The Legal Aid Society filed this class action lawsuit over concerns about the constitutionality of New York’s Sex Offender Registration Act of 1996, which required individuals convicted of sex offenses prior to the enactment of the law to register with their local police departments and mandated the public notification of their identities and addresses. The Act also provided that the Board of Examiners of Sex Offenders (the “Board”) assign these individuals a risk level at a hearing – but did not include even the most basic due process protections. In our suit, we argued that the Act violated our clients’ due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment by not 1) providing for adequate advance notice of a risk-level Board proceeding, 2) providing the assistance of counsel, 3) providing our clients’ the disclosure of the evidence upon which the Board’s recommendation is based pre-hearing, 4) by not establishing clear and convincing evidence of proof as the governing standard of proof; and 5) by not providing the right to appeal a Board determination. The Southern District of New York agreed: the Act denied our clients “the fundamental elements of procedural due process at their risk level classification hearings.” Among our clients, John Coe, was an individual with severe cognitive delay who had been convicted of forcibly kissing a neighbor prior to the enactment of the Act. At his risk-level hearing, he appeared without a lawyer. The Board incorrectly asserted that he had been charged of rape and designated his risk level as Level 2 (moderate risk). He eventually found a Legal Aid lawyer and appealed the determination, but a reviewing court dismissed his case because the Act did not provide an avenue for appeal.

In our suit, we also argued that the Act’s addition of consequences to convictions after they were entered into – many via plea arrangements - violated the Ex Post Facto Clause, Article I, §10 of the United States Constitution. While the Southern District of New York agreed that the public notification provisions of the Act punished people whose crimes occurred before its enactment, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed, holding that the notification requirements did not constitute “punishment” in violation of the Ex Post Facto Clause. Both courts held lawful the retroactive application of the Act’s registration