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Are Sex Offender Laws Reasonable?
allen griggs
Member Posts: 35,690 ✭✭✭✭
Woman can stay in her home while she sues over sex-offender law
By BILL RANKIN
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, November 24, 2008
Wendy Whitaker, the lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit challenging Georgia's sex-offender law, can spend Thanksgiving in her home.
On Monday, a Columbia County judge signed an order giving Whitaker a reprieve. She had been ordered to leave her home outside of Augusta by Thanksgiving because it is within 1,000 feet of a child care center and a church.
Whitaker, 29, is on the sex-offender registry for having oral sex with a high school classmate three weeks before his 16th birthday. Whitaker had just turned 17. She pleaded guilty to sodomy and received five years' probation.
The order allows Whitaker to stay in her home while her lawsuit makes its way through the court system. On Friday, she filed suit in Columbia County, seeking to have her name eliminated from the registry on grounds that making Whitaker register as a sex offender is cruel and unusual punishment, The suit also sought a halt to her removal from her home in Harlem.
"This is a great relief to Ms. Whitaker," her lawyer, Sarah Geraghty of the Southern Center for Human Rights, said. "She is grateful she will be able to stay in her home for the Thanksgiving holiday and thereafter while the case is being litigated."
In a separate, federal lawsuit filed in 2006, Whitaker and other plaintiffs are seeking to overturn the state law's provisions that make it a crime for sex offenders to live or work within 1,000 feet of places children congregate. That case is pending in U.S. District Court in Atlanta.
By BILL RANKIN
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, November 24, 2008
Wendy Whitaker, the lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit challenging Georgia's sex-offender law, can spend Thanksgiving in her home.
On Monday, a Columbia County judge signed an order giving Whitaker a reprieve. She had been ordered to leave her home outside of Augusta by Thanksgiving because it is within 1,000 feet of a child care center and a church.
Whitaker, 29, is on the sex-offender registry for having oral sex with a high school classmate three weeks before his 16th birthday. Whitaker had just turned 17. She pleaded guilty to sodomy and received five years' probation.
The order allows Whitaker to stay in her home while her lawsuit makes its way through the court system. On Friday, she filed suit in Columbia County, seeking to have her name eliminated from the registry on grounds that making Whitaker register as a sex offender is cruel and unusual punishment, The suit also sought a halt to her removal from her home in Harlem.
"This is a great relief to Ms. Whitaker," her lawyer, Sarah Geraghty of the Southern Center for Human Rights, said. "She is grateful she will be able to stay in her home for the Thanksgiving holiday and thereafter while the case is being litigated."
In a separate, federal lawsuit filed in 2006, Whitaker and other plaintiffs are seeking to overturn the state law's provisions that make it a crime for sex offenders to live or work within 1,000 feet of places children congregate. That case is pending in U.S. District Court in Atlanta.
Comments
Use it where it should be...adults taking advantage of kids or forceable sexual acts.
Sounds like all is in order on God's Green Earth.
Why in hell would she be arrested?
I am glad I am not being held to account for what I did with the 15 year old girls when I was 17.
By the way, when this occurred 12 years ago, the age of consent in Georgia was 14. It was just raised to 16 a few years ago.
Why was this girl arrested?
remingtonoaks: The bj is considered sodomy.
C&P from legalexplanations.com
http://www.legal-explanations.com/definitions/sodomy.htm
Sodomy
(n) Sodomy is the sexual act by which a man insert his BallPark Frank in another persons * for sexual satisfaction, with or with out consent of the other. Sedomy is a crime if done without consent or by using force and threat etc.
I guess I don't understand, I always thought sodomy was * sex. Just as this web site understands it
So she was an adult when the act took place.
Georgia's sex offender laws are * imo. There's only one class of sex offender when there should be two or three:
1. Pedophiles (should be shot in the head with a .22 and left for
the rats, buzzards, and worms.)
2. Sexual Predators (those that repeat or serialize their rapes,
yep, take them to the dump for the .22 also)
3. Others (if there HAS to be a third tier, the high school kids
doing it would be in this one)
1 and 2 would be on the list for life, or till they're taken to the dump.
