Convicted sex offenders under New York law must have their risk of reoffense assessed by courts under the Sex Offender Registration Act ("SORA" or "Megan's Law") with courts determining whether offenders are at low, moderate or high risk to re-offend. The rankings not only determine the length and intrusiveness of sex offender registration and community notification, which often last for life, but vital collateral matters, like whether offenders may live within 1,000 feet of a school, receive Section 8 housing vouchers or live in public housing.

Courts are required to base their risk-level determinations on an offender's scores on a Risk Assessment Instrument (the "RAI") created by a state entity, the Board of Examiners of Sex Offenders (the "Board"). The RAI provides a presumptive risk level which courts can then depart up or down from if there are factors the RAI doesn't adequately consider. There is little evidence, however, that the RAI has any predictive validity

The instrument was created in January 1996, almost 25 years ago, by the five state employees who comprised the Board, and even at the time was not based on actuarial data correlated to reoffense risk. It mixes risk predictions with "harm" value judgments and other policy considerations to create numerical rankings which have no direct relationship with either the modern science of sex offender risk assessment or the implicit value judgments about the relative harms caused by various kinds of sex crimes made by New York's Penal Law. Judges, moreover, given the absence of expert risk evidence at the vast majority of SORA hearings lack the appropriate tools to make valid risk decisions.