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Those sex offenders laws get tricky

A Georgia woman is about to lose her home due to Georgia's sex-offender law:

Wendy Whitaker, 29, has been on Georgia's sex offender list for more than 12 years. Her crime? She performed oral sex on a high school classmate just after turning 17. The boy was just shy of his 16th birthday. Both were sophomores. Whitaker is now suing, claiming that given her crime, her sex offender status is cruel and unusual punishment.
[...]
The question is whether the court will consider the registration requirement in and of itself cruel and unusual punishment for people convicted of consensual oral sex as minors before the law was changed.

Whitaker is also involved in a second lawsuit—this one to keep her house. In 2006, she and her husband scoped out neighborhood surrounding the Harlem, Georgia home they eventually purchased to be sure they were in compliance with Georgia's sex offender law at the time. That law prohibited offenders from living within 1,000 feet of any area where children congregate. Despite their efforts, local authorities ordered Whitaker and her husband to vacate shortly after they moved in. They had overlooked a nearby church, which was running an unadvertised daycare service.

Whitaker has to be out of her home by Thanksgiving.

We need to have laws that protect children, provided they are both constitutional and sane, but should this woman lose her home because she gave a classmate a blowjob? I don't believe anyone can call that justice.

Comments

WTF? These "sex offenders" have already paid their debt to scoiety for their crimes, but we somehow feel entitled to manage their lives to this deplorable degree years, even decades, after their convictions for what, in this case, is clearly a victimless crime. This is harsher treatment than you would get for armed robbery, murder - even multiple murders will not get you "managed" to the point where we as a society will tell you where you can and cannot live. It's time these draconian sex offender laws were done away with. If the criminal is a risk to society, they should be in prison. If they are not, they should be free - at least, as free as anyone else with a felony conviction.

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