Sex offender laws flawed

While two county judges have stricken the least defensible parts of Lee County’s sex-offender registration ordinance as too broad, the bigger issues with this kind of law remain.

We need a rational discussion of those issues. Our laws get more draconian because it’s politically popular to marginalize and punish sex offenders — often for good reason. Yes, we must be tough, but let’s be reasonable.

If sex offenders are so dangerous that they have to be registered, their addresses made public and their movements heavily restricted for life after their release from prison, why should they even be released to live among the public?

Life imprisonment might do less to undermine a key principle of justice, that once you’ve paid the price for your crime, you should be able to get on with your life, even encouraged and helped to do so if you are willing. With sex offenders, we hold their crime to be so heinous and incurable that we try to keep them in a kind of quasi-imprisonment through registration and restrictions on their movement.

Some communities, however, have so restricted residency that sex offenders become homeless or go underground, according to Sen. Dave Aronberg, D-Greenacres.

Aronberg commended the Lee County ordinance because, while it is overly broad, it seeks to control movement and monitor sex offenders 24 hours a day. Aronberg, who is running for state attorney general, said he is co-sponsoring legislation to employ Lee’s approach — with the right execution — statewide.

“Lee County has taken the approach that should be a model for the rest of the state,” he said. “The state has put its head in the sand on this issue. It’s a ticking time bomb.”
However, the Lee judges rightly ruled that portions of the county ordinance were too broad and vague, banning registered sex offenders from coming within 300 feet of not only such places as schools, day cares, video arcades, bus stops, public pools, playgrounds, certain restaurants, zoos, skate parks and beaches, but “any other similar type places where children congregate.”

Even the specific parts of the law would be hard for a sex offender to obey.
We agree that sex-offender laws need updating. At the very least, let’s be sure a less dangerous offender — say an 18-year-old who had consensual sex with a 16-year-old girlfriend — is not included along with the those who pose a real threat to children.

> ...and a sex offender poses no threat to children. Sex offender means the perpetrator of any of a wide range of illegal acts from actual child rape to things called molestation (which may or may not be) to indecent exposure, and with the exception of certain ones which specifically involve a child, there is no reason to believe they are any danger to a child. Sex offense also covers quite a few completely consentual acts by adults with each other. Until we stop lumping such a tremendous disparity of acts together we cannot have a meaningful dialog about any one of them. Specific types of sex offenders may be a threat to children, not just sex offenders. Whether persecuting rather than prosecuting them helps make anyone safer is another subject. <