If at first you don't suceed: GA poised to pass same bad lifetime GPS law that was declared unconstitutional in their on Supreme Court

Georgia's lifetime GPS monitoring bill was struck down, but it isn't stopping Jawja from trying again.

You can find a copy of Ga HB 720 HERE.

https://www.law.com/dailyreportonline/2020/01/17/new-legislation-would-allow-lifelong-gps-monitoring-of-sex-offenders/

New Legislation Would Allow Lifelong GPS Monitoring of Sex Offenders

The bill comes after the Georgia Supreme Court last year ruled that forcing individuals who had served their sentences to submit to lifetime monitoring was unconstitutional.
By Greg Land | January 17, 2020 at 06:36 PM

When the Georgia Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a law allowing convicted sex offenders to be ordered to wear GPS ankle monitors for the rest of their lives after release from prison, several justices offered a concurring opinion saying the Legislature could write a law requiring such monitoring that would pass constitutional muster.

New legislation dropped on the first day of the General Assembly aims to do just that.

Anyone convicted of a sexual offense under current Georgia law must already serve a split sentence including prison time and at least one year of probation.

House Bill 720 stipulates that a judge may order probation for life and that it may include electronic monitoring.

The bill notes that it is intended to “provide a response to Park v. State,” the March 2019 opinion deeming statutory lifetime monitoring after an offender has served his court-ordered sentence constituted a “lifelong search” in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

The unanimous opinion authored by Chief Justice Harold Melton rejected the state’s arguments that convicted sex offenders who served their sentences had a “diminished expectation of privacy” subjecting them to searches other citizens must not endure.

“We find such searches to be patently unreasonable,” Melton wrote, deeming the statute “unconstitutional on its face to the extent that it authorizes such searches of individuals … who are no longer serving any part of their sentences in order to find evidence of possible criminal conduct.”

A separate concurrence penned by Justice Keith Blackwell, joined by Justices Michael Boggs, Charles Bethel and Augusta Circuit Superior Court Judge J. Wade Padgett, sitting by appointment, said they agreed with the majority.

“I write separately, however, to emphasize that our decision today does not foreclose other means by which the General Assembly might put the same policy into practice,” Blackwell wrote.

The opinion centered on the law’s subsection requiring “some sexual offenders to submit to electronic monitoring even after they have completed the service of their sentences,” he wrote. “But nothing in our decision today precludes the General Assembly from authorizing life sentences for the worst sexual offenders, and nothing in our decision prevents the General Assembly from requiring a sentencing court in the worst cases to require GPS monitoring as a condition of permitting a sexual offender to serve part of a life sentence on probation.”

HB 720 is sponsored by freshman Rep. Steven Sainz, R-Woodbine, but is co-sponsored by veteran lawmakers including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Barry Fleming, R-Harlem; and Non-Civil Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Efstration, R-Dacula.

Among its provisions is that when a court imposes statutory probation for a felony sexual offense, “such probation in the court’s discretion may be for life.”

There are several provisions that such individuals must follow as part of that probation, including that they wear a “device capable of tracking the location of the probationer by means including electronic surveillance or global positioning satellite systems” and that they pay monitoring fees “set by regulation of the Board of Community Supervision.”

The Daily Report was unable to reach Sainz for comment Friday.

The defense lawyer who successfully challenged the monitoring statute at the high court dismissed the legislation as a “shortsighted and unacceptable fix to the previously shortsighted and unacceptable legislation the bill seeks to replace. “

“The authors of this bill clearly read a portion of Justice Blackwell’s concurrence in Park then stopped without finishing, and it will have consequences going forward,” Yurachek said.

In addition to ignoring what Yurachek said were “serious Constitutional defects” in the state’s current sex offender statute, “it also creates an unwieldy system where every single individual convicted of a felony sex offense will be subject to GPS monitoring for some period of time,” said Yurachek via email.

“By failing to put real considered thought into the matter and instead seeking the quickest and most Draconian solution, the legislature invites more successful challenges to its lazily composed bill while not doing anything to protect the people who elected them,” he said.