Contents

• The Origins of SOLR
• The Researcher
• Advisory Board
• Bias
• Where’s the Offender?
• Donate

The Origins of SOLR

The research behind this website began in July 2007 as a personal project by Marshall Burns to check the validity of rather outrageous claims made on the website Reform Sex Offender Laws (RSOL), with dire warnings of civil liberties being violated and cruel abuse of children by agencies set up to protect them. It sounded like a dystopian fantasy, but was too serious to ignore. And the amazing thing was that in-depth research showed that it's claims checked out. A set of footnotes were contributed to RSOL for the website to allow others to benefit from the research. Information gathered that was too lengthy for the footnotes was organized into a set of reports on a separate website, and thus began SOL Research. Further research continued to be conducted, with new findings posted on the website. In 2012, SOL Research was adopted as a formal project of Ennex Corporation, a business operated by Burns.  

The Researcher

Marshall Burns is a physicist and technology entrepreneur who pioneered in the development of personal computers in the 1980s and 3D printers in the ‘90s. His career forte is the analysis and interpretation of complex data, which he learned to do in his PhD research on quantum chaos. In 2007, Burns’ focus shifted from technology to human issues, which led to his taking an his interest in this project. For more information, see Burns’ personal website at MBurns.com.

Advisory Board

Burns is served by a world-class team of advisors with expertise in fields relevant to the work of SOL Research.

• Jeffrey Douglas is a criminal defense attorney who started his career in 1982 by representing Virginia McMartin in the infamous McMartin preschool child molestation case. He also serves as the chairman of the board of the Free Speech Coalition.
• Charlene Steen is a retired psychologist who served on California’s panel that evaluates prisoners designated as sexually violent predators. She is the author of four books and serves on the board of directors of the California chapter of Reform Sex Offender Laws.

Bias

The following is a personal statement of researcher Marshall Burns, and is adapted from the section, No Longer Impartial, of the SOLR report, Riding the Registry.

The original intention of SOL Research was to use my skill as a scientist to gather information and present it impartially, to present the facts and let the facts speak for themselves. I was already suspicious that all was not well with the source and implementation of the registry and related laws, but I was committed to looking at the matter dispassionately and letting the truth emerge with the facts.

By the time I started my registry road trip, after almost three years of this research, it was already hard to maintain a stance of impartiality. I had seen too many pictures of children on the registry, read too many cases of convictions overturned because prosecutors had falsified evidence, received too many e-mails from young ladies asking if I could help them contact their boyfriends in prison. It was pretty clear by this time that all was not well, but as I set off on my trip, I still did my best to be the objective scientist, eager to observe what was going on with my own eyes and leave conclusions to be drawn based on what I would see.

Since that trip, it is clear that I can no longer remain impartial. What I have observed has affected me too deeply. I am still committed, of course, to presenting correct and complete information. But I would only be pretending if I claimed to be objectively reporting on facts here without a strong moral stance on the circumstances. It is clear to me now that however well-intentioned US sex laws may be, they in fact often traumatize the very youngsters they are supposed to protect. This trauma takes place in at least three ways:

• Criminal prosecution, with incarceration and registration, of children and teenagers for consensual sexual activity with their peers. See Child Sex Criminals in the road trip report, as well as the previous SOLR report on Criminalizing Child’s Play.
• Paying no attention to the feelings or opinions of young people when prosecuting someone older involved in a sexual relationship with them. See Hearing from the Victims in the road trip report.
• Severe adverse effects of the registry on the children of people who are on it. I’ve only had an opportunity to interview four such children in three families, and I refer interested readers to the comprehensive study (2°, ☀) on this subject by Jill Levenson and Richard Tewksbury.¹

So I am no longer an impartial observer on the sex laws. What is happening is wrong and needs to change.  

Where’s the Offender?

The original full name of this website was Sex Offender Laws Research. This was natural enough because the laws it is about are often called “sex offender laws.” But over time, an incongruity became apparent between this name and those of other criminal laws. We don’t have “life offender laws” for people who commit murder or “property offender laws” for robbers. Those other laws focus on harmful actions and establish penalties for people who commit them. So why should sex laws focus on the people who break them and create a new category of people called “sex offenders”?

Another problem with this term that emerged from the research for this website is that there are many people on the registry who ought never have been charged with any crime at all. How can we with a straight face use the words “sex offender” to describe a woman who is on the registry for breastfeeding her baby, or another because when she was a teenager she sent a topless picture of herself to a friend, or another because when she was 17 she had oral sex with a 15-year-old boy? How can we use those words for a man who is on the registry because he relieved himself behind a garbage can in an alley, or another because when he was ten years old he touched a six-year-old girl’s breasts, or another because when he was 16 he had sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend who is now his wife? In cases like those, the offenders are the police, prosecutors, and judges who allow such matters to make their way to courtrooms and jail cells.

Clearly some people who are on the registry have committed offensive acts. However, we can never tell from information provided on the registry whether any particular person did so. So it is simply not appropriate to use the word “offender” to describe a person on the basis of their appearing on the registry.

For these reasons, the words “offender” and “offense” have been removed from this website except where they appear in a quote or in the title of a cited reference.

Examples of the results of these changes can be seen in the new titles of some of the SOLR reports:

These changes were implemented on June 5, 2015.  

Donate

A method will be provided here soon to allow interested parties to support the work of SOL Research.  

Footnotes