Judge axes part of sex offender law

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- A judge has thrown out part of a law barring sex offenders from living close to a school or day care.

An unidentified sex offender in St. Louis County had sued, claiming it's wrong for the state to make him move from his home because the legal standard changed after he began living there.

Cole County Circuit Judge Patricia Joyce agreed last week and barred the state from enforcing the law retroactively. But the ruling keeps intact part of the law, so going forward, sex offenders are forbidden from moving into a home that's near a school or day care.

A 2004 law prohibited sex offenders from establishing a residence within 1,000 feet of a school or day care.

But lawmakers changed the law in 2006 to bar offenders from living that close even if they moved in before the law took effect, and the judge found that unconstitutional.

"These people plead guilty under one scenario. You can't change the rules of the game at halftime," Chet Pleban, the man's attorney, said Wednesday.

The man who sued had lived in his home, which is near a grade school, since 1997, according to the judge's order. He pleaded guilty to attempted enticement of a child after being charged in December 2005 and was sentenced to five years' probation. In March, after the law changed last year, the state Board of Probation and Parole told him he was violating his probation and needed to move out, or risk a new felony charge.

Pleban said the man had remained in his home while asking the court to toss out the law.

Joyce's order said the state could not enforce the law against the plaintiff "and other similarly situated offenders" who lived within 1,000 feet of a school or day care when the law changed in 2006.

A spokesman for the attorney general's office, which defended the law, said lawyers were still studying the decision but would appeal it.

Attorneys in the Department of Corrections, which oversees the Board of Probation and Parole, were still reviewing the ruling. Missouri has about 7,000 registered sex offenders, but spokesman Brian Hauswirth didn't know how many could be affected by the ruling.