As the owner of storage facilities around the country as well as a real estate management company, Atlantan Jim Kane must have reliable employees. Because he once had an employee who embezzled $50,000, Kane puts a high premium on managers he can trust.

When he found a great one, Kane was frustrated to lose him to Georgia's draconian sex offender registry. State laws limit where an offender — even a low-level one like Kane's former employee, who had sex with someone just below the age of consent — can live or work.

"He had to finally move out of state," said Kane. "I would give my eye teeth if he could come back and manage a new property I just bought. He was the best employee I ever had, and I would trust him with any part of my operation. He knows what he did was stupid. He is not re-offending. He is just trying to make a living. He doesn't belong on that list."

That list has more than 14,500 names on it; it includes everything from reckless kids (teenagers convicted of sex with willing younger classmates) to real pedophiles. Under the previous 2006 state law — tossed out as unconstitutional in the fall — all 14,500 Georgians convicted of sex-related offenses faced dramatic limits on where they could live and work.

In its haste to reinstate the law, the House has also reinstated most of its flaws. House Bill 908 still makes no distinctions between low-risk and dangerous offenders, barring all of them from living within 1,000 feet of any place where children congregate, including school bus stops, and from working around schools, churches or day care centers. To satisfy the court's concerns about property rights, the House did exempt offenders who owned their homes or held their jobs before a church, school or day care center moved into the area.

That exemption wouldn't have helped Kane's valued employee because he rented in Atlanta near his workplace. "After they passed that law, he had to move to Buford to finally find an apartment far enough away from places where children congregate," says Kane.

"But he'd stay a few nights a week in town with a friend. This was discovered by the sheriff's department, and he was told he was in violation of his probation. He determined he couldn't live in the state of Georgia any longer as the law was so restrictive in where he could live and work. He's now in Minnesota," says Kane.

The Senate has a chance to fix the flaws when it takes up HB 908 in the next week or two. It ought to bring balance to the bill, which now does little to protect children. In fact, the bill may undermine public safety by discouraging sex offenders from registering with their local sheriff's department to avoid what essentially amounts to banishment from the state.

Federal law requires states to create registries of offenders convicted of sex crimes or offenses against children. And it mandates that local law enforcement agencies provide information to the public about sex offenders living in the community. But Georgia went a lot further and enacted restrictions on where offenders on the registry can live and work.

Suddenly, aging Alzheimer's patients were being evicted from nursing homes that were near playgrounds, and 18-year-old boys who'd had sex with their 15-year-old classmates were ordered out of their family homes because of a neighboring family day care center. People had to quit long-term jobs because their workplace was too close to a church.

There's no evidence that these extreme actions paid off in improved safety. The growing list of opponents to broad residency and work restrictions includes activist Patty Wetterling. The unsolved 1989 abduction of her 11-year-old son Jacob by an armed masked man led to the federal registry law, but she says the political zeal to restrict where offenders live and work denies the realities of sexual assaults. Most, she says, are committed by someone known to the family, and the best strategies are prevention and rehabilitation programs rather than registering everyone including "juveniles, convicted of any sexual offense, including consensual teenage sex, public urination and other nonviolent crimes."

In passing its law, Georgia looked to Iowa, which pioneered blanket residency restrictions in 2002. Today the Iowa County Attorneys Association says, "The research shows that there is no correlation between residency restrictions and reducing sex offenses against children or improving the safety of children." The Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault said the number of sex offenders who are unaccounted for has more than doubled since the law went into effect.

Several Georgia victims' advocacy groups oppose HB 908. In a letter to the Legislature, the groups wrote, "Residency restrictions require the use of scarce law enforcement and other resources that would be more effectively utilized in other ways. ... Sexual assault prevention and intervention programs and services would go much further toward creating safer communities for women and children."

"There are dangerous people out there that need this sort of scrutiny," says Kane. "And you can understand that legislators don't want to vote against this and have people say that they're allowing sex offenders in the neighborhood. But the law is unfairly and without need affecting some of the wrong offenders."

— Maureen Downey, for the editorial board