Sex offenders challenge Milwaukee residency restrictions

Six registered sex offenders are suing the City of Milwaukee over an ordinance that virtually bans them from living in the city, arguing the rules violate their constitutional rights.

The offenders are challenging a 2014 city ordinance that bans many sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school, park, day care or other area where children congregate. The 2,000-foot radius means Milwaukee’s 2,375 registered sex offenders can only live in 117 designated residences, with a few exceptions.

Across the country, local and state legislators have largely embraced sex offender residency restrictions, arguing they protect the public and children from dangerous convicts. But some researchers have found no evidence linking such ordinances to lower rates of recidivism, arguing instead that the ordinances make communities less safe by destabilizing the lives of offenders.

“We’re part of a growing resistance to the severity of these laws,” said Adele Nicholas, one of two lawyers representing the offenders. “It seems to me there’s finally a growing backlash saying, ‘Enough is enough. These people’s lives are being destroyed for no good reason.’ ”

Milwaukee aldermen enacted the ordinance after most of their neighboring municipalities passed their own rules virtually banning sex offenders from their communities. The aldermen argued Milwaukee had become a dumping ground for sex offenders, and their ordinance would send a message to Wisconsin legislators that the state needed a uniform sex offender residency law.

However, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation last year found the ordinance hasn’t worked as planned. Rather than pushing offenders into the suburbs, more than 200 offenders became homeless and offenders recently released from prison continued to move into the city.

Two of the six offenders suing the city are homeless. The other four legally reside in the city because they were grandfathered in. Of those four, two want to move to safer areas, one wants to move in with his wife and one wants to move out of his parents’ home and get his own place. If those four offenders leave their current residences, they will be in violation of the ordinance.

RELATED:Waukesha weighs reducing restrictions on where sex offenders can live

Nicholas said she believes the ordinance is unconstitutional, in part, because it does not differentiate between the level of threat each offender presents. Under the ordinance, offenders convicted of relatively lower-level sex crimes in the past are treated the same as recently released child molesters and rapists.

“They apply the ordinance with a very broad brush, without any analysis of whether they’re a present risk to the community,” Nicholas said.

Assistant City Attorney Nick DeSiato said his office’s lawyers are reviewing the lawsuit and could not comment on it. Milwaukee Ald. Tony Zielinski, a chief proponent of the ordinance, said the city’s lawyers told him in 2014 that they felt comfortable defending the ordinance in court.

In recent years, lawyers for offenders have had occasional success in getting residency restrictions deemed unconstitutional. Most notably, the California Supreme Court struck down a state law with a 2,000-foot residency restriction radius similar to Milwaukee’s. That law made 97% of San Diego County residences off-limits to sex offenders.

Last month, U.S. District Court Judge J.P. Stadtmueller ruled unconstitutional a 3,000-foot ordinance in the Village of Pleasant Prairie, just south of Kenosha. Stadtmueller, who’s based in Milwaukee, found the ordinance effectively banished sex offenders and harmed a “politically unpopular group” without a legitimate reason for doing so.