History has a tendency to repeat itself:

An Ohio legislative panel yesterday rubber-stamped an unprecedented process that would allow sex offenders to be publicly identified and tracked even if they’ve never been charged with a crime…The rules spell out how the untried process would work. It would largely treat a person placed on the civil registry the same way a convicted sex offender is treated under Ohio’s so-called Megan’s Law. The person’s name, address, and photograph would be placed on a new Internet database and the person would be subjected to the same registration and community notification requirements and restrictions on where he could live.

The article states that nobody in attendance voiced opposition to the proposal. Of course not – to do so would be to align yourself with child-molesters. In the eyes of state attorney generals, and law-makers, that’s what this measure does: it catches those who would otherwise fall through the cracks. In their eyes, it would never be used against someone who wasn’t actually a child molester. In high-school civics class, we were taught that there was a presumption of innocence in our legal system. And for criminal cases, guilt must be proven “beyond a shadow of a doubt,” with the slightly less stringent “with a preponderance of the evidence” in civil cases. Allowing judges, and in some cases the alleged victims, the right to exact vigilante justice when this requirement is not, or cannot be met, is a grave blow for civil liberties.

The presumption of innocence is dead.

OTOH, it dovetails nicely with this case which has received some attention from other bloggers.

h/t at the Agitator.