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Abusing State Power Or Controlling Risk?: Sex Offender Commitment And Sicherungverwahrung, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

This article addresses a paradigmatic risk-based collateral sanction, the so-called civil confinement. In contrast to many other collateral sanctions, it does not follow automatically but is judicially imposed following a hearing. In Hendricks v. Kansas (1997) the Supreme Court specifically upheld involuntary confinement following a criminal justice sentence for a sexually violent predator. The Kansas statute mandated confinement based on an assessment of dangerousness which had to result from a mental abnormality. Once it characterized the sanction as civil, the Court concluded that procedural protections traditional in the criminal context, such as double jeopardy, do not apply. The narrow majority …