3 would only be on a local listing until they're 18.
Not only do they re-offend, but their re-offense affects society much more than a drug offender. I don't care if someone continues to smoke dope, but I do care if a sex offender moves into my neighborhood.
I do agree with most, the application of the law in this event is misguided, they were boyfriend / girlfriend!
Sounds like she might have got some bad representation, her lawyer should not have let her plead.
Congratulations, you've pushed them out into the country WHERE I LIVE [:(!]
I can't stand sexual crimes, however our way of dealing with them in most states is completely worthless. Excution is a better solution for some of the sexual crimes. Two high school kids getting it on should hardly be a crime with that much ramifications.
Mike
It could have happened to my elder son when he was 20, when he was "dating" a 16 year old girl, had the girl's parents decided to make an issue of it.
Fact is, 17-21 year old males often "date" 15-16 year old girls.
I have ZERO sympathy for pedophiles, nor for late-20-something and 30-something adults that prey on adolescents, but the law needs to make allowances for normal teen-age and post-teen-age chemistry.
Advanced Member
USA
11350 Posts
Posted - 11/24/2008 : 10:21:30 PM
A 17 year old girl gives a bj to a 15 year old boy.
Sounds like all is in order on God's Green Earth.
Why in hell would she be arrested?
I am glad I am not being held to account for what I did with the 15 year old girls when I was 17.
sex offender registry laws have nothing to do with preventing recidivism but harrasing perps who have served their time and have paid their debt to society. Drug offenders have the highest recidivism rates, not sex offenders.
Absolute B.S. You don't have a clue as to what you are talking about.
Sex offenders cannot be "cured". Drug offenders can.
Margaret Thatcher
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
Mark Twain
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2008/11/24/sex_offender_georgia.html
quote:Originally posted by chappsyny
sex offender registry laws have nothing to do with preventing recidivism but harrasing perps who have served their time and have paid their debt to society. Drug offenders have the highest recidivism rates, not sex offenders.
Absolute B.S. You don't have a clue as to what you are talking about.
Sex offenders cannot be "cured". Drug offenders can.
I agree Alpine, sex offenders have a very high rate of rescidivism.
However, to me, a sex offender is a 30 year old man who has sex with a 7 year old girl. They give that guy ten years in jail, he will get out of jail and go right back and do it again.
To me, a 17 year old girl doing whatever with a 15 year old boy is not a sex offender.
Whaen are we as a society going to get smart enough to start RETHINKING the legal system?
You REALLY think a 21 YO guy doing a 16 YO girl is equal to a 40 YO man raping a 8 YO girl?
Is the first example really a crime? In the eye's of the "law" it is.....
quote:Originally posted by Alpine
quote:Originally posted by chappsyny
sex offender registry laws have nothing to do with preventing recidivism but harrasing perps who have served their time and have paid their debt to society. Drug offenders have the highest recidivism rates, not sex offenders.
Absolute B.S. You don't have a clue as to what you are talking about.
Sex offenders cannot be "cured". Drug offenders can.
I agree Alpine, sex offenders have a very high rate of rescidivism.
However, to me, a sex offender is a 30 year old man who has sex with a 7 year old girl. They give that guy ten years in jail, he will get out of jail and go right back and do it again.
To me, a 17 year old girl doing whatever with a 15 year old boy is not a sex offender.
I agree with you on this particular set of specifics. However how a set of laws are used/misused is subject to local interpretation.
However the local voters are gonna have to fix that.
But the blanket statement that druggies recidivist more than sex offenders is flat out wrong. And a sex offender damage to a victim lasts a lifetime.
Margaret Thatcher
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
Mark Twain
Better examples of the utter stupidity of these laws.
New Jersey Supreme court is being asked to overturn a sex offense conviction. It involves her now 16 year old son. He is also special ed type student.
When he was TEN, he was found in his undies, rubbing up against a 8 year old girl, also in her panties only. She want's this done so her retarded son has to go threw life on the sex offender regestry for molesting a 8 yr old.
