Court-Martial Trial Practice Blog
Here, courtesy of the great Professor Berman, is a case from Ohio, ruling that a state sex-offender registration law intended to comply with SORNA is unconstitutional under the state constitution.
In a ruling with potential national implications even though based only on state law, the Ohio Supreme Court this morning in a 5-2 opinion decided that the state’s new sex offender registration requirements were punitive and thus could not, as a matter of Ohio state constitutional law, be applied to offenders who committed offenses before this new registration law was put into effect. The majority ruling in Ohio v. Williams, No. 2011-OHIO-3374 (Ohio July 13, 2011) (available here)[.]
It’s an ex-post facto case, which generally has not resulted in reversal in federal courts under the federal constitution.