Sex offender law continues to take a beating
November 26, 2008 at 3:15 pm by Scott Henry in NewsYesterday, the Georgia Supreme Court took its strongest stand yet on the state’s draconian sex offender law, striking as unconstitutional a provision that punished failure to register with life imprisonment.
I welcome lawyers to throw in their two cents, but in my experience, when an appeals court throws out part of a law, it’s typically because of some technical flaw. They usually avoid ruling on the fairness of a law, because that’s a subjective measure that arguably drifts into the realm of policy – and, therefore, politics.
But, in the space of a month, the High Court has twice rapped the law as unfairly harsh. In late October, justices ruled that throwing homeless sex offenders in prison because they were unable to register an address was unfair. While the decision sent a message to legislators that they needed to temper lawmaking with an eye toward justice, it immediately affected a relatively small group.
Tuesday’s ruling, however, sweeps away an over-arching provision of the law that potentially affects all sex offenders. When first passed in 2006, the new sex-offender law changed the penalty for failure to register a change of address within 72 hours, increasing it from three years to life in prison for all violators.
In its opinion, the court described the life-sentence provision as being “grossly disproportionate” to the severity of the crime.
In a concurring ruling, Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears wrote that a life prison sentence “should be reserved for society’s most serious criminal offenders.”
The plaintiff, Cedric Lavell Bradshaw, who’d failed to register his address after moving in with his girlfriend, did deserve such harsh treatment, Sears indicated.
“Bradshaw’s failure to register as a sex offender, when his underlying crime only landed him in jail for five years, is not the kind of crime a civilized society ought to require him to pay for with his life,” she wrote.
The Court’s 6-1 ruling points out that among states, Georgia is “the clear outlier, providing the harshest penalty and providing no sentencing discretion.” Of the 24 states that specify the punishment for a subsequent offense, Georgia is the only one that imposes a life prison sentence, the opinion explained. Most states authorize a maximum punishment of five years in prison or less.
The reason this is such a ballsy ruling is that it invites the inevitable accusations of “judicial activism.” In fact, the lone dissent by Justice George Carley opened that door by calling the majority decision a “monumental abuse of this Court’s authority to determine the constitutionality of legislation.”
Just as doctors are charged with healing patients, the age-old duty of the judiciary is to make sure the punishment fits the crime. Certainly, I feel more comfortable with the Justices’ idea of justice than the yahoos at the Statehouse who wrote this law.
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