Offender restrictions overturned

Georgia’s top court overturned a state law Wednesday that banned registered sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools, churches and other areas where children congregate.

“It is apparent that there is no place in Georgia where a registered sex offender can live without being continually at risk of being rejected,” read the opinion, written by presiding Justice Carol W. Hunstein.

Civil rights groups had argued that the law would render vast residential areas off-limits to Georgia’s approximately 11,000 registered sex offenders and could backfire by encouraging them to stop reporting their whereabouts to authorities.

State lawmakers adopted the law in 2006, calling it crucial to protecting the state’s most vulnerable population: children.

Though many states and municipalities bar sex offenders from living near schools, Georgia’s law, which took effect last year, prohibited 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.

It also led to challenges from groups like the Southern Center for Human Rights, which argued that it would force some offenders to live in their cars or in the woods, and undermine other efforts to keep track of offenders.

The Georgia Supreme Court ruling said that even sex offenders who comply with the law “face the possibility of being repeatedly uprooted and forced to abandon homes.” It said the statute loomed over every location that a sex offender chose to call home, and added that although the case in question particularly involves a day-care center, “next time it could be a playground, a school bus stop, a skating rink or a church.”