The thing that’s most worrisome here is that the 11th Circuit panel is clearly terrified to overturn what is a fundamentally fascist law.
One thing about fascist regimes is that they’re Tough on Crime. Sure, they imprison and execute a lot of people for political crimes, or just dispense with any form of process and just disappear them. But regular street criminals with no Party connections are treated with the same casual disregard for life and liberty that marks the regime’s approach to everything. The death penalty gets greatly expanded and is enthusiastically applied for a wide range of crimes. Those who don’t get their heads chopped off (literally in the Nazis case-they adopted the guillotine for criminal cases) get long, brutal sentences.
The moral cowardice that seems to be driving this delay, cowardice that may be hiding behind self-delusion that if the opinion is just detailed and scholarly enough, there won’t be any hysterical GQP politicians demanding their heads, bodes ill for the capacity of the judiciary to deal with the rising tide of fascism generally.
And, yeah, a lot of the problem here may be that they’re hoping to find a way to rule narrowly enough to avoid having apply as precedent to the vast array of less draconian, and widely supported and popular, post-conviction sex offender liberty deprivation laws nationwide.
Hell, I’m not even against imposing burdensome conditions on most real sex offenders post release. (By “real” I mean "not including purely technical convictions, e.g. people arrested for indecent exposure because they were stone drunk and took a pee in an ally or women who wore a thong bikini in Myrtle Beach.) But this law is basically just a state effort to drive them to suicide.