Jessie's Law Slowly Making Impact Against Sex Offenders
Posted on Mon, Feb. 19, 2007 'Jessie's Law' slowly making impact against sex offenders BY SUSANNAH A. NESMITH snesmith@MiamiHerald.com Two years after Citrus County deputies found 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford's body buried in garbage bags just yards from her home, the convicted sex offender who told police he buried her alive is going on trial in Miami. But Lunsford's family has already attained some measure of justice. Florida was the first state to pass a ''Jessie's Law,'' which aims to better track sex offenders and keep them away from children. Twenty other states have followed suit in the past year. Florida's Jessica Marie Lunsford Act, passed in May 2005, requires school districts to do background checks on contractors and vendors who may come in contact with children. It also requires sex offenders to register in person every six months with their local sheriff's office. Law enforcement agencies around the state have beefed up efforts to track down the ones who don't. Lunsford's father, Mark, is credited with helping to put the legislation on a fast-track to passage. Just hours after his daughter's body was found, Lunsford told reporters he needed support ''to help change things.'' He began traveling the country, pushing for changes to force law enforcement to do a better job of tracking sex offenders. ''He can't save his daughter, she's gone, but he can certainly do everything he can to save another child,'' Mark Gelman, Lunsford's attorney, said last week. John Couey, the man accused of killing Jessica, was required, as a sex offender, to register his address with authorities, but he never let anyone know he had moved. And no one checked. Authorities searched for the little girl for nearly three weeks without realizing Couey lived near her home. And even though he was convicted in 1991 of trying to sexually assault a child, he was allowed to work as a mason's assistant at Jessica's school. ''We'll never know if he had any communication with her or got to know her or if that's how he originally saw her,'' Gelman said. Since passage of the Lunsford Act, school officials around the state have done background checks on 322,000 contractors and vendors, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said. So far, Miami-Dade County schools have run checks on about 12,000 people and rejected approximately 480 because they had criminal records. The Miami-Dade Police Department, which before the law had just two detectives and an intelligence analyst tracking sex offenders, now dedicates six detectives, two sergeants and four civilians to the effort. ''We basically created a whole new section in the bureau to deal with this,'' Maj. Elizabeth Buccholz said. ``It's a much better law. It makes a lot more sense, but it created a tremendous amount of work.'' Buccholz said her department has arrested 272 sex offenders for failing to register, which is a felony under the new law. One month before Jessica was killed, Florida law enforcement agencies had lost track of at least 1,800 sexual offenders statewide, a 2005 Miami Herald investigation revealed. And Couey wasn't even on the list of so-called absconders, because no one had checked on him. In a little more than a year since the law was enacted, the absconder list is down to 1,027, according to the FDLE. ''We seem to be getting the kinds of results that I think the Legislature had intended,'' said Donna Uzzell, FDLE's director of criminal justice information services. The FDLE has also added agents who work full time tracking down unregistered sex offenders. The law also imposes longer sentences on anyone who rapes a child, a minimum of 25 years in prison, but that provision hasn't had much effect yet because those cases take a long time to make it to trial. The requirement to monitor certain sex offenders with Global Positioning System devices is also slowly taking effect, with the Department of Corrections using GPS devices to monitor 1,018 offenders as of November. It's too early to tell if children are safer because of the Lunsford Act, but anecdotal evidence from law enforcement suggests the efforts are making a difference. ''I think there are fewer now absconded since they have to go register every six months with the county. Before, they would just disappear,'' said Miami police Detective Elio Tamayo of the special victims unit. That, say advocates for children, can only help. ''The vast majority of sex offenders are not in institutions. They're not incarcerated. They're in our communities,'' said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. ``At a minimum, authorities in a community need to know where they are.'' http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/nation/16735370.htm