Georgia Banishment Law Criticized
The Washington Post has an article today criticizng Georgia's new sex offender banishment law.
Here are some of those affected by the law: A man with alzheimers and another who is 100 years old. A third is living in a nursing home where he is dying of heart disease.The roughly 10,000 sex offenders living in Georgia have been forbidden to live within 1,000 feet of a school, playground, church or school bus stop. Taken together, the prohibitions place nearly all the homes in some counties off-limits -- amounting, in a practical sense, to banishment.
The stupid law makes no distinction between those who are dangerous and those who are not. Even those who are not may be forced to move or expelled from their hospices.
The residency law applies not only to sexual predators but to all people registered for sexual crimes, including men and women convicted of having underage consensual sex while in high school.
Banishment laws, as TChris and I have written numerous times, are ineffective. They just drive offenders underground. More from WaPo:
Advocates for the sex offenders say the law is unfair to people who have served their sentences and been deemed rehabilitated. Many police officers, prosecutors and children's advocates also question whether such measures are effective. Most predators are mobile, after all, and by upending their lives, the law may make them more likely to commit other offenses, critics say.
"We should be concerned when we pass laws for political purposes that are irrational," said Sarah Geraghty, a staff lawyer for the Southern Center for Human Rights, the Atlanta-based group that filed court actions against the law's provisions. "This law will essentially render thousands of ex-offenders homeless, and that's just going to make them harder to monitor."
What humane society can countenance forcibly removing a terminally ill patient who happens to have a remote conviction for a sex offense from his hospice?
None. As Geraghty says, it shocks the conscience.
Who else does the law effect?
Among those swept up under its definition of sex offender are a 26-year-old woman who was caught engaging in oral sex when she was in high school, and a mother of five who was convicted of being a party to a crime of statutory rape because, her indictment alleged, she did not do enough to stop her 15-year-old daughter's sexual activity.
Stupid is as stupid does. This is just shameful.
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