In Utah, the supremes are looking at the case of a 13 year old girl who was convicted of rape of a child. Her willing partner was 12. The real fun part is that he was convicted of rape of a child under 14?
The parent want's to overturn because they don't want to have there kids go thru life as "child rapist".
The Utah Suprme court is now trying to justify how a a child "victim" of rape can also be a perpetrator of child rape at the same time.
PS: the youngest person who was ever put on the sex offender list was 6. And with the anti-pedo hysteria, our lawmakers have decided that juvenal offender will also be put on the adult sex offender roles.
" as opposed to murderer's, who walk scott free at 18".
Fact is, 17-21 year old males often "date" 15-16 year old girls.
I have ZERO sympathy for pedophiles, nor for late-20-something and 30-something adults that prey on adolescents, but the law needs to make allowances for normal teen-age and post-teen-age chemistry.
I was under the impression that most states had "Romeo and Juliet" provisions under these laws, which shielded couples that were within 4 years of age
(shoot I can't think of the term) a law that is enacted after the act being used against you.
Needed? Yes
Correcttly implemented? I would say no
For example, under my state's sexual assault statutes it's not illegal if neither party is younger than 14 and they're within 3 years of each other's age. Basically, most of those high schoolers won't instantly become sex offenders for engaging in consensual sex.
Life in the shadows
Now facing a legal challenge, Georgia's war on sex offenders could punish minor violators while failing to focus on the worst ones
Published 07.19.06
By Scott Henry
This January, Wendy Whitaker and her husband bought their first home, a turn-of-the-last-century bungalow on a quiet street in Harlem, Ga., just outside Augusta.
A month later, police showed up on their doorstep. Wendy would have to move, they explained, or face arrest.
Joeff Davis Convicted nine years ago under Georgia's old sodomy law, Wendy Whitaker is required to re-register every year as a sex offender.
A 26-year-old college student on federal disability, Whitaker doesn't fit most people's image of a sex offender. But, because of an ill-considered 10th-grade b****** -- resulting in her conviction for an act that's no longer crime in Georgia -- she has spent nearly a decade on Georgia's sex-offender registry.
Harlem police told Whitaker she was in violation of a state law that prohibits registered sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school, playground or other place where children congregate. Before she and her husband of six years bought the house, she says, they made sure the property was far enough away from a public park down the street. What the Whitakers didn't realize was that a nearby church was operating a small day-care center.
As a result, they've had to move into a trailer park across the county line. They're sharing a two-bedroom single-wide with Whitaker's brother-in-law and his teenage daughter.
"We're paying a mortgage for my cat to live here," she says of the house she and her husband have had to leave behind. When she stops by to check on the property or do laundry, she says, her neighbors routinely call the cops, who drop by to make sure she isn't trying to move back in.
Now, Georgia's strict new sex-offender law -- signed by Gov. Sonny Perdue in April but delayed in federal court before it could take effect July 1 -- could force Whitaker out of the trailer park as well, leaving her with few options for living anywhere in the state. Under a nebulous loitering provision in the new law, she might not even be allowed to go to church.
"This is causing a lot of problems in my marriage," she says. "My husband can't quit his job. What are we supposed to do, separate? If this new law goes into effect, I really don't know what I'll do. I'm absolutely at wit's end."
The easy response to Whitaker's dilemma, and the one implied by Georgia legislators, who overwhelmingly approved the new law, can be summed up in two words: Tough luck.
Sponsored by House Majority Leader Jerry Keen, R-St. Simons Island, the sex-offender law increases minimum sentences for most violent sexual offenses to 25 years; requires the most dangerous offenders to wear a GPS tracking device for the rest of their lives; and requires those convicted of felony sex offenses to remain on the state registry for life.
But the law's thorniest provision expands the existing 1,000-foot residency restriction to include school bus stops, which renders virtually all of Georgia off-limits to the state's 10,000 or so registered sex offenders.
In March, when Keen, a former state head of the Christian Coalition, described to a Senate committee the intended impact his law would have on sex offenders, he didn't mince words: "Candidly, senators, they will in many cases have to move to another state."
