Megan’s Law: California In 1994, seven-year-old Megan Kanka was lured into a neighbor’s home to play with his new puppy. She was never seen alive again because she was raped and strangled by this neighbor, a convicted sex offender. Just days after the murder, Megan’s parents decided that they were going to dedicate their lives to exposing child predators living undetected in neighborhoods all over America. They traveled around the country, provoking politicians, lecturing parents and giving hundreds of press interviews. The Kanka’s started the Megan Nicole Kanka foundation a non-profit charity with the intent of preventing crimes against children money poured in, and results came quickly. Three months after the murder, New Jersey passed Megan’s Law, which requires the whereabouts of high-risk sex offenders to be made public. Under the federal Megan’s Law statute, states have the discretion to establish conditions for how …show more content…
Personally, I feel that once someone violates the rights of others in such a sense, their own rights should be of less value. However, there are two sides to every story. Critics of the law feel that it violates Double Jeopardy, which prevents a criminal from being tried, convicted or punished for the same offense twice and that by having offender’s names publicly published as a sex offender, the offender will continue their life in a constant state of punishment, even after they have fulfilled their sentence. In an article about double punishment the author quotes "Megan's Law is an eye-opener ethically, because it is, at the core, a conflict of interest between the reporter's need to disclose and protect society and her desire to protect privacy and freedom -- all tenets, by the way, of social responsibility," says Michael Bugeja, a professor at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio