When the Montana Supreme Court stripped identifying information from more than a thousand convicted sexual and violent offenders, including 90 classified as Tier 3 the highest risk to the public, it didn’t just rewrite our registry laws. It made a conscious decision to protect criminals at the expense of our communities.
The court’s ruling in effectively erases core safeguards that have helped parents, teachers, and law enforcement keep their neighborhoods safe. Photos, convictions, and residency restrictions for offenders convicted before 2007 will vanish from public view. That means violent predators convicted decades ago will now live, work, and move freely next to schools, parks, and homes, and the state can do little to stop it.
Let’s be clear about what happened here. The court’s liberal majority decided that these criminals deserved more leniency because applying modern registration laws retroactively is “punitive.” But what about the punishment victims live with for the rest of their lives? What about the right of every Montana parent to know who’s living next door? Those rights apparently don’t rate with this court’s majority.
Attorney General Austin Knudsen got it exactly right: this decision shows that Montana’s judicial left is more worried about “the poor sex offenders” than about protecting the public. Under this new precedent, convicted predators get legal relief, while victims and communities get silence and ignorance.
This outcome didn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of a decade-long campaign by unions, environmental lobbies, abortion-rights activists, and trial lawyer PACs that poured tens of millions of dollars into state judicial races to capture a majority on the Montana Supreme Court. They’ve built a liberal bloc that interprets the Constitution as a political weapon — soft on crime, hostile to business, and increasingly divorced from Montana’s shared values of accountability and community protection.
Now, the result of that investment is on full display. From dismantling commonsense registry safeguards to tying the hands of law enforcement, Montana’s liberal justices are making our state less safe. The same progressive forces that want to defund police and weaken criminal penalties in places like Portland and Seattle have found their foothold here — not through the legislature, but through the bench.
Montanans should remember this when they hear the left’s claim that the courts must remain “independent.” Independence isn’t the issue — ideology is. When judges start rewriting law to serve political allies and social agendas instead of protecting the public, they cease to be neutral arbiters and become activists in robes.
The Montana Supreme Court’s decision doesn’t just shrink a database; it shrinks our sense of security. If our state’s highest court won’t stand with victims, then it’s up to voters, lawmakers, and future judicial candidates to restore balance — and remind the bench that justice in Montana still means protecting the innocent before the offender.
By: Jake Eaton
Editor’s note: Jake Eaton is an entrepreneur, investor, and Republican political consultant based in Billings, MT. Mr. Eaton is an investor in the parent company of this site.