Only one senator, Democrat Regina Thomas of Savannah, voted against the bill. In the House, it sailed through with token opposition from a handful of Democrats.
"Sex offenders are the most reviled people in society," explains a legislator who, despite misgivings, voted in favor of the bill and asked not to be named. "They're one step above terrorists; there's no political downside to cracking down on these folks."
But critics say the new law -- which is awaiting a judge's ruling this week to determine whether it can go into effect -- is likely to do more harm than good.
Law enforcement officials warn that the law is practically unenforceable and that, instead of driving offenders out of Georgia, it will cause many to go into hiding.
Lawyers predict the harsh residency restrictions and increased mandatory minimum sentences will remove incentives for accused offenders to plead guilty, which inevitably means more child molesters will escape conviction.
And experts in sex-offender treatment claim the law will do little to protect children and could actually result in more repeat crimes by offenders cut off from their families, jobs and treatment programs.
In other words, Keen may have produced a near-perfect example of a poison law -- not simply unfair or unsavory, but likely to do just the opposite of what was intended.
As DeKalb County Sheriff, Thomas Brown relentlessly attacks the new law at public gatherings and in the press, he doesn't seem a bit worried about being labeled soft on sex offenders.
"I have a responsibility to tell people in DeKalb when I can't protect them, and this law would have that effect," Brown says. "This law is nothing but election-year politicking by the Republicans."
Brown says his office has carefully mapped thousands of DeKalb school bus stops and determined that there's nowhere within the county for its 490 registered sex offenders to live. But he notes that it's unrealistic to imagine that all offenders will simply pack up and leave -- or that the county could keep tabs on the ones who don't.
"This bill will force people to go underground, and not because they're dangerous sexual predators," but because they have no place else to go, Brown says. "I have one man who's 88 years old, living in an apartment building near a bus stop."
The county already has warrants out for 90 sex offenders who neglected to show up for registration, and is home to an estimated 44 "absconders," those who have violated parole and gone into hiding.
"We're not whining about our responsibility," Brown says. "We're saying, don't pass laws that are unenforceable."
Brown may be more outspoken than most law enforcement officials, but he isn't alone in his frustration. Many of the state's 159 county sheriffs have been scrambling to figure out how to enforce the new law, says Terry Norris of the Georgia Sheriffs' Association.
Although the association has taken no official position on the law, the sheriffs forcefully lobbied Keen and other legislators to remove the bus stop provision, arguing that it represented an arbitrary standard. In many rural school systems, a bus stop is, well, wherever the bus stops. And because even officially sanctioned bus stops often change from one semester to the next, offenders could be constantly on the move.
"It wasn't as if they didn't listen to us," Norris says of the lawmakers. "It didn't matter what we said, they just didn't agree."
While some individual sheriffs have voiced support for the law, he says, others have described encounters that have left them questioning its fairness. A man convicted of statutory rape several years ago in Indiana was told to move from his Muscogee County home, where he lives with his wife and their children. Like many offenders, he was found guilty of consensual sex with an underage teen. The former teenage victim is now his wife.
When deputies told another sex offender in his 60s that he'd need to leave the house he'd grown up in because it's too close to a bus stop, the man said he planned to buy a gun after they left and would kill himself when they returned to evict him.
"I'm not trying to imply sympathy with sex offenders," Norris says. "But if certain provisions of this law inconvenience all offenders in order to make Georgia safer, then these are some of the collateral effects."
Most sex offenders would like to keep their past misdeeds hidden. As breathtakingly embarrassing as her behavior was, Wendy Whitaker wants people to know what she did. It's the only way she can convince people that the one-size-fits-all crackdown on Georgia sex offenders doesn't make sense.
In 1997, Whitaker, who had recently turned 17, was sitting in the back corner of a high-school classroom, when the teacher dimmed the lights to show a video. The boy sitting next to her suggested that no one would notice if she gave him a b****** in the dark. So she did.
