Kansas Supreme Court Justice Lee Johnson repeatedly compared the state’s sex offender registry to "The Scarlet Letter" on Friday in a series of 4-3 opinions that determined lifetime registration for sex offenders is not cruel and unusual punishment and a 2011 law cannot be applied retroactively to defendants who committed sex crimes before July of that year.

In 2011, state law was amended to require people convicted of sexually violent crimes to register for 25 years rather than 10 years. The new law applied to anyone convicted of such a crime prior to April 15, 1994.

Several defendants challenged the new law as a violation of Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution, which bars states from passing a law that "makes more burdensome the punishment for a crime" after it is committed.

Because that section of the Constitution only applies to criminal punishments, not civil punishments, the Kansas Supreme Court debate hinged on whether registration for sex offenders is a criminal punishment.

It was a question that split the court’s seven justices.

Four justices found the 2011 law is not only a criminal punishment but also punitive because it forces "fully rehabilitated offenders" on a registry for a quarter-century and does not, in the words of Johnson, differentiate between "the 18-year-old immature, marginally intelligent, sexually naïve person who succumbs to the seduction of a mature-acting, sexually informed 15-year-old child and the 30-year-old confirmed pedophile that rapes preschoolers."

Johnson compared sex offender registration to shaming tactics in colonial America, such as requiring adulterers to wear a scarlet "A" on their clothes.

"(The Kansas Offender Registration Act) mimics that shaming of old by branding the driver’s license of a registrant with the designation, ‘RO,’ " Johnson wrote. "While a driver’s license is not worn upon a person’s chest, it is required to be displayed for a variety of reasons unrelated to KORA’s public safety purpose."

Three justices disagreed. In a dissent written by Justice Dan Biles, the minority argued federal courts have repeatedly shown sex offender registration laws are not punitive and may be applied retroactively.

"I would follow this abundant caselaw and hold that KORA’s Internet posting of information is not akin to historical shaming punishments," Biles wrote in his dissent, which was joined by Chief Justice Lawton Nuss and Justice Marla Luckert.

"I do not see how the majority can say no public safety purpose is rationally furthered by having sex, drug, and violent offenders register," Biles added.

Friday’s opinions on the punitive nature of the 2011 law came in three separate cases, all with 4-3 rulings.

In a fourth case, Johnson, Justice Carol Beier and Justice Eric Rosen argued lifetime registration for sex offenders is cruel and unusual punishment. They were overruled by a four-justice majority.

Henry Petersen-Beard pleaded guilty to rape for having sex with a 13-year-old girl when he was 19 years old. Before he could be sentenced, he challenged the constitutionality of the state’s lifetime registration law, arguing it violated his rights under the Kansas Constitution and Eighth Amendment of the federal constitution.

In an opinion written by Justice Caleb Stegall, the narrow majority of justices found registering is not a punishment.

"Because we conclude the registration requirements Petersen-Beard complains of are not punishment, his claim that those requirements violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment cannot survive," Stegall wrote.

In his fiery dissent, Johnson again referred to the scarlet "A" punishment for adultery, quoting from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book "The Scarlet Letter." He accused Stegall of "spin" and said the sex offender registry "does resemble traditional forms of punishment."

"Further, one has to challenge the accuracy of the disseminated information when it does not differentiate between the extremely low-risk offenders and the extremely dangerous high-risk offenders," Johnson wrote.

Johnson, joined by Beier and Rosen, disagreed with Stegall’s dismissal of the case, arguing sex offender registrations are criminal punishments and the court should debate whether they are cruel and unusual.

"The citizens of this state are entitled to have their own Supreme Court interpret their own constitution in a logical, rational manner that is consistent with actual, not made-up, facts," Johnson wrote.

Though the four rulings were all released Friday, the Petersen-Beard case was heard later than the others.

As a result, the court’s ruling in that case, that sex offender registration is not a criminal punishment, becomes the court’s precedent.