Sexual violence is a serious problem that affects those victimized, their families, and the community around them. Much sex offense legislation appears designed to respond to the collective fear that sexual violence engenders, with legislative efforts (intentionally or unintentionally) tending to target low-base-rate “stranger danger” types of offenses. This article reviews prevailing forms of sex offense legislation, providing a summary of recent case law and an examination of empirical findings that bear upon the functioning and impact of common legislative responses to these “stranger danger” fears, including sexually violent predator laws, registration and community notification statutes, residence restrictions, and electronic monitoring. Although it is difficult to conduct well-controlled studies that test whether sex offense legislation works, extant research provides, at most, limited support for the value of much current legislation. This article concludes by suggesting areas of research need and outlining how empirical data may help to shape sex offense legislation so as to most successfully reduce sexual violence.

Generally, a criminal statute must consist of two essential elements: a description of the forbidden act (actus reus) and a designation of a guilty mental state (mens rea). For a crime to be committed, an individual must commit the forbidden act with the culpable mental state. For any criminal act, both criminal liability and the possible punishment turn largely on retrospective judgments by legal decision-makers about what a defendant was or was not thinking at the time of committing the forbidden act. Given the central and foundational nature of this legal judgment, there is surprisingly little empirical study of how the mens rea construct functions. Shen and colleagues have studied the reliability of mock jurors' ability to distinguish between the various mental state categories defined in the Model Penal Code and have identified some support for jurors' ability to reliably sort "guilty minds" into their "correct" categories (Shen, Hoffman, Jones, Greene, & Marois, ). The present study builds on this work by examining mock jurors' ability to reliably and "accurately" judge a defendant's mens rea at the time of an offense under conditions reflecting how criminal jurors are tasked with judging a defendant's mens rea. It was hypothesized that folk psychology models of human behavior that generally presume a high degree of personal control and responsibility would bias individuals' judgments of others' criminal behavior in the direction of reflecting intentional and purposeful conduct. Overall, results demonstrate that, in a surprisingly high percentage of cases across many conditions, individual decision-makers are indeed likely to attribute the most culpable mental state (purpose) to defendants, even when the facts on the record are judged by legal experts to depict no more than negligent or reckless conduct.

The Boston Naming Test (BNT) was designed to present items in order of difficulty based on word frequency. Changes in word frequencies over time, however, would frustrate extrapolation in clinical and research settings based on the theoretical construct because performance on the BNT might reflect changes in ecological frequency of the test items, rather than performance across items of increasing difficulty. This study identifies the ecological frequency of BNT items at the time of publication using the American Heritage Word Frequency Book and determines changes in frequency over time based on the frequency distribution of BNT items across a current corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Findings reveal an uneven distribution of BNT items across 2 corpora and instances of negligible differentiation in relative word frequency across test items. As BNT items are not presented in order from least to most frequent, clinicians and researchers should exercise caution in relying on the BNT as presenting items in increasing order of difficulty. A method is proposed for distributing confrontation-naming items to be explicitly measured against test items that are normally distributed across the corpus of a given language.