They were caught, of course. Whitaker was expelled from school and found herself facing sodomy charges. The boy, a 10th-grade classmate, was 15, although Whitaker says it didn't occur to her at the time that he was a few months shy of the age of consent. He also was black, a fact that she feels provoked a harsher reaction from local officials.
"I think the principal was trying to make an example of me when he called the cops," Whitaker says, looking back at the incident. "I'm not saying what I did wasn't wrong -- it was -- but when you're a teenager, you do stupid things."
file Georgia sheriffs say state Rep. Jerry Keen paid little heed to concerns about his hard-line bill.
Whitaker met her court-appointed attorney for the first time only minutes before her hearing.
"He said, 'Plead guilty,' and I just did what he said," she recalls. "I didn't understand any of it."
The judge sentenced her to five years of probation for sodomy but didn't order her to attend sex-offender treatment. Whitaker says she wasn't charged with sex with a minor, nor was was it explained to her that pleading guilty would place her on the sex-offender registry.
It wasn't long before she began screwing up, missing required check-ins and racking up technical probation violations. Whitaker's first-offender status was revoked and she spent more than a year behind bars: in county lockup, Pulaski State Prison for women, and a boot camp near Davisboro, Ga. In 2002, her five years of probation were over.
"I had a sigh of relief, and I thought I could just put it all behind me and be somebody," says Whitaker, who earned her GED while on probation.
But it didn't work out that way. As a registered sex offender, Whitaker has had to report to the local sheriff's office every year to be photographed and fingerprinted, and she was required to register in person with the county school board. Acquaintances have come across her name and photo on the Georgia Bureau of Investigation website. She says her neighbors in Harlem have shunned her since being alerted by sheriff's deputies of her conviction.
And not long ago, her mug shot and a map to her home were shown on the local TV news as part of a weekly segment devoted to keeping tabs on area sex offenders.
"I had to explain to people why I'm on TV for something I did nine years ago," she says. "It makes me afraid that a vigilante might try to hurt me, not knowing what it is I actually did."
Two years ago, she quit her job at a local pizza parlor and filed for federal disability, citing sleep apnea and a severe weight problem.
Whitaker doesn't believe the choices she's made in her life qualify her to be much of a role model. But she also argues that a law that applies the same harsh restrictions to teenage statutory offenders like her as it does to serial rapists is hurting people who pose little threat to society.
Of the more than 10,600 registered sex offenders living in Georgia, many were convicted of child molestation and rape. But thousands of others are on the registry for having consensual sex when they were teenagers, or for lesser crimes such as flashing, peeping through windows and sexual battery, which often translates into inappropriate touching. One of Whitaker's co-plaintiffs, a 23-year-old Georgia State student, got on the list for drunkenly groping a co-ed at a keg party.
John Bankhead, spokesman for the GBI, says his department had hoped lawmakers would do more to draw distinctions between non-violent sex offenders and those deemed potentially dangerous.
"We felt it would benefit the public to know who on the list were, say, child molesters," he says.
Although Keen's law mandates a review process that is expected to place more offenders in that category, only 14 men -- six of whom are still in prison -- are currently designated sexual predators by the state.
Adding insult to injury in Whitaker's case is the fact that Georgia's sodomy law was overturned in late 1998, just three months after her conviction. The mere two-year age difference between Whitaker and her classmate would have spared her from the registry under one of the few amendments that Keen allowed on his bill: a much-publicized clause that exempts such "Romeo-and-Juliet" convictions. The new law, however, does not apply retroactively to those already on the registry.
"It's not fair that they're applying the new restrictions on me, but I don't get any of the benefits," Whitaker says.
That's why she has devoted her time in recent weeks to serving as lead plaintiff in the federal lawsuit by the Southern Center for Human Rights and the ACLU of Georgia that seeks to block the new offender law from taking effect.
"Just because you're on the sex-offender registry doesn't mean you're a sexual predator," she says. "There's a lot of people like me, and there's no reason they shouldn't be allowed to live around children. Some have children of their own."
