NC Ruling Influence On Sex-Offender Monitoring May Be Muted

North Carolina's highest court says it's constitutional for the state to require people convicted of the most serious sex offenses to be monitored perpetually by satellite-linked bracelets. But the influence of Friday's state Supreme Court majority opinion may be muted, since a new law will soon reduce lifetime GPS monitoring of such “aggravated offenders” and others convicted of sex crimes to 10 years. The majority overturned a lower appeals court decision that monitoring was reasonable only for the time the named defendant was on post-release supervision. A dissenting justice called the prevailing decision a  “soon-to-be-irrelevant conclusion" since the law takes effect in December.