CINCINNATI - When Florida authorities were searching for a missing 9-year-old girl, four people at a mobile home within sight of the girl's house told them that no one else was living there.
Citrus County, Fla., officers said they found out later that a convicted sex offender was staying at the Homosassa trailer, and authorities have charged him with kidnapping and killing Jessica Lunsford.
Authorities in Florida and across the nation say their options for tracking convicted sex offenders are inadequate. They say the offenders avoid detection by moving and take advantage of law enforcement's lack of resources to track them.
But civil libertarians say that authorities can violate the offenders' rights with excessive requirements.
In Ohio, a prison reform advocacy group filed suit this week challenging a new state law allowing prosecutors, beginning on April 29, to go to court to evict convicted sex offenders who live within 1,000 feet of a school.
The law does not require an assessment of whether the sex offender poses any threat to children and could require eviction of someone who had lived for years near a school, said David Singleton, the Cincinnati attorney who filed the lawsuit.
The law imposes an unreasonable requirement by eliminating large residential areas because most communities have numerous schools, Singleton said.
Society must be allowed to protect itself with such laws, said Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph Deters, whose jurisdiction includes Cincinnati.
"It's almost on a monthly basis we have children missing, and often it turns up that it's a prior offender," Deters said. "If they're in our neighborhoods, I think we have a right to know that."
Citrus County Sheriff Jeff Dawsy is lobbying Florida lawmakers to make it a felony crime to knowingly harbor a convicted sex offender who has told authorities that he lives elsewhere.
Officials estimate there are more than 400,000 convicted sex offenders in the United States.
As many as one-fourth of sex offenders have moved and eluded law enforcement despite laws requiring them to report their home addresses, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, a Washington-based advocacy organization.
Police say limited manpower prevents them from doing much more than making random spot checks to see whether offenders live at their listed addresses. Officers often must rely on neighbors to departures, particularly in states where offenders are required to register only with annual mailings.
"Many sex offenders don't register - notwithstanding the prospect of going back to prison if they're caught - because they know the consequences," said Jack Levin, a criminologist and director of Northeastern University's Brudnick Center on Violence.
Convicted offenders could lose their jobs, home and could be ridiculed by neighbors if they are identified, he said.
In Florida, a bill moving through the Legislature would mandate life sentences or lifetime electronic monitoring for child molesters.
In Ohio, Butler County commissioner Michael Fox has suggested that computer microchips be implanted in offenders to allow electronic tracking.
A defense lawyer, Martin Pinales, said that smacks of big-brother government and could violate the offenders' constitutional rights.
"People have a false sense of security," said Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones, whose agency monitors about 300 convicted sex offenders. "Just because they are registered doesn't mean anything. It doesn't keep them from getting in their cars and going anywhere."
Jones said his office recently began making random checks on sex offenders.
U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, proposed legislation in March that would require people convicted of sex offenses against children to report a change of residence within 10 days of a move. A violation would be a federal felony offense.
In Iowa, a man has been charged with abducting, sexually abusing and killing a 10-year-old Cedar Rapids girl taken from her home last month. The victim's mother said she did not know that the accused man was registered on Iowa's Sexual Offender Registry.
Electronic monitoring won't necessarily help, said Sheriff Don Zeller of Linn County, Iowa, where the girl was abducted.
"You may know where the person's at, but how do you know what they're doing?" Zeller said.