Whitaker wasn't the kind of sex offender Georgia lawmakers had in mind when they passed Keen's bill back in April. Many of them announced at the time that they were thinking about the fate of Jessica Lunsford, the 9-year-old Florida girl who in early 2005 was snatched from her bedroom, sexually assaulted, murdered and buried.
Last week, jury selection began in the trial of Jessica's accused killer, John Couey, who was captured outside Augusta after fleeing into Georgia from Florida. A convicted sex offender with a long criminal history and a face that would make any parent shudder, Couey makes a perfect boogeyman for law-and-order advocates like CNN's Nancy Grace and Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. Both TV show hosts have devoted hours of highly charged coverage to the upcoming trial.
O'Reilly, in particular, has been on a yearlong crusade to push get-tough legislation modeled on Florida's "Jessica's law" in all states, as well as through Congress. Keen's bill followed that state's example of requiring the very worst offenders to wear monitoring devices for life. But the Georgia lawmaker went even further by expanding the state's already tough residency restrictions to include school bus stops -- of which there are tens of thousands.
In last winter's legislative session, members of both parties allowed recent bills dealing with such issues as illegal immigration and eminent domain to evolve as the product of a normal give-and-take debate between lawmakers, interest groups and qualified experts. Not so for the sex-offender bill. Aside from the Romeo-and-Juliet provision, Keen would accept no compromises.
"Before the session began, we were told that the bill would be passed basically as-is, without many changes," explains the Sheriffs' Association's Norris.
Keen, through a spokesperson, declined to be interviewed for this story.
"It was one of those bills that was difficult to vote against because we all want our children to be safe," says Rep. Pat Gardner, an Atlanta Democrat who nonetheless cast a no vote. "But we also want the law to apply fairly and evenly and sometimes these nuances get lost in the political soundbites."
It wasn't as if lawmakers weren't warned that the bill could result in unintended consequences. Dr. Gene Abel, director of the Behavioral Medicine Institute of Atlanta, was one of several experts who went to the Capitol to testify in committee against aspects of the bill.
Abel believes that by placing so much emphasis on curbing rogue sexual predators like Jessica Lunsford's killer, the law ignores a larger public safety threat, lulling people into a false sense of security.
"Only 10 percent of child molesters are strangers," he says. "About 30 percent of these crimes are committed by immediate family, another 30 percent by extended family and the final 30 percent by family friends and neighbors." The law does little to address those dangers, he says.
A professor of clinical psychiatry at both Emory University and Morehouse School of Medicine and a national expert on the treatment of sex offenders, Abel says Georgia's new law also fuels harmful misconceptions.
"When we're talking about child sexual abusers, the public perception is of a 50-year-old man hanging around a schoolyard," he says. "In reality, the average age for a child sexual abuser is 14."
By downplaying treatment and focusing on punishing sex offenders through strict residency restrictions that cost jobs and divide families, he says, the new law could backfire, resulting in an upsurge of sex crimes.
"It's rather common knowledge that you want to reduce the stress on sex offenders because the greater the stress, the greater the risk," he says.
Treatment is key, agrees Charles Olney, research associate for the Center for Sex Offender Management, an offshoot of the U.S. Department of Justice, based in Silver Spring, Md. While the center takes no official stand on Georgia's law, Olney says it's a bad idea to disrupt the smooth integration of sex offenders back into society.
"It's not just a liberal stance to suggest these people need supervision and support to help them not re-offend," he says. "Many victims advocates realize now that communities are less safe unless sex offenders are effectively managed once they're released from prison."
Residency restrictions, Olney says, can have the effect of forcing offenders to move to remote rural areas and away from treatment facilities. Abel points out that Georgia is home to only 40 licensed treatment centers, nearly all of which are located in urban areas.
"What really bothers me," Abel says, "is that we already had a probation system that was working and recidivism was low" -- about 4 percent among child molesters involved in treatment. "This law has already caused havoc among sex offenders and their families, but it should be good for real-estate agents."
Irresistible as the issue may be for politicians, not every get-tough effort against sex offenders is born of cynicism.
