At a glance, the 23-year-old has a stellar resume.

He graduated magna cum laude from Binghamton University, where he was a part of an Honors Academic Society and routinely on the Dean’s list.

During college, he tutored others in calculus and was a teacher’s assistant. He also volunteered at the Jewish Relief Agency collecting, packaging and distributing goods to disadvantaged families.

The Union County resident now works as a financial analyst-at-large for an international telecommunications company in the tri-state area.

But each year he must check in with law enforcement. He must notify them if he moves or gets a new job. He also faces restrictions on where he can get a job and where he can travel.

He is a registered sex offender.

And he has been one since he was 16 years old and will be one until at least 2027 after being adjudicated as delinquent on three counts of endangering the welfare of a child.

But the question of whether he should be on the registry is at the center of an ongoing federal civil rights lawsuit against the New Jersey Attorney General that is seeking to eliminate Megan’s Law registration for all juvenile sex offenders in New Jersey.

The lawsuit raises other questions. Is the the community in more danger without him on that list? Is there even a high chance he would commit another sex crime in his life? Does the harm of putting a juvenile on a sex offender registry outweigh the good?

The lawsuit filed earlier this year on behalf of the 23-year-old, who is only identified in the lawsuit by his initials, argues that there was a rush to judgement when laws were passed creating sex offender registries that included juvenile sex offenders. Research over the last two decades has shown that recidivism rates for juvenile sexual offenders are extremely low and putting them on a registry may actually have little effect on public safety while causing severe psychological harm to the juveniles themselves, experts say.

“I have found that no scientific evidence demonstrates any public safety benefit to subjecting (juvenile sex offenders) to Megan’s Law,” Dr. Elizabeth J. Letourneau, the director of The Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse, said in response to a series of questions from James Maynard, the attorney representing the young man.

Currently, under state law, a New Jersey juvenile over the age of 14 must register under Megan’s Law for at least 15 years after being adjudicated as delinquent. (A juvenile under 14 must also register but can petition to be removed when they turn 18.) According to the lawsuit, being registered triggers over 600 state and federal consequences and even more on the local level. It creates a “minefield of collateral effects” for the person, the lawsuit says.

In recent years, courts have taken on the issue across the country. Last year, the New Jersey Supreme Court found that having juveniles register as sex offenders for life was unconstitutional. Since 2014, juvenile sex offenders, except for those classified as a “Sexually Violent Delinquent Child,” do not have to register in Pennsylvania. Currently, 12 states and the District of Columbia do not require juvenile sex offenders to register, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“These laws are antiquated,” Maynard said. “They are out of date. They were passed at a time when everything to do with sex offense laws was really guided by myth, misinformation or lack of information.”

Maynard, according to court documents, is scheduled to have a settlement conference with the Attorney General’s Office Friday to discuss Megan’s Law effect on juveniles and possible solutions to this case. The Attorney General’s Office declined to comment.

Megan’s Law

When 7-year-old Megan Kanka was sexually assaulted and murdered in Hamilton Township by a man who had previously been convicted of a sex crime as an adult, lawmakers quickly reacted to the heinous crime.

Gov. Christie Todd Whitman signed Megan’s Law into law less than two months after the bill was introduced by the New Jersey State Assembly in 1994.

The law required all sex offenders to register their whereabouts with law enforcement, and depending on the severity of their offense, certain public entities are notified of their location. For tier 3 offenders, the highest level, schools, licensed day care centers, summer camps, registered community organizations and members of the public are notified of an offender nearby. (The majority of juvenile sex offenders only have to notify local law enforcement agencies and are not placed on an online database.)

Neither the Assembly nor the Senate held fact-finding hearings on juvenile sex offense recidivism or the effects of placing teens on a sex offender list when passing Megan’s Law.

“Sexual abuse is not the stranger danger, rape and murder that caused all these laws named after children to come into existence,” said Maynard, whose Morristown firm specializes in representing those convicted or accused of sex offenses. “That is less than 1 percent of all sex abuse in our country, yet all the laws are based on that.”

