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"Unyielding law means sex offender can't stay, can't move"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the headline of this new piece in the Miami Herald, which gets started this way: Joseph Mortimer and his wife took out an equity loan on their longtime home in Richmond Heights during the real-estate boom, fell into foreclosure in February and then got scammed for $3,000 at a loan-modification seminar. But their recession story has a twist: Mortimer can't move to another nearby home because he was convicted of a sex offense in 1993. Mortimer's problem illustrates a quirk in the Miami-Dade County ordinance that bars sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of a school, park or playground. Because Mortimer lived in his Southwest Miami-Dade house before the ordinance was passed in 2005, he was allowed to stay there despite its proximity to two schools...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on August 09, 2010 (boomark / email).