NEWSSEX OFFENDER REGISTRY

Even more predictable than Jersey Shore costumes this Halloween was the wave of paranoid, misdirected policies claiming to protect kids from sex offenders. As they do every year, cities and towns across the country have been passing regulations restricting the movement of people convicted of sex offenses. And every year these policies are misdirected and counterproductive.

As kids head out to trick-or-treat across the U.S., they'll do so in a world made "safe" by adults -- which apparently entails requiring people convicted of prior sex offenses to stay home, skip any Halloween decorations and turn out the lights.

Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast wrote a comprehensive summary of these ridiculous regulations and he finds plenty of fodder in Texas alone -- including El Paso, which is so pleased with its Halloween restrictions that it's thinking of extending the rules to Christmas.

Baltimore is among the dozens of cities that require registered offenders to post "NO CANDY" signs like a scarlet letter. Police officers across the country will be checking on registered sex offenders to make sure they're following the rules and countless local TV stations are pointing parents to state registry websites.

Grits also pointed to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by blogger Lenore Skenazy, where she writes that Halloween is among the safest days of the year -- in fact there has apparently only been one reported incident of a child abducted and molested on Halloween in U.S. history, in Wisconsin in 1973, and the perpetrator was not a convicted sex offender so strict regulations would have missed him.

This month, while the State Fair of Texas was drawing huge crowds and stretching police staff, the small Dallas Police office charged with registering sex offenders was swamped. Lines of people seeking to register snaked around the block, and some were turned away after waiting for hours.

Officials say they’re working on the problem in Dallas, but the incident underscores a wider problem with sex offender registries (and with the criminal justice system in general): the constant delays and long waits that defendants and their families face in trying to conduct the most routine business.

Tough on crime legislation is often an unfunded mandate for the agencies it impacts. Longer sentences, registration and parole requirements and postponed hearings require government resources -- from police, courts and other departments. And the effect of this drain on resources is exactly the opposite of perceived intent of the legislation: by ensnaring our poorest citizens in an endless bureaucracy, we've denied them time with family and countless work days and job opportunities, placed hurdles in the path of a functioning life and possibly even contributed to more crime.

There's no doubt that laws targeting sex offenders have a valuable purpose — to protect the public, and especially kids, from dangerous individuals. But these laws don't quite work when what they're doing is driving sex offenders to live under bridges.

Earlier this year, this problem came starkly to light in Florida's Miami-Dade county, after national media exposed a sex offender shantytown under a highway. How did they county respond to the pressure? They came up with a band-aid solution: first by demolishing the camp, and then by putting its 92 residents into studio apartments with six-month leases.

Predictably, the six-month apartments are now about to expire, and many of the 92 residents have nowhere to go. The county hasn't addressed the root of the problem, which is the fact that it restricts sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of a school or park. Almost every house in a city like Miami lies within 2,500 feet of such a school or park, which is what originally drove the 92 people to live under a bridge — and unless that policy is changed, it will continue to fuel homelessness.

Yesterday in a disappointing ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court green-lighted the federal practice of detaining sex offenders for years — even after their sentences end.

The court ruled 7-2 in United States v. Comstock that it was okay for Congress to allow authorities to continue imprisoning people after sentence completion, so long as a judge sees “clear and convincing” evidence that the person would be likely to re-offend.

It's not often that I agree with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, but as I wrote when this case was first argued, Scalia is right when he argues that the practice is unconstitutional.

Sadly, the two were the only ones to dissent in this latest ruling — the only ones to stand up for sensible sentencing practices and clear limits on the government’s power. As Thomas wrote, "The fact that the federal government has the authority to imprison a person for the purpose of punishing him for a federal crime — sex-related or otherwise — does not provide the government with the additional power to exercise indefinite civil control over that person.”

Tonya Craft was on the stand in Georgia today to defend herself against charges of child molestation, making an already riveting trial even more dramatic. We've covered the trial here and here, but for those of you who've missed it, Craft is facing charges in a trial that's lately turned a three-ring circus — with judges and prosecutors turning to increasingly outlandish tactics to railroad the defendant.

Though her case started as a backwater controversy, it's lately picked up media attention from across the country.

Yesterday, Craft could only answer a few questions before Judge House claimed that her attorney was "playing to the media and jury," and ordered an interruption, retreating into a conference in his chambers (watch the exchange here).

When she returned, Craft answered questions about the multiple affairs of her former husband (and accuser), as well as her relationship with the alleged victims and their parents. At one point, she looked directly at the jury and declared: "I did not and have not sexually abused any child."

Today, in a rambling cross examination, prosecutor Len Gregor tried to link questions about Craft's earlier marriages and her drinking to the alleged child molestation. Yet Gregor hardly pressed Craft on the actual abuse charges before he finished. At the end of the day, the defense rested, and the trial will continue on Monday.

Will Craft manage to successfully fight these charges? She's certainly made a shrewd move of hiring outside lawyers, whose livelihood does not depend on currying favor with local officials, and who have no fear of burning bridges.

People accused of child molestation are rarely sympathetic characters. But someone like former Georgia kindergarten teacher Tonya Craft might make you think again.

Accusations that Craft (left) molested three young girls at a 2008 slumber party — including her own child — have torn apart the small community of Chickamagua, which lies just south of the Georgia/Tennessee border. The crime would be reprehensible, if Craft actually did it. But there are glaring inconsistencies in the testimony of the girls and their parents, a fact compounded by how egregiously the police, prosecutors and judge involved have behaved.

