Lifetime GPS Bill Gets Further Consideration

The Florida Legislative Sites; myfloridahouse.gov and flsenate.gov can offer some useful public information on the status of Bills. Since those affecting registrants are on our radar, we wanted to update our members on some of the considerations that are going on as the bill progresses.

Aside from being able to pull the Bill text itself and read the redlined revisions, you are able to pull the staff analysis on the bill as well. This morning the staff analysis on SB 134 (lifetime monitoring) was updated and contained some concerns that FAC members (as well as others) raised to legislators during our call/letter writing campaign, namely; registrants won’t be able to afford the cost so taxpayers will be stuck footing the bill and you can’t punish someone beyond the statutory limit. (That’s setting aside the obvious; studies show it’s ineffective).

The entire Staff Analysis can be found here, but here are excerpts so you can see what’s being talked about:

Statutory revenues are significantly limited by the ability of the offender to pay and a great number of offenders will not meet the established criteria  to pay the actual costs for the lifetime monitoring program and equipment.

Lifetime electronic monitoring would be considered part of the criminal sentence. The lifetime sanction would exceed the statutory maximum punishment for many of the sexual offenses that would require sexual offender registration and may be ruled, at this time, as unlawful.

So we know that the harder they make the lives of registered citizens, the harder it will be for them to earn a living, which, in turn, will make it impossible for them to cover $300 a month in monitoring.

Point #1 might not be much of a concern for Florida, since if you can’t pay for monitoring it’ll be a third degree felony and you’ll be back in prison anyhow.

What is concerning about point #2 is that they write, ‘at this time’, leaving the implication that Florida can amend the statutory punishments for ALL sex offenses, whether currently First, Second or Third Degree Felonies (or Misdemeanors) to be Life Felonies. Pretty draconian stuff!

The analysis alludes to some other issues which seem to indicate that the bill writers really didn’t think this through, such as: Who will be responsible for monitoring these GPS? Who will be responsible for putting them on, maintaining them, repairing or replacing broken units, etc? How will billing and collections be handled? Who will actually go out and measure the all geographic boundaries that are prohibited, since right now they are no demarcations for where a buffer zone begins? They also still have not determined the costs other than to say they will be “significant’.

Like most knee-jerk, politically motivated bills, it seems this is another that is not well thought out but might fly through on the “sex offender” magic carpet unless we step up efforts to educate lawmakers.

Our President, Gail Colletta, will be in Tallahassee Monday, testifying before the Senate Criminal Justice Committee and will hopefully be able to do just that. Please show your support.