Repeat offenders

2-14-2008 Georgia:

IT SOMETIMES seems that the sole purpose for the General Assembly meeting each year is to guarantee full employment for the state’s lawyers.

How else to explain the swift and overwhelming passage by the House, 141-29, of a revised sex-offender law? Given an opportunity by a Georgia Supreme Court decision knocking down one small, limited portion of it to revisit an atrociously written piece of earlier legislation, the House proceeded, if anything, to make it worse (they added libraries to the long list of places that past convicted sex offenders cannot live or work near).

The rewritten measure permits offenders who have established residency and own their property to continue to live there even if something like a day-care center later relocates into their vicinity. Previously, they would have had to move, something the court correctly described as an unconstitutional seizure of property.

However, the earlier bill was littered with known legal problems that were not addressed even though many lawsuits already exist.

Best known is probably the 1,000-foot restriction around school-bus stops, which are everywhere and change locations constantly. Another challenge is to the part that evicts sex offenders because they live near a church. Any number of other attacks upon the measure have been promised and there are certainly plenty of lawyers up to the challenge.

ASSUMING the legislature’s underlying motive is protecting the citizens, and particularly children, there’s nothing wrong with the general intention if it showed any knowledge at all regarding reality. It doesn’t, instead coming across as political grandstanding and posturing without concern as to whether the law might actually work as intended.

Add in that some legislative leaders have made no secret that their true intention is to force every sex offender to leave Georgia because they can’t find a place to live, and real legal trouble is guaranteed. The federal courts long ago made “banishment” illegal as a punishment.

Underlying the whole mess is that the state lumps all past “sex offenders” into a single category even though, plainly, the concern should be focused on repeat predators (who should never have been released from prison in the first place but instead committed to mental treatment facilities).

The bedridden 90-year-old Alzheimer’s patient who once exposed himself, the 18-year-old “rapist” who had sex with the 15-year-old now his wife, and the serial child abuser are all lumped together and treated the same.

And it’s not as though the legislators aren’t aware of this fundamental problem from which most of the trouble stems. Keep a serial child predator away from the bus stop ... sure. Keep the child’s father away from the bus stop because 10 years ago he and the mother had sex without benefit of wedlock ... you’re nuts.

AND, TO MAKE matters worse, it’s not as though Georgia doesn’t have a policy in place to categorize and “rate” sex offenders. It does. It’s in the very same original 2006 bill that’s so stupid and flawed. The problem is, the panel to classify sex offenders is there but the legislature has never appropriated a single penny to put it to work.

Testifying before a House committee before the full body proceeded to make bad matters even worse, Atlanta psychologist James E. Stark, director of a clinic treating both sexual abusers and the sexually abused, warned that the current law simply works to make offenders stop registering and then vanish into the general population.

“We need to know where these people are,” he said. “We don’t need to drive people underground, and if we pass laws that are so draconian, we’re going to drive people underground. ...

“There are some offenders who are God-awful abusers and killers who are abusing people and chopping them up and, my God, those people need to be put away forever. But way over 90 percent of these people can be law-abiding citizens ... 95 percent of the state’s 15,000 registered sex offenders are low risk or moderate risk. We need to be doing different things at those different levels of risk.”

Hitting the nail directly on its grandstanding head, Rep. Roberta Abdul-Salaam, D-Riverdale, commented: “While the legislation makes good press, it doesn’t make good sense.”

GIVEN A MAJORITY of the General Assembly seems to believe it knows more about sexual deviancy than the experts in the field, let’s try to put this into terms they should understand. When it comes to writing laws, our legislators are just like flashers: Fond of showing off something they don’t know how to use. ..more.. by Rome-News Tribune