Supreme Judicial Court: Sex offender law not retroactive

BOSTON (AP) - The state's highest court has ruled that Massachusetts cannot retroactively post information about thousands of registered sex offenders on the Internet.

The ruling on Wednesday came in response to a challenge to a law passed last July that allowed the state to add Level 2 sex offenders to its online database. The state's Sex Offender Registry had previously been allowed to make information available online only about Level 3 sex offenders, those considered most dangerous and most likely to re-offend.

The Supreme Judicial Court did not strike down the new law, but ruled that it could not apply retroactively to sex offenders who had been classified as Level 2 prior to July 2013.

The court said its ruling would affect about 6,200 Level 2 sex offenders.

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