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Florida's sex-offender laws, designed to protect the public from predatory criminals, unfairly lump together sexually active teenagers and the man who raped a 9-year-old girl and buried her alive, state senators said Thursday.
One of those laws makes it a second-degree felony for anyone older than 18 to have sex with a minor younger than 16. But that means so-called Romeo-and-Juliet situations between consenting teenagers can lead to the adult in the relationship being labeled a sex offender, the same designation given to John Couey before he killed Jessica Lunsford in 2005.
''I have real concerns that we're destroying people's lives by some of the things that we're doing,'' said Sen. Evelyn Lynn, R-Ormond Beach, at a meeting of the Criminal Justice Committee.
Once on the registry, sex offenders -- which under current law includes a teenager who has had sex with a minor -- are tracked by law enforcement and added to a searchable online database. They're prohibited from working in certain jobs and places. Now the Legislature is considering a bill that would mark their driver's licenses as well. That's not sitting well with lawmakers who worry about how to handle teenagers in illegal Romeo-and-Juliet type relationships.
Lawmakers are hashing out a way to keep young lovers from being branded for life, but the topic has led to a flood of questions over when teenagers are mature enough to have sex and how severely the government should punish youthful mistakes.
Even the age of consent -- when a person is psychologically capable of agreeing to sex -- is disputed. The individual nature of maturity defies the law, because a specific age must be included to determine when it is a crime and when it is legal.
Without forgiveness for this group written into law, state attorneys told senators that they've found ways to protect the relatively innocent.
Dennis Siegel, an assistant state attorney for Broward County, said he tries to use a lesser charge. In Miami-Dade, an educational program lets first-time youth sexual offenders avoid felony convictions. That's what Antwain Easterling, the star football player at Northwestern High, chose after admitting to having sex with a 14-year-old girl in a campus bathroom. He was 19 at the time.
''Almost every day we get cases where you're dealing with the kind of person that you want to exclude,'' said Bill Cervone, a state attorney in Gainesville. ``But our hands are tied by all of these statutes.''
The option senators are weighing now wouldn't have made Easterling's action legal. They've proposed to make it legal for a minor ages 14 to 16 to have a sexual relationship with anyone less than four years older. Easterling's victim was five years younger.
Romeo-and-Juliet cases are actually rare. Mary Coffee of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement estimated that they make up just hundreds of the 40,000 sex offenders on the state registry. But lawmakers felt the law is unfair enough to them to warrant special attention.
''Even though it's a small percentage of the offenders, it's life-ruining,'' said committee chairwoman Nancy Argenziano, a Republican from Dunnellon.
The committee is set to pass a way for this group to avoid being registered an offender, but they took no steps to decriminalize such sex. That seemed unreasonable to senators like Sen. Jim King, R-Jacksonville, who shook his head in disbelief when told by staff that two 15-year-olds could be arrested for fooling around on a beach.
That couple, however, would be prosecuted as juveniles and wouldn't be subject to sex offender registration.
Siegel, the assistant state attorney, said the prosecution of sex among minors doesn't come close to its prevalence. For proof of that, Siegel said, just visit a middle school: ``You can walk down a hallway at any given minute and see sex offenses happening.
BY STEPHANIE GARRY
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