Ga. Woman Challenges Sex Offender Laws

Woman challenges Georgia's sex offender registration laws.

ByABC News
July 14, 2008, 5:52 PM

July 15, 2008— -- Wendy Whitaker may not be allowed to live in the 100-year-old bungalow she owns with her husband. The 28-year-old was forced out of the house in 2006 and cannot volunteer at her local church. She says she was arrested for returning home to do her laundry.

Whitaker is a sex offender: When she was a 17-year-old high school sophomore, she had oral sex with a 15-year-old boy.

Whitaker pleaded guilty in 1997 to sodomy and served five years of probation. But she and her husband have been forced to move several times in the last two years because Georgia's sex offender registry laws prevent offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school, church, playground, school bus stop or other place where children congregate.

Though she thought recent changes to the state's sex offender laws would let her return to her home, last week, she was told to move again because the house is too close to a church. She says she and her husband have had to put their careers and family on hold because they have moved so many times.

"I know what I did was wrong, but do I really deserve to keep going through this over and over?" said Whitaker, who is the lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the registration laws. "Does my husband deserve it? I'm being punished over and over again."

Though Georgia's supreme court in November struck down as unconstitutional an earlier version of the law, the state legislature quickly passed a new version that keeps intact most of the law's strictest provisions. The new law, still considered one of the nation's toughest sex offender laws, went into effect this month.

It is one of a rash of laws enacted by state legislatures in the last several years that restrict where sex offenders can live, and in some cases, bars them from living within 2,500 feet of schools.

"I think it's an excellent step toward protecting the children of Georgia from sex offenders," said State Sen. John Wiles, one of the co-sponsors of Georgia's law.