More than 16,000 people living in Georgia are registered sex offenders.
They don’t register because they want the public to see their photographs, personal information — including home addresses — and records of their crimes.
They register because it’s the law.
Not to register means “a trip to jail on a felony charge,” Catoosa County Sheriff Phil Summers said. “In most cases, this is something that follows individuals for the rest of their lives.”
North Georgia sheriffs say the registry is a good tool for law enforcement officers and improves public safety.
“We have to protect our children, and this is one of the ways we do it,” Chattooga County Sheriff John Everett said. “This helps us make the public aware that convicted sex offenders live in their communities.”
The law, considered the nation’s most stringent, was adopted in 2006. It has faced several legal challenges and been modified to comply with state and federal court rulings.
The General Assembly continues to fine-tune the law, Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson said.
One change being considered was prompted by a case in Dade County and would allow some offenders confined to nursing homes to be purged from the annual list.
Another would allow some considered “low-risk” as repeat offenders to petition to be stricken from the list.
Sheriff Summers cited the example of a 17-year-old being convicted of statutory rape of his underage girlfriend. The couple have since married and are raising a family, yet he must still annually update his registry information.
There’s a proposal to require self-described homeless people to provide weekly updates as to their whereabouts, and one that would reverse a requirement that sex offenders give their Internet account passwords to law enforcement agencies.
Of Chattooga County’s registered sex offenders, “a few are at Hays State Prison, but the majority are in our neighborhoods,” Sheriff Everett said. “We’ve arrested three since January for filing a false home address.”
Melissa Gifford is director of Four Points, a nonprofit agency that serves the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit Domestic Violence Task Force. She said some offenders will never register, while others will try to comply with the law.
She said that means for every job interview, every time they date or whenever they deal with the legal system they must explain their past.
“This is a life sentence,” Ms. Gifford said. “It won’t just go away.”
Sheriff Wilson said one detective devotes about 70 percent of his time to maintaining the ever growing task.
“I’d like to devote one full-time staff member to just keeping the registry current, monitoring offenders and handling related administrative work,” he said. “It must be done. Not only is it the law, it is the right thing to do.”
