Session v. State

Derrick Session pleaded guilty in Louisiana in 1995 to sexual battery after being charged with a much more serious crime as a teenager. Years later he moved to Georgia, registered as a sex offender, then was accused of failing to keep his registration current. A Paulding County judge convicted him after a bench trial (a trial decided by a judge instead of a jury), and Session appealed to the Supreme Court of Georgia. Session argued the evidence did not prove he had to register, that Georgia's registry law violated his federal rights to travel and equal protection because he would only have committed a misdemeanor if he had done the same thing in Georgia, and that the law violated a Georgia constitutional provision barring legislation about a citizen's 'social status,' a clause with a troubling history of being used to justify racial segregation. The court rejected every argument, finding Session had abandoned his main sufficiency argument, that his rights claims rested on pure speculation about what would have happened in Georgia, and that he had not shown any modern reading of the social-status clause would block the registry law. His convictions were affirmed.

The court held that Session failed to show his evidence-sufficiency, right-to-travel, and equal-protection arguments succeeded because they relied on speculative assumptions, and that he failed to identify any plausible modern meaning of the Georgia Constitution's social-status clause that would invalidate the sex offender registry as applied to him.

The ruling confirms that Georgians with out-of-state sex offense convictions can be required to register in Georgia even if similar conduct might have been treated as a lesser crime here, reinforcing how the registry law applies to people relocating from other states.

Affirmed

1. The court first addressed whether the evidence was sufficient to support Session's convictions, applying the rule that on appeal it must view the evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict and ask whether a rational judge could have found guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
2. Session's only developed argument was that requiring him to register violated ex post facto principles (a constitutional rule against punishing someone under a law enacted after their conduct), but he conceded at oral argument that this argument could not succeed under existing Louisiana and Georgia case law.
3. Because Session tried to raise a new argument for the first time at oral argument and in a supplemental brief, rather than in his main appellate brief, the court declined to consider it, since court rules require arguments to be raised and supported in the principal brief.
4. Turning to the right-to-travel claim, the court explained this constitutional protection (rooted in the Privileges and Immunities Clause) guards a new resident's right to be treated like other citizens of the state, but found Session's claim depended on the speculative assumption that if he had committed the same acts in Georgia, he would have been convicted only of a misdemeanor and thus escaped registration.
5. Applying the same logic to his equal-protection claim (which asks whether similarly situated people are treated differently without a rational reason), the court found Georgia's and Louisiana's sexual battery laws were not identical, so Session could not show he was similarly situated to someone convicted under Georgia law, defeating the claim.
6. On the state constitutional social-status claim, the court acknowledged the provision's troubling history of being used to enforce racial segregation, but held that even if the clause has a different modern meaning, Session had not proposed any meaning that would forbid criminalizing conduct or requiring registration for people convicted of such crimes.

• sex offender registration
• Louisiana conviction
• right to travel
• equal protection
• Georgia Constitution social status clause