Over 12 years ago, Congress enacted the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act. One provision of SORNA created a requirement that a convicted sex offender register with every jurisdiction in which he resides, works or studies, as well as in the jurisdiction in which he was convicted. Another part of SORNA, its criminal enforcement provision, made it a crime for a convicted sex offender subject to the registration requirement to fail to register or to keep his registration information updated if he travels across state lines. But what about sex offenders convicted before SORNA’s enactment? SORNA did not itselfspecify whether pre-SORNA offenders were required to register. It instead authorized the attorney general of the United States to “specify the applicability” of SORNA’s registration requirement to “sex offenders convicted before” the date of SORNA’s enactment, and “to prescribe rules for the registration of any such sex offenders and for other categories of sex offenders who are unable to comply” with the registration requirement.
In subsequent years, defendants charged under SORNA contended that the act and its enforcement scheme violated a panoply of constitutional rules. One of these cases reached the Supreme Court in 2012 in United States v. Reynolds. By issuing an interim rule, the attorney general had made SORNA’s registration requirements applicable to pre-SORNA offenders, and Billy Joe Reynolds claimed this interim rule was invalid. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit rejected Reynolds’ argument because that court had earlier held that SORNA by its own terms required pre-SORNA offenders to register; the validity of the interim rule, it reasoned, was thus irrelevant to Reynolds. At the Supreme Court, Reynolds challenged that logic, contending that SORNA did not of its own force apply to pre-SORNA offenders and that a valid interim rule was therefore necessary to subject him to the registration requirement and its enforcement provision.
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