One-fourth of the names on Maryland’s sex offender registry are to be removed after the state’s top court expanded on an earlier ruling that adding offenders from before the list was created violated the state constitution. The Court of Appeals declared last year that the state could not require the registration of people who committed their crimes before October 1995, when the database was established. State officials removed the one name in question in that case but maintained that federal law required them to keep older cases in the database. The judges ruled that federal law doesn’t override the state constitution.

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