These pop-up parks were specifically designed to BANISH former sex offenders. Is banishment legal, years after the sentence, and retroactively applied?4-14-2012 Florida:
With sex offenders on a Shorecrest sidewalk, Miami opened a new park just a few hundred feet away to stop more from showing up.
Only a few hundred feet from the latest encampment of sexual offenders, who were banished to a sidewalk in Miami’s Shorecrest neighborhood, is a little piece of mostly barren city-owned land, about 100-by-40 feet, filled with a couple of old rusted toys and a metal carport frame.
Welcome to Miami’s new “Little River Pocket Park,’’ a sod-challenged pop-up park never envisioned in any master plan, but created by City Commissioner Marc Sarnoff in a clever bid to keep more offenders from moving to the area.
“I can’t dislodge those who are there,’’ Sarnoff, who represents the district, told The Miami Herald. “But this is to prevent any further sexual offenders from being put there by the state.”
Sarnoff learned of the vacant land from nearby homeowners concerned about at least 13 sexual offenders who have set up camp nearby. County and state law prohibit sex offenders from living near parks where children gather, though the state allows offenders already living somewhere to stay if the park is created after they’ve moved in, the city said.
The new park, at the southern end of Northeast 10th Avenue on the Little River, is about 300 feet from the relatively new encampment of sex offenders, who gather at 10 every night on a small piece of sidewalk just north of the park near 79th Street, and who generally leave before dawn.
The restrictive county law doesn’t allow offenders within 2,500 feet of schools or any place children might gather, leaving the men few places in Miami-Dade County where they can spend evenings.
Several of the men told The Miami Herald that their probation officers handed them pieces of paper suggesting they go to Shorecrest after they were released from prison. State correction officials deny that, saying they can only tell released inmates where they are not allowed to live.
Either way, the group has been at the spot for several months now, prompting Sarnoff to take action.
In March, commissioners voted to take legal action demanding that corrections stop the men from congregating in Shorecrest, a neighborhood in the city’s northeast corner. Nothing has been filed yet.
The city seems to have met the minimum requirements to create a park. Deputy City Attorney Maria Chiaro said the city has to declare the spot a park, then maintain it. At Sarnoff’s request, City Manager Johnny Martinez wrote Maria DiBernardo, the state corrections circuit administrator, two weeks ago to inform her of the new park.
“This new park should necessarily preclude the placement of any sex offenders in the area of 79th Street and 10th Avenue,’’ the letter said. ..For the rest of this story: by CHARLES RABIN
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