People v. Lymon

MICH. CONST. ART. I, § 16 (“cruel or unusual punishment shall not be inflicted”)

Cora Lymon held his wife and their two children at gunpoint in the family home for hours, threatening to kill them and burn down the house. He was later convicted of torture, unlawful imprisonment, assault, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. But because the unlawful imprisonment convictions involved his children, who were minors, Lymon was placed on Michigan’s sex offender registry as a Tier 1 offender under the state’s Sex Offenders Registration Act (SORA). On appeal, the Michigan Court of Appeals ordered Lymon removed from the registry, and prosecutors appealed that ruling to the state supreme court.

Requiring someone without any sex-related convictions to register as a sex offender violates the Michigan Constitution’s ban on “cruel or unusual” punishment.

The court first reiterated, as it has numerous times, that the text of Michigan’s state antipunishment clause shows that it provides greater rights protection than does the federal 8th Amendment. While the federal clause bans “cruel and unusual” punishment, Michigan’s clause is disjunctive, barring criminal sanctions that are either “cruel or unusual”: “This Court has previously recognized that the Michigan Constitution’s use of ‘or’ rather than ‘and’ provides additional protection beyond its federal counterpart, as it prohibits punishments that are cruel, even if they are not unusual, and prohibits punishments that are unusual, even if they are not cruel.”

Next, the court found that sex offender registration counts as “punishment,” and therefore must comply with the cruel or unusual clause. Prosecutors had argued that registration is merely a “civil,” or “regulatory,” sanction designed not to punish but to inform and protect the public. The court rejected this argument as an attempt to place form over substance. For example, the court explained that registration “continues to resemble the traditional punishments of parole and shaming,” and “to impose significant obligations on registrants by requiring the immediate disclosure of extensive personal information, annual (or more frequent) in-person visits to law enforcement, and the payment of fees.” The court also found that, with respect to SORA’s “nonpunitive” purpose of “protecting public safety,” “the restraints it imposes on non-sexual offenders are excessive. Such offenders are branded dangerous sex offenders even though their crimes contained no sexual component and even though there has been no determination that they pose such a risk of harm to the community.”

Finally, applying the test for whether a punishment is cruel or unusual, the court found that requiring non-sex offenders to register is “grossly disproportionate” to their offense. In Michigan, this includes asking whether the challenged punishment promotes the goal of rehabilitation, a factor that weighed heavily in this case: “Branding an offender who did not commit a sexual offense as a sex offender and subjecting that offender to the attendant social stigma and law-enforcement supervision of that label does not address the underlying causes of a defendant’s conduct or support a defendant’s reintegration as a noncriminal member of society,” the court wrote. “In fact, the imposition of SORA on defendant could actually ‘’work[] at an opposite purpose [to rehabilitation], [by] preventing defendant from securing employment and otherwise moving forward with his life plans.’ People v Dipiazza, 286 Mich App 137, 156; 778 NW2d 264 (2009).”