Last night's News Hour on PBS had a report by Jeffrey Kaye, "Laws Restricting Lives of Sex Offenders Raise Constitutional Questions."
JEFFREY KAYE: It's no surprise that sex offenders are critical of Jessica's Law, but so, too, are many police officials and victims' rights advocates.
SUZANNE BROWN-MCBRIDE, California Sex Offender Management Board: I can tell you that it hasn't resolved the sex offender problem in California.
JEFFREY KAYE: Suzanne Brown-McBride is executive director of the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault, as well as the chairperson of the state board that shapes sex offender policies in California. She fears residency restrictions are backfiring and driving sex offenders off the radar screen.
SUZANNE BROWN-MCBRIDE: So you go from a place where you have an offender where you know where they live, you know where they're sleeping, you can check up on them and monitor them, to they're transient and you have only really a guess of where they're at, that they may be down at some different part of the city, they may be down in an alley somewhere.
So you go from a known quantity to, quite honestly, a fairly unknown one.
JEFFREY KAYE: That was the experience in Iowa, according to Elizabeth Barnhill, executive director of the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault. She says that, after Iowa passed its version of Jessica's Law in 2005, many sex offenders disappeared from the system.
ELIZABETH BARNHILL, Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault: We found they were living in very unstable situations. So at one point when I reviewed our sex offender registry, I found things like, "I am living in an old truck parked at the abandoned K-Mart." "I'm living in a truck down by the river." "I'm living in the QuikTrip when everybody leaves for the night."
So we know that those are very unstable conditions. And we know that there is a relationship between unstable living conditions and re-offending.
When California voters approved a version of Jessica's Law in November 2006, it did not contain a death penalty provision.
The JML Foundation says that 33 states have passed some form of Jessica's Law. Only those in Florida, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas contain a possible death penalty for non-homicidal child rape. Louisiana and Montana have similar provisions that pre-date the Jessica's Law proposals. The Supreme Court has agreed to examine the death penalty for non-homicidal child rape through the case of Kennedy v. Louisiana. In addition to Patrick Kennedy, a second man in Louisiana is now on death row for child rape, as noted in this post last month. The Jessica's Law index is here.
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