Appeals court rules LA judge erred in sex offender case

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Full article: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/breaking_news/14867361.htm

More details here: U.S. Appeals Court Rejects Arousal Test for Sex Offender - Los Angeles Times

It's OK for the government to use kiddy porn.

Very very wrong.

To determine if the treatment to adjust their arousal from children to adults is working. I don't believe they use porn. It is one of the many tools used in monitoring and treating sex offenders.

http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/plethysmograph.html

A genital plethysmograph (pronounced pluh-THIZ-muh-graf) is a controversial device that measures blood flow in the genitals. Sensing equipment is attached to the subject's genitalia and the subject's reactions are measured while exposed to images or audio recordings of materials some people find erotic.

Proponents claim the devices are an accurate gauge of sexual arousal, although results are highly variable and open to interpretation and manipulation by both the test subject and the observer.

Most work with plethysmographs has been done on males with penile plethymography (PPG), but some researchers have recently attempted to create vaginal plethysmographs. Researchers note that like its penile counterpart, vaginal probing has many disadvantages, including “the lack of a sound theoretical basis for interpreting what exactly the signal means” (Meston 2000).

Some researchers and clinicians in the field of sexual offender treatment accept penile plethysmography as a useful tool in assessing and treating admitted offenders and in monitoring offenders post-incarceration. However, even among those clinicians who accept and use plethysmography, the majority do not feel that plethysmography has any usefulness as a diagnostic tool or as a reliable predictor.

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The device is less reliable than a polygraph, or so it would seem.

...what we should do with sex offenders: throw away the key or attempt to treat them so they are not a threat to the community. Some of the tools they use are controversial, and not too pretty--such as this tool. It is an on-going process to find successful and reliable ways to treat sex offenders. Some do use this tool as it was not intended--as a predictor of future behavior. Some treatment providers use it to determine if the treatment has worked in changing the offender's subject of arousal.

Good for the 9th Circuit.