New Directions in Sexual Offense Policy

Dr. Zgoba serves as an expert in sexual violence cases and registration challenges across the country and has provided testimony used in three Supreme Court cases. Having served as Co-Chair and Chair of the NJDOC Institutional Review Board (IRB) from 2006-2018, she currently serves as Chair of the FIU SB-IRB.

 Dr. Zgoba received her doctoral degree from the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Prior to coming to FIU, she served as the Research Supervisor for the New Jersey Department of Corrections (NJDOC) for 15 years. Dr. Zgoba received two National Institute of Justice grants as Principal Investigator: (1) to be the first state to test the effectiveness of New Jersey’s Megan’s Law, and (2) to examine the utility of the federal SORNA guidelines.
 

   Emily Horowitz is a Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice and the author of: From Rage to Reason: Why we Need Sex Crime Laws Based on Facts, Not Fear, which explores the human carnage wrought by decades of draconian and fear-based sex offense policies.

Her scholarly research addresses the causes and consequences of mass incarceration, with a focus on the harms of conviction registries and banishment laws.
She is also the author of Protecting Our Kids?  How Sex Offender Laws are Failing Us.

Professor Horowitz frequently engages in advocacy efforts and public scholarship aimed at challenging myths and misinformation that lead to ineffective and draconian laws. 

 Paul Dubbeling is a former U.S. Army ranger and infantry officer. He attended law school on an army scholarship, graduated summa cum laude from Indiana University in Bloomington in 2005, and then served as a JAG attorney for six years, including two tours in Afghanistan. After leaving the army, Paul clerked for Judge Neil M. Gorsuch (now a Justice of the United States Supreme Court) before earning his MBA from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and going into private practice. Since then, Paul successfully prosecuted Does v. Cooper, a federal lawsuit which struck down much of North Carolina’s previous premises restrictions, and is currently lead counsel for NARSOL’s legal challenge to the North  Carolina registration laws, Does v. Stein. . 

Guy Hamilton-Smith is a civil rights and criminal defense attorney whose own experiences with the legal system inspired him to become a lawyer. Guy is also a scholar who has authored several law review articles concerning sex offense registration laws and felony disenfranchisement, one of which was recently cited by a federal appeals court in declaring a state law unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. Guy was a 2019 JustLeadershipUSA fellow, was the inaugural legal fellow for the Sex Offense Litigation and Policy Resource Center at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, and currently serves on the board of directors of the National Association for Rational Sex Offense Laws. He splits his time between the home he shares with his wife Stefanie in Kentucky, and his office in Washington, D.C.  You can read his writing and scholarly work on his website, https://guyhamiltonsmith.com.