I checked out my neighborhood and was shocked to see about 40 offenders. The truly peculiar one was an address at which 3 offenders (all lewd/lascivious with under 14y.o.) lived. So, they’re roomies? How did that happen? Do they tell each other “I’m legally obligated to inform you that I’m a sex offender.” “Yeah? Me too!” “Hey, me three! Gotcha ya!”
As for the OP, I think the person posting the flyer was within their legal rights to do so. Not that I necessairly agree with their actions, but I don’t think posting the flyer counts as harassment. The clause about consulting an attorney before using the information strikes me as simply a way of CA covering their butt; “If you want to use this information, we leave it to you to research if it’s okay or not. Don’t blame us if you get sued.”
There are a few addresses like that in my area. I’m guessing that they’re half-way houses of some sort, where people released from prison go to live until they can get themselves a more permanent address.
We’ve got a cluster in Oakland too, I’m also leaning towards halfway house. The difference is it’s about two blocks from a freakin school. :smack: I was pleasantly surprised to find Oakland had only 84 sex ofenders. We spent years as the dumping ground for the states violent criminals. If I had to guess we probably have twice that number of murderers running aound loose.
This is well within the guidelines for IMHO but you seem determined to make it Pit fodder. You’ve already been warned about your behavior in this thread, Jester. Unfortunately it didn’t sink in. Other posters don’t seem to have a problem discussing this reasonably. You’re acting like a hostile jerk. For the second time, knock it off.
Huh. You learn something every day. My post was a jest, marvelling at the coincidence, but doing a search of your posts reveals that you do, indeed, live in the same zip code as me.
Man, you guys have only 84 SOs in all of Oakland, and we in Baltimore have 84 just in walking distance of my home. We can’t even say at least we have fewer murderers here–so far this year, we’re running over a murder a day. And one of our halfway houses is only one block from an elementary school.
There were quite a few in Allegheny county, although only two in my zip code. What I can’t understand though is that some people are on the list as “kidnapping”. Since when is kidnapping a “sex offense?”
Is that just PA penal code, or is that universal for Megan’s Law?
Let’s pretend for a minute that the guy that might be living where the OP lives is a sexual predator who, oh, served time for doing some really sick stuff to a 5 year old kid (let’s stop short of murder, though, and pretend that the victim is still alive).
And let’s say he’s a real real REAL bad predator that’s itching to do it again, and so he does, to some kid that lives in the apartment complex.
Can you imagine the lawsuit the OP’s landlord will have on his/her hands when the parents of this child find out that this guy was a RSO and the landlord either didn’t run a criminal background check or, worse, ran it, KNEW he was a RSO and let him rent anyway?
shrug Not a risk I’d want to take were I a landlord, anyway.
I’m not saying that all landlords should refuse to rent to RSO’s. We’ve already established in this thread that some RSO’s are indeed NOT predators and not even perverts to begin with. All I’m saying is that I hope the OP’s landlord made damn sure that this guy is on the SOR for a really stupid, unfair reason, rather than because he’s truly dangerous.
Sorry for the hijack, but you’re putting a lot of responsibility on the landlord, don’t you think? Beyond making sure the place is habitable, up to fire code, and maintaining the integrity of the master passkeys, the landlord isn’t responsible for the tenants’ personal safety.
All I know is when I signed my lease I had to declare whether or not I was a (1) drug dealer, (2) sex offender, or (3) terrorist. (I thought about checking all three just to see what would happen, but…naah.) I’m pretty sure there are anti-discrimination laws preventing them from refusing to rent to those people; like others said, they have to live somewhere. But if a bomb explodes outside of a crack house filled with naked children, the cops will know who to interrogate.
We’re doing pretty good in that regard. All of the sideshows* has made law enforcement target the local badasses, sending quite a few back to the pen. Two years ago we averaged a murder every three days. It’s down to about once a week now, if not less.
As for my neighborhood, there are 5, but wre talikning up to 20 blocks away. None closer than 8. Still.
Dramatic hypothetical situations aside, an offender who is complaint with the terms of his release isn’t breaking any laws. I can’t see how the landlord could be liable for something like this. Besides, that could open the door to lawsuits in even more areas. Could a landlord who rented to a convicted drug dealer be sued because the dealer offered another tenant drugs? Could a landlord who rented to a convicted reckless driver be responsible if a tenant gets run over by said driver? What if he rented to a convicted thief who burgled another tenant?
We like to say that a internationally-reported incident in Israel or Iraq is just a slow weekend in B-more, land of lock-down, city of stick-up boys, and checkpoint of chicken boxes. Actually, I usually feel pretty safe.
To answer Guin, kidnapping is a reportable sex offense in several states, and in others, if the intent in the kidnapping was to commit a sex offense, it can count as well.
The other problem with sex offender registries that many people fail to pay attention to is that the VAST majority of victims know their offenders. It’s the people you know that you have to watch out for, most of the time.
Well, in the quoted text from the first page, it said:
So I’d think that turning someone down for an application to rent an appartment based soley on the fact that they had been a SO previously would be illegal. One one hand I’d think they should inform the other tennants that a SO was a resident of the complex, on the other hand I feel like once someone has served their time, they shouldn’t be persecuted for life.
