http://www.newsday.com/opinion/letters/letter-why-a-new-deal-for-megan-s-law-group-1.11769142
Letter: Why a new deal for Megan’s Law group?
Updated May 6, 2016 11:52 AM
By Newsday Readers
In this Thursday, March 3, 2016 photo, Laura Ahearn, center, executive director of Parents for Megan's Law, poses with retired New York City police detectives who work for her organization verifying the accuracy of the state's sex offender registry, in Ronkonkoma, N.Y. Ahearn's organization is completing a three-year, $2.7 million contract with Suffolk County, N.Y., to verify the registry. In the front row from left are Joe Grimm, Paul Alonzo, and Edwin Rivera. In the back row are from left are Harry Zakian, Robert Carboine and Alex Ramos. (AP Photo/Frank Eltman) Photo Credit: AP |
First is the fact that Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone is about to renew the contract with Ahearn’s organization. And for what? To carry out an exclusively public, governmental legal responsibility, which is seeing that New York’s Sex Offender Registration Act is obeyed.
Parents for Megan’s Law is not the Suffolk County Police Department. As Newsday’s article points out, the group is already a defendant in a federal civil rights lawsuit for a home interrogation of another man, and now you report that it is hauling into court yet another of its critics.
Is anybody minding the store?
William M. Erlbaum, Forest Hills
Editor’s note: The writer is a retired justice of the New York State Supreme Court and an adjunct professor at Brooklyn Law School.
PLM has the support and membership of a former senator Dean Skelos. No doubt he is pulling strings behind the scenes to get this vigilante group such privileged authority. No other citizen's group has the authority of law enforcement and this group should not be the exception. They should be jailed for harassment and made to pay a huge settlement to every single registrant they've harassed over the years.
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