer resided there,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote.
The decision did not reach the constitutionality of SORNA, and the Court noted that recently added federal language will solve the problem by requiring notice of intended travel to a foreign jurisdiction.
Nichols was not charged under state law, which would have required him to notify authorities.
“Both parties agree that the new (federal) law captures Nichols’s conduct,” the justices said. “And, of course, Nichols’s failure to update his registration in Kansas violated state law. We are thus reassured that our holding today is not likely to create ‘loopholes and deficiencies’ in SORNA’s nationwide sex-offender registration scheme.”
The ruling resolves a conflict between different appeals courts on the language in the statutes.
As of last November, Nichols lived in Wichita.
Dave Helling: 816-234-4656, @dhellingkc
This story was originally published April 4, 2016 at 10:55 AM with the headline "Supreme Court says federal law didn’t require Kansas sex offender leaving country to notify authorities."