Failure To Update A Registration Does Not Violate SORNA

SORNA: International Registration.

Nichols v. United States,136 G. S. Ct. ___ (Apr. 4, 2016).

Title 42 U.S.C. § 16913(a) requires a sex offender who resides in a foreign country to update his registration in the jurisdiction where he formerly resided. Two men lived on opposite sides of the Missouri River in the Kansas City Metropolitan area, one in Missouri within the Eighth Circuit, the other in Kansas within the Tenth Circuit.

Both men were convicted of sex offenses before the enactment of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (“SORNA'”), but were required to register under SORNA. Both men traveled from their homes to the Kansas City International Airport, flew to the same foreign country—Manila—to reside, and thereafter did not update their registrations in the jurisdictions they had left.

On these facts, the Eighth Circuit ruled in United States v. Lunsford, 725 F.3d 859 (8th Cir.2013), that the failure to update a registration does not violate SORNA. The Tenth Circuit came to the opposite conclusion in Nichols’ case.

The Supreme Court reversed Nichols’ conviction in a unanimous decision authored by Justice Alito. The decision reasons that “[a] person who moves from Leavenworth to Manila no longer ‘resides’ (present tense) in Kansas,” thus SORNA “did not require Nichols to update his registration in Kansas once he no longer resided there.”