Sex-offender law on its way to near-total rewrite

Four nearly four years, we've been bashing Georgia's current sex-offender law as draconian; practically unenforceable; counter-productive; and patently unfair under any yardstick you care to use. (For more details, check out my July 2006 cover story.)

Since then, various courts — both federal and state, including the Georgia Supreme Court — have blocked or stuck down portions of the law as unconstitutional, such as a measure to prohibit registered sex offenders from living near school bus stops and a provision that criminalized homelessness.

And yet, the law's most destructive aspect has been left unchanged: that it provides for no meaningful distinction between a serial child molester and a teen convicted of having sex with an underage girlfriend (or boyfriend). In some baffling cases, people convicted of non-sex-related crimes have ended up on the registry, where they have to meet the same requirements as rapists.

In addition, the law doesn't allow judges to decide whether a particular offender poses a legitimate threat to the community, even if he's an 80-year-old former peeping tom who's confined to a wheelchair.

All of this appears about to change. Before the current legislative session began, new-elected House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, took up the reform of the sex-offender law as his personal cause. As the former chairman of the House Non-Civil Judiciary Committee, Ralston was well aware of the law's shortcomings and his House Bill 571 represents a near-total overhaul.