NH- Convicted sex offender challenges a Dover ordinance

7-20-2008 New Hampshire:

When New Hampshire residents are convicted of sexual crimes, they assume a set of lifetime responsibilities. These may involve going to prison (and if they don’t appear to be rehabilitated perhaps remaining locked up longer than their sentences stipulated). Sex offenders are also prohibited for life from working with children. And if and when they are released from prison, they will probably find their names on the public sex offenders list and have to register their addresses with the communities in which they live.

This is an excruciatingly difficult area of the law. There are constitutional doubts about keeping people locked up after their sentences have expired. And the public offender lists, while perhaps helpful to neighbors, have resulted in vigilante murders in other states.

In New Hampshire, the question of how to deal with people convicted of sex crimes has been made more complicated by recent decisions in Boscawen, Dover, Franklin, Northfield and Tilton to prohibit registered sex offenders from living within a certain distance of schools or day care centers. And in Dover such prohibitions are being challenged by a man who moved within 2,500 feet of a kindergarten. He is backed by the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union, which contends the ordinance is unconstitutional, that government has no right to regulate where people can live.

Many states and communities around the country have enacted similar laws in recent years — limiting various categories of people from living or working between 500 feet and 2,500 feet of schools and other institutions. A Georgia law was overturned by the state Supreme Court on the grounds that it constituted an unconstitutional taking of property, only to replaced by another almost identical law earlier this year. Eventually, these issues will be decided by the courts, perhaps by the U.S. Supreme Court. There are too many of them, and they go off in too many directions. And if you can tell sex offenders where they can’t live, how long will it be before society starts targeting violators of other laws?

Meanwhile, there are indications that residency laws are unwise, regardless of their constitutionality.

For one thing, they tend to be blanket prohibitions, applying not only to dangerous predators, but also to young men with underage girlfriends.

Also, communities in other states have found that residency laws can create dangerous concentrations of offenders, herded together or in close proximity. And, while many permissible living areas are far from work opportunities, keeping offenders unemployed and on the streets, they may well be in neighborhoods with large numbers of children.

Of course there is nothing in most of the laws to prevent someone who is prohibited from living near a children’s facility from taking a stroll out of the neighborhood.

And experts in criminal law say the best way to prevent recidivism by sexual offenders is by requiring and providing professional counseling.

New Hampshire has no state residency law for sex offenders, but the state government has decided to defend the Dover ordinance in court, calling it an acceptable safety measure. Perhaps so. Perhaps evidence to that effect will be produced when the case goes before a judge in October. But experience elsewhere raises doubts about the assumption that any law that makes life difficult for convicted sex offenders must always be good for the community. ..News Source.. Editorial The Keene Sentinel