Shawna is a mother of three. She is on the public registry in Oklahoma for life for a one-time sexual encounter on her 19th birthday with a 14-year-old boy. Her court-ordered punishment was a jail sentence, which she served, and lifetime probation and sex offender treatment. She is also serving an additional life sentence on the public sex offender registry, one whose requirements can shift and change depending on the whims of legislators and new laws. Since it is not considered punishment, applying conditions retroactively is apparently not a problem.
Oklahoma, where Shawna, her husband, and their three children live, is one of only three states defining “parks” to include public state parks and with a state-wide law forbidding park usage, access, or loitering to some or all who are required to be on a sex offender registry. The other two are Louisiana and Illinois. A fourth, Tennessee, couches its language ambiguously, saying that such access is prohibited “…when the offender has reason to believe children under eighteen (18) years of age are present…”
Oklahoma extends the definition of “park” far beyond
children’s playgrounds, parks, and areas whose primary use is intended to be by
children, the definition adhered to by other states with presence restrictions
and by all individual counties and cities with similar ordinances. In Oklahoma,
Illinois, and Louisiana, a park is a park is a park, and state parks are included. All
access to lakes, beaches, and waterways are state parks.
Oklahoma passed its law in 2014, twelve years after Shawna
was ordered to register on the Megan’s Law registry as a level 3 offender, an
automatic designation when the victim, even a statutory one, is under 16.
Another Oklahoma registrant, writing a comment on a With Justice for All blog, said, “I was surprised that here in
Oklahoma, I cannot go to a park. A park does not mean a place with swings and
playground equipment... it means ANY park, State Park included. I really wanted
to buy a boat, and I can, but I would have no place in Oklahoma to use it.”
The state of criminal justice reform as it applies to those
required to register as sex offenders is very much in flux. While some
jurisdictions and states recognize that no evidence supports residency and
presence restriction as effective and either eschew or overturn such
requirements, others are rushing to implement them.
In North Carolina such and other restrictions have become so
onerous that National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws (NARSOL) and
NC-RSOL have filed a suit against the state on constitutional grounds.
A fourth of the states follow what research clearly shows as
the most beneficial to public safety, making serious efforts to integrate
law-abiding former sex offenders into their communities by placing no
restrictions on where they may live, work, or go with their families. The
majority of the other states range widely in the restrictions and requirements
they place on their registered citizens.
Only three – Oklahoma, Illinois, and Louisiana – have taken
steps to assure that children with a parent on the sex offender registry will
not enjoy, as a family, the wonders and beauty that their state’s national
parks offer to all citizens and the educational value of their state’s
historical monuments – all, that is, except those who are punished beyond
reason and with no safety justification all the days of their lives for crimes
committed far in their pasts. Those like Shawna.
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