Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act

Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act

The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act (Pub.L. 109-248) was signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush on July 27, 2006. The legislation organizes sex offenders into 3 tiers, and mandates that Tier 3 offenders update their whereabouts every 3 months. It makes failure to register and update information a felony. It also creates a national sex offender registry and instructs each state and territory to apply identical criteria for posting offender data on the Internet (i.e., offender's name, address, date of birth, place of employment, photograph, etc.).

The bill was sponsored by Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) in the US House of Representatives and moved to final passage over a two-year period. who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee and shepherded the bill through the US Senate. It had been sent to the Senate in 2005 as H.R. 3132 and had 88 co-sponsors, including Mark Foley (R-FL), who had originally introduced the House bill, and co-sponsor Rep. Bud Cramer (D-MS). The Senate bill passed on July 20, 2006 with an amendment and amendment to the title.

At the time of passage, at least 100,000 of more than a half million sex offenders in the United States and the District of Columbia were 'missing' and unregistered as required by law. Law enforcement did not know where they were, and could not warn communities about them. This situation posed an enormous challenge for law enforcement and caused fear among the public. More federal funding was needed to assist states in maintaining and improving these programs so a comprehensive system for tracking sex offenders and alerting communities would be developed.

John Walsh, father of murdered child Adam Walsh, and founder of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) was joined other children's advocates to mount an aggressive campaign to get the bill passed into law. As part of the campaign, Walsh was joined by Congressman Sensenbrenner, representatives from the NCMEC, and other victims' advocates and parents. These included Patty Wetterling, children's advocate from Minnesota and mother of missing child Jacob Wetterling, abducted in October 1989; Mark Lunsford, whose daughter Jessica was killed in Florida in 2005; Linda Walker, the mother of North Dakota college student Dru Sjodin who was kidnapped and murdered by a released Minnesota sex offender in November 2003; and Erin Runnion, whose 5-year-old daughter Samantha Runnion was raped and killed in California in 2002 by a released sex offender. Thousands of Americans concerned about their children's safety contacted their lawmakers in Washington to pass the legislation.

The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act was signed on the 25th anniversary of the abduction of Adam Walsh from a shopping mall in Florida. Adam Walsh was found murdered 16 days after his abduction and the perpetrator of the crime has yet to be brought to justice. Adam Walsh's father is John Walsh, host of the television series America's Most Wanted.

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