Convicted sex offenders, wherever they reside, are burdened with a stigma unlike any other in American criminal justice – their names, and faces, made available online for easy perusal, identification, and often snap judgments.

Two on Maine’s list were executed by a disturbed Canadian teenager last year. Stephen Marshall had a vendetta against sex offenders, and saw them as a danger to others – “pedophiles are the scum of the Earth,” he reportedly told a friend – who needed to be stopped before they victimized again.

Marshall didn’t have all the facts. His rampage’s fuel, Maine’s sex offender registry, describes neither the offenders’ crimes, except in legalese, or probability of re-offending. Neither man Marshall killed was considered a vicious predator, yet nothing except their names and addresses were listed to differentiate them from those who could be.

Not that even the most disreputable offender deserves to be the victim of a vigilante. But lumping offenders together, without delineating their specific crime, makes all offenders subject to the natural reaction of anticipating the worst, even if they had remade their lives far beyond the scope of their conviction.

Maine’s Legislature is now plowing through proposals to renovate the sex offender registry, in light of last year’s killings, and the viral policy of forced exile that’s blossomed throughout the state, in which towns have enacted ordinances prohibiting registered sex offenders from living within their borders.

Lawmakers are considering introducing categorization to the registry, and identifying low-risk re-offenders. Such names could be removed from the registry with a five-year sunset provision, or deleted entirely, according to two (of many) bills now before the Legislature.

Currently, sex offenders in Maine are listed on the registry for 10 years. Offenders deemed “sexually violent predators” are listed for life. Federal legislation passed in 2006, the Adam Walsh Act, created a national registry with three tiers of offenders, which some think could become a standard new model for states.

Tiering offenders, to better inform the public, is the right course. The Maine Department of Corrections and law enforcement agencies already thoroughly assess offenders. Lewiston police, for example, review individual offenders before deciding whether the community should be notified of their residence.

There is no easy answer to fixing the registry; however, and lawmakers should take time beyond this waning session to develop changes to this important, yet complex, problem.

Information is key. Instead of assuming the worst, the public should know more about offenders, either through improved disclosure on the registry or publishing assessments of offenders’ propensity to re-offend.

A registry for sex offenders is a valuable tool, but its worth fades when it incites fears of the public, and puts people who paid their debt to society into peril.