FL- Sex offenders live in legal limbo

5-6-2009 Florida:

OUR OPINION: Unfair laws create dangerous communities of outcasts

In three years, the number of people living in legal limbo on a spit of sand under the Julia Tuttle Causeway has grown to 66 from seven. They are there because state and local elected officials have acted with willful ignorance and fear-mongering to perpetuate the illusion that isolating sexual offenders somehow makes a community safer. They are wrong. They are instead creating colonies of desperate men who live in squalid, inhumane, unsanitary, dangerous conditions.

These same elected officials -- the lawmakers you sent to Tallahassee and members of local councils and commissions -- will react with shock and horror when the tinderbox they created is leveled by storm or fire, crippled by disease or explodes in violence.

Punishment doesn't end

Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm in recent weeks has documented the sordid conditions in the camps and the lame excuses politicians offer for their existence. On Sunday, reporter Robert Samuels further illuminated the despair and precarious circumstances of 65 men and one woman forced to live out their lives under the causeway bridge. People who commit sex crimes deserve punishment, but not life sentences.

The Miami camp is larger and more humiliating than most, but it is a harbinger of the future if nothing is done about it. The camps are the result of state lawmakers and communities throughout Florida enacting laws that ban sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of a school, kindergarten, playground or school-bus stop. These laws rely on a 2005 federal-appellate court decision upholding an Iowa law that registers and bans sex offenders under civil procedures.

Challenges in court

However, with camps like Miami's and a much smaller one in Broward County, there is a growing body of evidence that the bans aren't civil at all. The bans clearly are meant to punish sex offenders as a continuing part of their criminal convictions. Proof of this is the fact that sex offenders are required to wear GPS monitoring devices and to report their whereabouts to parole officers. This clearly is a continuation of the criminal process. These issues eventually will be reconsidered in court, thanks to legal challenges by the ACLU and civil-rights groups.

However, the intentional creation of a humanitarian crisis by local and state officials is no less excusable. Their behavior is reminiscent of a practice begun in the Middle Ages of banning people with leprosy and isolating them in colonies. This was largely discontinued hundreds of years later when it became known that leprosy was not highly contagious. Like their forebears, today's elected officials act from a misguided sense of duty, yet they are informed by the same demons: ignorance and fear. ..Opinion.. of The Miami Hearld