Adjustments in Federal Criminal Law

The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act is focused, as its name implies, upon child protection and safety. Its efforts involve the creation of new federal crimes, the enhancement of the penalties for preexisting federal crimes, and the amendment of federal criminal procedure, among other things. The amendments to federal criminal procedure are a bit more numerous and somewhat more likely to implicate crimes in addition to those committed against children. Among their number are:
Random searches of sex offender registrants as a condition of probation or supervised release. Preventive detention in cases involving a minor victim or a firearm. Civil commitment procedure for federal sex offenders. The act increases penalties for several other child offenses including:

	Grant Programs

The act establishes, reinforces, and revives several grant programs devoted to child and community safety, including the following. State, local and tribal governments in order to outfit sex offenders with electronic monitoring devices (authorizing appropriations totaling $15 million through FY2009). Among them are sections that broaden access to federal criminal records information systems, create a national child abuse registry, expand recordkeeping requirements for those in the business of producing sexually explicit material, immunize officials from civil liability for activities involving sexual offender registration, and authorize and direct the Department of Justice to establish and maintain a number of child protective activities.
The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, P.L. 109-248 ( H.R. 4472 ), serves four purposes. It reformulates the federal standards for sex offender registration in state, territorial and tribal sexual offender registries, and does so in a manner designed to make the system more uniform, more inclusive, more informative and more readily available to the public online. It amends federal criminal law and procedure, featuring a federal procedure for the civil commitment of sex offenders, random search authority over sex offenders on probation or supervised release, a number of new federal crimes, and sentencing enhancements for existing federal offenses. It creates, amends, or revives several grant programs designed to reinforce private, state, local, tribal and territorial prevention; law enforcement; and treatment efforts in the case of crimes committed against children. It calls for a variety of administrative or regulatory initiatives in the interest of child safety, such as the creation of the National Child Abuse Registry.
This is an abridged version of CRS Report RL33967, Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act: A Legal Analysis , by [author name scrubbed], without the footnotes and citations to authority found in the longer report.