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Vigilante or Vigilance?
Yesterday’s Globe and Mail asked a very good question: should the public get open access to private details of sex offenders? This, of course, comes after two sex offenders were shot and killed in Maine by Stephen Marshall, a Cape Breton man (pictured at left). Marshall, who has since committed suicide, found information on the men through the publicly-available online registry that Maine keeps. Ontario has a similar registry, with about 8,000 names, though it is only available to police officers.
Should Ontario make its registry public? The Globe and Mail seems to think not (noting that the police do issue public warnings about particularly dangerous sex offenders and that it would likely drive many offenders into hiding), but the killings have re-opened the debate and Torontoist wonders if the issue deserves some reconsideration. Certainly, this kind of information can be used for vigilante justice, but at times – especially in areas where the concentration of offenders is high (in Toronto, it’s supposed to be highest in the Symington area) – it seems to make some sense. As much as we may want to jump to defend the privacy rights of the offenders, it’s easy to empathize with a nervous parent unknowingly living next door to a convicted criminal. In the end, it all comes down to your faith in the justice system: when sex offenders are let free, are they “reformed” or are they likely to re-offend?