At this point, Craft's trial has devolved into a ludicrous, back-and-forth character assassination of everyone involved. Prosecutors Chris Arnt and Len Gregor, in particular, have asked lurid and wholly irrelevant questions about Craft’s sexual history, while her attorneys have been barred from introducing evidence of Craft’s good character.

The trial is now in its third week and has turned into a virtual circus, one presided over by Catoosa County Superior Court Judge Brian House. House had previously represented Craft’s ex-husband during their divorce, and yet he's refused to recuse himself from the case. This by itself will almost surely require a new trial. What's more? House has also violated ethical rules by speaking to the mother of one of the accusers for over an hour before she testified. House also allowed Craft’s ex-husband to testify that Craft viewed a lesbian pornographic video — 10 years ago — over objections by Craft’s attorneys.

This month, a Brooklyn pizza-delivery guy narrowly avoided a wrongful conviction for child pornography. Wrongful convictions might not be that unusual, but this case certainly is: the man accused has a porn star to thank for setting the record straight.

In August when returning from a trip to Venezuela, Carlos Alfredo Simon-Timmerman was stopped en route in Puerto Rico when custom officers found pornographic DVDs in his backpack. One DVD was called "Little Lupe the Innocent — Do Not Be Fooled By Her Baby Face." Customs investigators reviewed the DVDs and determined that actresses in the films were underage. They charged Simon-Timmerman with trafficking in child porn. Nobody knew the ages of the girls or women in the films, but authorities decided to err on the side of assuming Simon-Timmerman's guilt.

It would eventually take Little Lupe herself flying from Venezuela to Puerto Rico, testifying in court and displaying her passport to prove her age to the judge and lead prosecutors to drop the charges. They could have just checked out her Wikipedia page and maybe called her on the phone — which is what Simon-Timmerman's lawyer ended up doing. In the meantime, Simon-Timmerman spent two months in jail and four more months free awaiting trial before charges were dropped.

I learned about this case from Mike at the blog Crime and Federalism, who broke the story of this near-injustice. Mike's victim-blaming posts often leave me cringing, but he was right to identify this case as an instance of prosecutors abusing their power.

A pair of bills moving through Florida’s legislature could finally bring a dose of sanity to the state’s sex offender registry. The proposed reforms would reduce the no-go zone for sex offenders around schools and parks from 2,500 to 1,000 feet. They would also have some much-needed impact beyond that: like allowing sex offenders to live in actual houses and apartments, rather than under bridges.

As Sam Harnett has previously written here on Criminal Justice, Florida is far from alone in the extremely restrictive nature of its laws governing the movements and residences of registered sex offenders. But the state has gained some particular notoriety for the homelessness its laws have caused, especially in Miami, where the New York Times found a community of sex offenders forced to live under a bridge because they couldn’t find anywhere else. Yeah, that story might have turned a few heads.

Of course, this issue is nothing new to Change.org readers. We’ve written about Florida’s harsh guidelines, and about the Michigan man who died in the snow because the two shelters in Grand Rapids couldn’t allow sex offenders (the shelters were located too close to schools). Our bloggers at End Homelessness have also covered this issue with several great pieces.

"They could show up anywhere." That's a quote from Metro Police Lt. Mickey Garner about homeless sex offenders. Not exactly a comforting thought, especially considering how policies modeled on Jessica's law are putting more and more offenders out on the street.

It's worse than uncomfortable. It's tragic. Take the case of Samuel Dorsey, a convicted, unregistered and homeless offender who has been charged with raping a 17-year-old girl. Garner, who works in the district, told local television station WSMV-TV that the police couldn't keep up with him because they didn't know where he was.

You would think policymakers would try to make sex offenders easier to keep track of, not harder. Residency restrictions do little more than address the phantom issue of where offenders live in order to make communities feel safer. In the meantime, it increases the cost and difficulty of police monitoring; and, most detrimentally, creates an instability in the lives of sex offenders that heightens the chance for re-offending.

A panel organized to advise governor Schwarzenegger sums up the problem with policies modeling Jessica's law by saying that such laws "seem to have been made for political reasons or what feels good at the time ." Accordingly, plenty of money has been "wasted on policies and programs that do not make our communities safer, but are politically popular.”

The last place a community wants a sex offender is wandering the streets at night. Unfortunately, more than 30 states have laws with living restrictions that have made released sex offenders homeless.

These laws (modeled after the original Jessica's Law drafted by Florida in 2005) have plenty of flaws — starting with the fact that living restrictions are simply a misguided idea. Iowa has shown some intelligence by limiting where sex offenders can visit, instead of where they can live. However, a majority of states, like California, are adhering to the restrictions written into Florida's original law.

The San Francisco Chronicle offers one window into the dangerous side effects of Jessica's Law through the story of Earl Taylor, a sex offender who is forced to sleep in his truck at night and roam the streets during the day because his house is located near a school. As the paper reports, Jessica's Law means that about one third of California's approximately 6,700 sex offender parolees are homeless. This is particularly an issue in "dense cities with many parks and schools such as San Francisco," where fully 84% of paroled sex offenders don't have a steady home.

Take a look at this map of San Francisco to see the clear impracticality of the state's residency restrictions. Limiting where sex offenders can live doesn't mean the city is sex-offender free. It just means that they're out on the street instead of at home.