Lawmakers, communications workers want changes to Lunsford Act
MIAMI (AP) -- Fred Gray thought it was a mistake when he was told he didn't have clearance to work at schools. A background check had flagged the telephone company employee under a 2005 law aimed at protecting children from sex offenders.
His crime: hunting wild hogs out-of-season in 1971, a case that had been dismissed.
Gray says his arrest and the barbecue he had hoped to have with the hog has been a joke for decades. But the incident had him losing sleep recently, he said. Clearing it up with the Orange County School Board took months, and he worried about losing his job.
"It's funny to me now, but at that point I was so mad," he said.
Gray's case is perhaps one of the most bizarre cited by communications workers who have been vocal in arguing the Jessica Lunsford Act needs to be refined and vague wording clarified so it doesn't affect people whose backgrounds include long-ago minor crimes that had nothing to do with children.
As a result, Florida legislators this year are discussing amendments to the act. Similar bills proposed last year won overwhelming support, but lawmakers ran out of time in the regular session to reconcile House and Senate versions.
When it was passed two years ago, lawmakers touted the act as a way to toughen laws against sex offenders, and about 30 states now have similar laws. But wording in the law created headaches for some school contractors in Florida, ranging from companies that repair air conditioners to those that stock vending machines.
The act is named for 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford, whose killer, John Couey, had briefly worked as a mason's assistant during a building project at her school even though he was a convicted child molester. The act's primary purpose was to enact a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life for people convicted of certain sex crimes against young children and lifetime tracking by global positioning satellite after they are freed.
But the act also bars people convicted of a crime of "moral turpitude" from school grounds when students are present. The problem, legislators and workers agree, is that the definition of moral turpitude is up to school boards. Some have defined it in the strictest sense possible, well beyond what sponsors intended, so that a person cleared in one county sometimes fails in another.
This year's Senate bill (SB 988) would replace the vague "moral turpitude" with a specific list of sex crimes, along with terrorism, murder and kidnapping.
It also includes a provision that drivers licenses and IDs issued to sexual offenders and sexual predators have identifying numbers on them. Florida would be one of the first states to enact such a measure, according to Stop Child Predators, a Washington-based group that advocates for the passage of Jessica's laws.
State Sen. Nancy Argenziano, who sponsored the Lunsford Act and proposed fixes last year and this, said some school boards did not look at the intent of the law.
"Much to my surprise, every school board ran the gambit of what they thought was moral turpitude," said Argenziano, in whose district Jessica lived. "I didn't know it would go crazy like that, and of course we've changed that now."
The amendments proposed by Argenziano, R-Dunnellon, have passed through Senate committees with no opposition and are likely headed for the chamber floor. No companion bill has yet been filed in the House, though Rep. Charlie Dean, R-Inverness, said he will sponsor one, as he did last year. He defended the revisions, saying glitches are almost expected on legislation as complicated and expansive as the Lunsford Act.
Supporters have been in Tallahassee lobbying for the new wording, including communications workers from the Miami and Orlando areas, where many of the complaints have originated. In Miami-Dade County, contractors were held to the same standard as teachers and administrators hired by the school district. About 12,000 people were screened under the act and about 4 percent failed, according to Miami-Dade public schools spokesman John Schuster.
The school board recently relaxed its policies and is allowing people denied clearance under the old rules to appeal or re-appeal, but contractors say the headaches could have been avoided if either the law were clearer or the school district had followed its intent.
Don Abicht, president of Communication Workers of America in Miami, said about 80 of his union's 2,000 members failed an initial background screening, many for minor offenses. He was in Tallahassee this week helping to lobby for the new law.
"They went way overboard," Abicht said of the school board's original restrictions, citing a case where a bar brawl years ago was keeping an employee from working at schools.
For his part, Gray is glad to have his hog case behind him. He said he spent upward of 40 hours resolving it through phone calls, letters and other conversations. He even spent hours at a courthouse looking at old microfiche of cases so he could have documents to show the Orange County board his case had been dismissed.
"I'm the lucky guy," he said.
(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
