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This page is down due to the controversy surrounding it. Many of you made great points and I appreciate your thoughts. I'll be adding some pages in the next few days outlining how I made the site if you feel like making your own Google Maps hack (to map whatever you like).
If you have comments or just feel the need to call me an asshole one more time, take it to my blog.
For those of you who do find such a tool useful it is being mirrored here www.somapper.com
Matthew Michael Agee wrote (some paraphrasing of Dan Ackman of Forbes and Alexander Cockburn/ Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch):
Prior to contemporary "victims rights" movements, America's criminal justice system was designed around the constitutional notions of a fair trial accompanied by humane punishment levied in accordance with the crime. America was founded with the understanding that the price of these civil liberties was the certain measure of risk inherent in any open society, a notion embraced by and in fact integral to the nation's character.
Sadly, the slow attrition of political meddling in the criminal justice system has assured anything but a fair trial in recent years. Ordinary accused unable to afford the six figures required for decent representation are left to the dregs of the legal profession or an overworked and underachieving public defender, facing off against an armada of ambitious and well-funded prosecutors and investigators eager to pile on inflated charges, doctored evidence, and fabricated testimony on the calculation that the defendant will plead out. And it works - the sad fact is that we now have a show trial system, with the overwhelming majority of all criminal cases resolved by plea bargains. Those five percent of accused with the courage to push through to trial in the face of vastly inflated minimum sentencing requirements have very dismal prospects indeed: only *three-tenths of one percent* of all felony charges end in aquittal (2002 figures for the state of California). The demographics of the prison population are depressing testimony to this state of affairs, with a ridiculously disproportionate representation amongst the lower classes unable to muster the resources required to assure a fair trial on equal footing with the prosecution.
Sex offenses have been subject to worst of this witch hunt - presumption of guilt is the rule of the day. Offered the choice between a probationary slap on the wrist in exchange for a guilty plea or a twenty-year sentence without parole if found guilty at a jury trial (more than convicted *murderers* typically receive or serve), nearly every single accused individual walks out the courtroom labelled a sex offender for life, regardless of the circumstances of the case.
Against this unstoppable machinery of this prison-industrial complex, the accused's only recompense has historically been that, at least after fairly serving out one's time, one can walk out a free man. Not so for sex offenders - these days they're permanently saddled with registration requirements, restrictions on property, residency, employment, and free association. They're frequently legally segregated from their family and community, not allowed to vote - heck, they're less than 3/5th a citizen by Constitutional measures and we know where that got us last time around.
And all this can happen on the capricious whim of a vengeful colleage, an emotionally disturbed family member in "repressed memory" therapy, a school child craving the attention of her peers after watching an exciting grown-up program on television the night before. Even if there is no evidence. Even if the accuser can't produce consistent accounts. Even if child protective services doesn't find any credibility to the accusation. Because no aspiring district attorney can afford to drop a sex offense charge in the face of the witch hunt - it's political suicide, the charges are a dime a dozen, and nearly every single one is a guaranteed conviction.
Some violent or forceful sex offenders have committed heinous crimes, and definitely deserve the book thrown at them. But violent and forceful crimes are already subject to a *host* of charges, penalties, and recourses crafted specifically for those situations, without the need to artificially trump up additional redundant sentencing for sex crimes in a frenzied witch hunt. And violent crimes leave tangible physical evidence, rather than the presumption- of-guilt absence-of-evidence status quo for most sex charges.
By any reasonable measure, accused sex offenders don't receive a fair trial, are not presumed innocent until proven guilty, and are subject to unusual if not cruelly excessive punishment. Their liberties are needlessly trampled without any statistical evidence of a tangible impact on relevant crime rates.