In 1997, a year before the GBI's sex-offender registry went online, state Sen. David Adelman, then a Druid Hills neighborhood leader, was shocked to discover that parole officials had quietly placed several sex offenders -- including a child molester -- in an apartment building near the front gates of Emory University without alerting neighbors.
When he arrived in the state Senate as a Democrat in 2003, the first bill Adelman pushed into law placed substantial restrictions on where sex offenders could live.
"There was a real problem and I worked with experts in the field to create buffer zones around places where children congregate," he says.
Modeled on similar laws in other states, Adelman's bill prohibited sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school, park, playground, day-care facility or rec center. It included no restriction for bus stops.
Adelman's legislation survived three legal challenges, all of which attacked narrow technical aspects of the law.
Adelman, a father of three who voted for Keen's bill and acknowledges that it has widespread public support, argues that the law he authored didn't impose an excessive burden on convicts.
"It's certainly reasonable for the state to enact laws to protect children," he says. "I felt my solution was moderate and enforceable."
Sheriff Brown agrees. But he says Keen and company were bent on fixing a problem that didn't appear to exist.
"I personally think the current law has worked fine," he says. "Before the new law was passed, I wasn't hearing any outcry that we need to do more to deal with sexual predators."
Once enacted, however, get-tough laws are difficult for lawmakers to undo without opening themselves up to that most sticky of campaign-trail charges: "soft on crime."
Just look at Iowa, where a similar law passed in 2002 and finally went into effect last year. It has, by many accounts, proven a disaster.
The law has effectively rendered the state's cities and sizable towns off-limits, explains Corwin Ritchie, executive director of the Iowa County Attorneys Association, which represents local prosecutors in the Hawkeye State's 99 counties. As a result, Ritchie says, many offenders still in Iowa have clustered in rural motels, live in their cars, are now homeless -- or have simply vanished from sight. The number of offenders whose whereabouts are unknown has more than tripled in recent months.
"Anything that pushes people off the registry is a bad idea," he says. "If they can't find anywhere to live, they'll just drop off the list."
Ritchie says prosecutors also have blasted the law because they believe it will make it more difficult to win convictions against child molesters.
"The residency restrictions will deter defendants from accepting a plea deal," he says, which, in turn, will require more criminal trials, where testimony by young victims can be unreliable. What's more, many parents are unwilling to press charges if it means their children would have to testify in court.
This spring, forceful lobbying by sheriffs and other groups nearly succeeded in getting the law repealed by state legislators. Ritchie is hopeful that public opinion will help turn the tables next year.
But politics being what they are, he realizes there are no guarantees.
For all the tough talk by Keen, Gov. Perdue and others who endorsed the bill, lawyers with the state attorney general's office mounted a startlingly feeble defense of the law during a two-day hearing last week in federal court.
Attorneys with the Southern Center for Human Rights called upon a series of sheriffs' deputies to testify that virtually all sex offenders would need to relocate to comply with the law. In Gwinnett, 277 of 278 offenders would have to move, testified Cpl. Karen Pirkle, who manages that county's sex offender registry. Investigator Charlene Giles of Houston County explained that all but one of her county's 136 registered offenders live too close to a school bus stop. Giles also expressed concern that displaced offenders might simply go AWOL.
"I'd much rather know where they are rather than have them abscond," she said.
Later, one of the state's chief witnesses, Mario Dennis, a Virginia psychologist, reinforced one of the main arguments against the law by conceding that residency restrictions "have the potential to raise the risk for recidivism because they could be destabilizing for offenders."
Surprisingly, state attorneys based the bulk of their defense on the dubious argument that the law would not require many offenders to move, an assertion that flew in the face of Keen's stated intent.
As evidence, they called upon the school superintendent of Pelham, a hamlet halfway between Bainbridge and Albany, to testify that his tiny system doesn't offer bus service. The implication seemed to be that Pelham, population 4,000, would make a fine haven for sex offenders.
State attorneys also argued that the law applied only to bus stops "designated" by local school boards. Since there arguably is no formal designation process -- most systems delegate the work of positioning bus stops to transportation directors -- then the issue is moot, said Assistant Attorney General Devon Orland.
