A Maine judge must give further consideration to whether a man’s rights were violated by legislative action requiring him to be placed on the state sex offender registry retroactively, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled Tuesday.

The ruling came in the case of a man, identified in court as “John Doe XL VI,” who served 72 hours in jail in 2003 after pleading guilty to possession of sexually explicit materials.

At the time, the conviction didn’t require him to be on the sex offender registry. But that changed later that year when lawmakers updated the list of crimes mandating placement on the registry.

The Supreme Judicial Court ruling vacated a Superior Court judge’s decision to reject Doe’s lawsuit challenging the requirement to register as a sex offender. Justices said more information is needed to reach a conclusion on his claim that lawmakers illegally circumvented the judicial process to impose extra punishment.

Unlike some previous class-action lawsuits attacking Maine’s sex offender registry, the case applied to a small number of people – those convicted of offenses that don’t involve sexual contact with a victim.

“Because of the limited effect of this decision, more legislation may not be necessary, although we will be briefing the (Legislature’s) Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee on this and other (sex offender registry) issues in due course,” Tim Feeley, spokesman for the state Attorney General’s Office, said in a written statement.

Maine’s sex offender registry has gone through a number of changes since it was created in 1992. It attracted national attention in 2006 when a 20-year-old Canadian man killed two sex offenders in Maine before killing himself after randomly getting their names from the state’s online registry.


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