Representing Sex Offenders

It was February 2005, and I faced an important decision.1 Four years after leaving my position as a staff attorney with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (PDS), I was three years into my job as the executive director of the Ohio Justice & Policy Center (OJPC). The decision—whether or not to challenge Ohio’s ban on “sex offenders”2 living within 1,000 feet of schools—could repel funders and shutter the struggling organization I led. The timing could not have been worse. That month a convicted sex offender abducted Jessica Lunsford, a nine-year-old Florida girl, and buried her alive. The murder of young Jessica generated national headlines, igniting a backlash against sex offenders everywhere. I felt torn between my public defender instincts, which urged challenging the residency restriction, and the fear, expressed by some OJPC board members, that taking such a controversial case could be organizational suicide.