"I don't know where the sky-is-falling mentality started, but it spread like wildfire," Orland said, referring to the thousands of man-hours that county sheriffs had devoted to determining the proximity of sex offenders to bus stops to prepare for the implementation of the new law.
Even if taken at face value, the argument that only certain school bus stops are considered off-limits suggests that the law is arbitrary, leading to the illogical conclusion that some children deserve to be protected while others do not.
Sarah Geraghty, the Southern Center's lead attorney in the case, expressed amazement at the attorney general's defense strategy.
"The state has spent the last two days [in court] backing away from this law," which she labeled "dangerous, irresponsible and ineffective." At the least, she added, "the governor and Legislature owe the sheriffs of Georgia a very big apology."
In the end, Judge Clarence Cooper demanded that lawyers for the state submit briefs defining exactly what is meant by "designated school bus stop" and explaining why that provision of the law should not be regarded as unconstitutionally vague. In a ruling expected any day, Cooper could decide to extend his June 29 injunction delaying the law's enforcement. It's likely to take at least another two years for the planned challenges to be completed.
Wendy Whitaker didn't testify last week. Instead, she watched much of the hearing from the back of the courtroom, hoping the outcome will eventually force the state to draw meaningful distinctions between sex offenders who pose a threat to the community and people like herself.
"I consider my offense to be minor," she says. "I've been locked up with people who've done much worse than I did -- murderers, armed robbers, drug dealers -- who haven't had to go through what I have."
Earlier this year, she enrolled in Augusta Technical College to study criminal justice but is sitting out this quarter while she meets with Southern Center lawyers and attends court hearings. After she earns her two-year degree, she'd like to go on to law school, a plan she says is motivated by her tangles with the law.
"In another year, I can petition to be taken off the [sex-offender] registry, but I don't want what's happened to me to happen to others," she says.
Whitaker is referring to a provision in the law that allows certain first-time sex offenders to have their names taken off the registry after 10 years. If she and her husband, who works for Columbia County animal control, can manage mortgage payments for another year, she explains, then she'll be free to move back into her home.
Under the new law, however, the 10-year clock starts ticking not on an offender's conviction date, but on the completion of probation or parole, which means Whitaker could be barred from her house for several more years.
And last week, she learned of one more place that would be off limits if the new law were allowed to take effect: Because some of the students at Augusta Tech are under 18, Whitaker wouldn't be allowed to return to school.
Note from AG: I went to high school with legislator Jerry Keen who is behind the draconian sex offender laws. I was in homerooom with Jerry and quite a few classes as well.
Jerry was the "class clown" type in high school, I was surprised to learn that he has become one of the most prominent legislators in the State of Georgia.
The guy liked bar hopping, and apparently wasn't too shy about public urnitation in a college town, or at least not sufficiently discreet about it.
His urination was due to too much alcohol consumption... why the cops got him for indecent exposure and not public drunkeness? I don't know, maybe they got him for both.
This behavior almost certainly won't last past his 20's, but his registration on that list is forever.
Being seen simply taking a leak is considered a sex offense, which belittles the whole offender registration concept - just as we're seeing here.
Again, another case of the law someone violated being screwed up, not the registration system itself.
This is asinine.
CP
Candidate #1 says, "I think that we need to protect our community from sex offenders, but we need to have provisions within the laws that acknowledge that teenagers engage in sexual behaviors, and that sometimes young adults, 18, 19, and 20 year olds, engage in sexual behaviors with 16 and 17 year olds, who are legally still children. As difficult as it may sound, in some cases we need to acknowledge that in these circumstances, most reasonable citizens find it OK for adults to have sex with children. We need a graduated and nuanced set of laws and punishments that acknowledges and allows, or at least gently punishes this behavior, while still retaining harsh punishments for those behaviors far from the norm."
Candidate #2 says, "I'll take those guys to the dump and shoot them in the head! Think of the children! Jesus is Lord!"
Now, look at the people posting on this board. Which candidate do you think 90% of them are going to pick?