Saturday, March 26, 2011

More Homeowners Associations Banning Sexual Offenders


By Dean Narciso, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

March 21--Homeowners associations increasingly are seeking to ban sexual offenders and predators in an attempt to improve safety and maintain property values.

"There's an explosion in Franklin County," said David W. Kaman, a lawyer with Kaman and Cusimano, which specializes in association law.

A 2003 state law and more-restrictive municipal laws already prohibit Tier 3 sexual predators -- those convicted of the most-serious sex crimes -- from living within 1,000 feet of sensitive areas such as schools, playgrounds and day-care centers.

The association laws are far more restrictive, however, and are considered outright bans intended to protect higher-density areas, such as condominium communities, said Kaman. He recently met with 40 associations in Delaware County's Genoa Township to discuss the issue and has meetings scheduled with 40 more in Springfield and nine in Westerville in late April.

In the past six years, 30 Tier 3 sexual offenders have been denied entry to association-run communities in Ohio, without a single legal challenge, Kaman said.

It's an issue associations are considering now because a new state law requires them to file their bylaws with county recorders or lose their ability to enforce them.

"It opened up some eyes," Diana Howell, president of the 47-home Lake of the Woods homeowners association in Genoa Township, said of the law change and Kaman's presentation.

"The Realtors check the neighborhoods for offenders. And that's an issue if you have one living next door to you," she said, citing a study showing that property values can drop about 17 percent in neighborhoods where sexual offenders live.

"I know I would not move in next door to a sexual predator. And I'm assuming that as a member of society, that there are other people a lot like me," she said.

"I think we're going to see more of this," said Charles T. Williams, a partner in Williams & Strohm, which also represents homeowners associations. "I think people are very, very concerned about personal safety and their security."

Critics of the bans say they violate offenders' civil rights and amount to cruel and unusual punishment.
"It's an understandable outflow from the notification provisions, where you get a postcard if you're living within 1,000 feet of a registered sex offender," said Stephen Johnson Grove, deputy director for policy at the Cincinnati-based Ohio Justice and Policy Center, an advocate for prisoners' rights.

But eliminating housing or jobs from offenders "is really a damage to our communities," he said. "If people can't get housing, none of us are safer."

He said the vast majority of sex offenders know their victims. Often they're related, or are in a position of trust, such as a teacher, coach, clergy member or youth leader.
Howell isn't sympathetic.

"It's also cruel what they've done to be labeled what they are," she said of offenders. "They've got rights; we have rights."

The 2,400 homes in Dublin's Muirfield Association don't have restrictions against people convicted of sex crimes, but residents have discussed them, said Walter Zeier, general manager of the association. "It's a huge concern."

Association members have been told that 100 percent of the voting residents would need to approve a rule change. "Our deed doesn't have provisions to change it," he said.
Zeier also worries about potential legal challenges.

"It shocks me that no one has challenged it here," he said, when told that such laws have been challenged, unsuccessfully, only in New Jersey.

Johnson Grove said he thinks that courts would uphold the restrictions.

Constitutional laws are "a limit on the powers of government, not on (homeowners associations)," he said.

dnarciso@dispatch.com
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"When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect."
~Adlia Stevenson U.S. Vice President (1893–1897) and Congressman (1879–1881)

On a Personal Note

Thanks for the opportunity to express my thoughts regarding the issue of citizens’ rights, particularly addressing certain sex offenders’ crimes that do not fit the devastating, inequitable and endless punishment given.


As you know, many young men and women lives across the nation are being destroyed by incarceration, life-time registry and restrictive laws that do more harm than good. For those individuals, there is no second chance.

Below is a personal letter to President Obama:
* * * *
“Dear President Obama,

I truly agree with your sentiments that individuals, such as ex-felons, should be able to receive a second chance at life. Since we all know that one can veer off that path of life and travel along rough, rocky terrain, sometimes running off and ending up in some ditch. We all have made our fill of mistakes and sometimes those held a costly consequence that changed life forever. So we lived through it, trying harder to make things right with family, friends and those around us, but what about those who aren’t able to make things right even if they tried…because they’re labeled as too dirty, a leper, a person who is rejected from society and home.

But what if they’re a seventeen year old and had sex with a fifteen year old, consensual at that? Or they’re a teen that had gotten so enraged after a breakup that he sent out naked pictures of his girlfriend on his cell phone or email? Or an individual urinates where someone just happens to see them?

All are wrong and a travesty but do they deserve the life of no second chance with a registry that ends all. They are labeled, no jobs, no where to live…they have been deemed a menace to society, a plague. These certain circumstances, and many other situations similar to these, I believe still deserve a second change.

Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

After my son’s early release and two years of prison, I thought I had handled that fact graciously knowing after serving his time he would be able to get that fresh start, that second chance. He was an exemplary inmate, GED, college courses and vocational classes. Little did I know that a second chance on the outside was the farthest from the truth? He now struggles and lives in a trailer park sharing a trailer with another and surrounded by others in the same rocking boat, one to float endlessly in shark infested waters. I see him little because of probation requirements (he couldn’t live with us because we were 800 feet near a school). My family is afraid of what would happen to them if he lived with them…vigilantism. My son has no other place to stay since others condemn him of his crime that is screamed from the highest rooftop. Sex offender, sex offender!

Not all sex offenders are pedophiles or predators but some are simply young kids that make one stupid and rash decision that eventually changes everything, and they have no idea what they’ve done until their life is never their own. Exactly, where is that second chance for those sex-offenders who are lumped together with pedophiles and predators? Now, it makes me sick to think of my son’s future and many like him that are on the registry and many with no second chance…ever. I am asking you as a mother and as another concerned citizen of the United States that these laws are looked at again and taken into serious consideration in what they are doing to the Constitution of the United States, not for sex offenders in general but the future rights of every citizen, before anymore are put into effect. They unjustly strip an offender of their rights and place them in a guillotine that can be easily set off by anyone and at anytime. Where is the second chance for ex-sex offenders in the present, pending and future laws?”
* * * *
What truly saddens me is the weakness and deterioration of what the sex offense issue is doing to our once, great nation. Across Europe, others are seeing the injustice and disregard of rights, but we ignore this problem and it makes me wonder where humanity is heading….

We have become a hysterical society in which our latest witch-hunt is a sex offender--no matter his/her crime.

Below is a email sent from a foreign advocate to a father of a sex offender:
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“The tragic story of your son's death is just so sad that it's difficult to explain how. It was very hard to read your letters. It seems almost unbelievable that this can take place in a democracy! From our point of view, there is no justice in this. Not in any way: not for you, your son, the former girl friend – or even the state.

It is an abusive legal system. It seems barbaric. And we are so very sorry that this takes place. That's why it's so important for us to try to neutralize the debate with this…, hopefully making some changes. ….. to show the every day life of the sex offenders, trying to show how they keep on being punished, even after served prison time…..But we will for sure tell the story of the injustice that your son has been exposed to.”
* * * *
I appreciate everyone's commitment and backing to protect everyone's civil rights, plainly as noted in the Constitution of the United States and is presupposed, giving ALL men are “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.”