Sex offenders sue state over new law

The state is limiting the places that sex offenders can live after they are released.
ATLANTA (AP) -- Lori Collins searched lonely stretches of country roads and scoured industrial lots for a place she could live as a registered sex offender. After weeks of looking, she finally found a house 35 miles east of Atlanta.
But her heart sank when she learned it was close to a school bus stop.
That meant the house was off-limits under the thorniest restriction in a new Georgia law. It is one of the strictest sex-offender laws in the nation.
"OK? Now where do you look?" said an exasperated Collins, who was convicted in 2002 of statutory rape for having sex with a 15-year-old when she was 39. "I've looked in the country and the city. Where else?"
Though many states and municipalities bar sex offenders from living near schools, Georgia's law, which takes effect July 1, prohibits them from living, working or loitering within 1,000 feet of just about anywhere children gather -- schools, churches, parks, gyms, swimming pools or one of the state's 150,000 school bus stops.
That puts virtually every residential neighborhood off limits to Georgia's more than 10,000 registered sex offenders.
Lawmakers began working on the legislation last year following the arrests of two sex offenders in the slayings of two girls in neighboring Florida.
"We don't want these types of people staying in our state," state Rep. Jerry Keen said when he introduced the bill in January.
Debate
With the law about to take effect, a debate is under way over how tough is too tough.
A lawsuit filed on behalf of Collins and others this week in federal court by the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights argues that the law makes it impossible for offenders to live in most of the state's urban and suburban areas. It predicted that many will have to live out of their cars or set up tents or trailers in the woods. The center also warned that the law will undermine efforts to keep track of offenders.
"The reality is that the restrictions are so tough that they are going to backfire by causing people not to report and re-register with their probation officers," said Sara Totonchi, the center's public policy director. "As a result, the number of people who will abscond from the registry will increase. And we won't be able to supervise them."
In Georgia's Bibb County, which includes Macon and is about 85 miles south of Atlanta, most residential areas are within the buffer zones surrounding the county's 4,700 school bus stops, according to the lawsuit. That means all but three of the county's 230 registered offenders must move, the lawsuit says.
And because the locations of bus stops can change throughout the school year, offenders could be forced to move over and over again, some say.
Under the Georgia law, those deemed sexually dangerous predators also would have to wear electronic monitoring devices for the rest of their lives after their release from prison. The law also increases prison sentences for rape, child molestation and other charges from 10 years to a mandatory minimum of 25 years and makes it a crime to harbor a sex offender.
Though at least 15 states also restrict how close sex offenders can live to schools or day-care centers, Georgia is the only state to explicitly bar them from living near school bus stops, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
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