Dr. Karl Hanson, a Canadian psychologist who studies sex offense recidivism, said the public developed a perception in the 1990s — based off highly publicized cases by known offenders — that those convicted of sex offenses, including juveniles, were likely to re-offend and be dangers to the community.

“When any person hears the word ‘sex offender’ they have a visceral reaction,” said Riya Saha Shah, the managing director of the Juvenile Law Center, the organization that challenged the juvenile registry law in Pennsylvania. “There is an automatic assumption that these people are dangerous and you have to protect yourself from them.”

But over the last two decades, that perception has often been questioned, especially for juveniles who commit sex offenses.

In 2016, Dr. Michael Caldwell, a psychologist at the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in Wisconsin, published a study that reviewed 106 other studies that tracked over 33,000 juveniles and found that the average sexual recidivism rate was under 5 percent over a five-year follow up. Other research has found the rate to be less than 3 percent.

And the farther removed a juvenile is from the offense they committed, they are less likely to commit another act because of their natural brain maturation and the rehabilitation process they often go through, experts say.

Dr. Hanson concluded that if a juvenile sex offender remains offense-free, they eventually “are less likely to reoffend than an individual with a history of nonsexual crime is to commit an ‘out of the blue’ sexual offense.”

‘What does that do to his self-image?’

When the young man in the lawsuit was 16 years old, he had to register as a sex offender after being adjudicated as delinquent on three counts of endangering the welfare of a child. He was ordered to two years probation and sex offense-specific treatment.

Each year, he has to check in with law enforcement about his status on the registry. He must re-register if he ever changes his address or job or school. He had to seek a job that wouldn’t conduct a background check so his potential employer would not see he is a registered sex offender.

Maynard, his attorney, argues that the young man, like many other juvenile sex offenders, is not a threat to the community and therefore, he should not be restricted under Megan’s Law.

His psychologist agrees, according to the lawsuit.

In 2015, Sean Hiscox, a Somerville psychologist, conducted a risk assessment of the likelihood that the plaintiff, who was 19 at the time, would re-offend sexually.

“(He) is not likely to pose a threat to the safety of others and therefore could be safely removed from the requirements of New Jersey’s community notification and registration law,” Hiscox concluded, according to the lawsuit.

Shortly after the plaintiff graduated college, according to the lawsuit, Hiscox re-evaluated him and found that he was “starting his career in a positive way” and that he “now poses a very low risk to the community sexually,” which will continue to decrease over time.

“I see no signs that his sexually abusive behavior, which again last occurred nearly eight years ago, was part of a broader deviant sexual interest pattern or antisocial personality,” Hiscox said.

But even if research and the plaintiff’s doctor indicates that he should not be required to register as a sex offender, he currently has no options until he spends the 15 years on the registry and then petitions to be removed.

Unless his case pushes New Jersey’s top law enforcement office to change the state’s course on the issue, which experts say should be done to prevent further harm to juveniles.

A 2013 Human Rights Watch investigation found that empirical evidence suggests putting youth offenders on registries “does not advance community safety,” but instead causes the juvenile offender “severe psychological harm.”

Letourneau, the director of The Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse, and her colleagues, conducted the first study looking at the consequences of having juveniles register. In 2017, they surveyed more than 250 children from across the country who were in treatment for problematic sexual behavior, in which 30 percent of them were subjected to registration policies.

Their study found that registered children were five times as likely to have attempted suicide in the past 30 days. She described the results as “shocking.”

“What about doing that to a child in his developmental phase?,” Maynard said. “What does that do to his self-esteem? What does that do to his self-image?”

Letourneau, who has been studying the issue for more than 30 years, said the only impact registries have on juvenile sex offenders is a negative impact on the juvenile themselves.

“This is not a policy that we need,” she said. “I think you would only want to retain the policy if you wanted to hurt kids that hurt kids."

Joe Atmonavage may be reached at jatmonavage@njadvancemedia.com. Follow on Twitter @monavage. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips

Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.com’s newsletters.