Federal appeals court Good law

Russell v. Gregoire

124 F.3d 1079 (9th Cir. 1997)

Washington’s registration and community notification are regulation, not punishment, and publishing public-record facts is not a privacy violation.

Court
U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Decided
September 4, 1997
Reach
Binding in federal courts in AK, AZ, CA, HI, ID, MT, NV, OR, WA
Verified
September 30, 2026
Read the opinion All cases

Good law. Still followed. Later cases may have narrowed it — see Scope. Binds federal courts in its circuit only. Persuasive, not binding, everywhere else.

What happened

Two men classified at Washington’s highest risk level under the state’s Community Protection Act sued, arguing that registration and notification punished them retroactively and violated their privacy.

What the court decided

The Ninth Circuit held that the Act’s registration and notification provisions are regulatory, not punitive, so applying them to earlier offenses is not an ex post facto violation. It found no constitutional privacy interest in information already in the public record, including the general vicinity of a home address.

Why it matters to the Registry

Russell was one of the first federal appeals decisions on community notification. Its approach — notification shares facts that are already public — ran through federal case law until the Supreme Court adopted a similar view in Smith v. Doe.

What it did not decide

The court stressed how narrowly Washington’s law was drawn at the time. It did not approve every form of notification, and the Ninth Circuit later distinguished it when reviewing Alaska’s broader law — the case the Supreme Court reversed in Smith v. Doe.

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