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Thursday, October 22, 2009
Ind. Law - More on "Jeff Council takes steps to revise sex offender ordinance"
The ILB had a long entry Oct. 8th on the Jeffersonville City Council's preliminary action to revise the city's sex offender ordinance. Today Debbie Harbeson, described by the Jeffersonville News & Tribune as "local columnist," has this must-read column:
The Jeffersonville City Council still doesn’t get it. They still pretend that a law banning known sex offenders from parks will protect your kids.They have obviously not taken my advice and educated themselves about this issue because they still won’t admit that the park is not where kids get in trouble with sex offenders.
They also won’t admit they were completely wrong in how they handled the Eric Dowdell case. Dowdell is the dad who tried his best to follow their new ordinance so he could get an exemption to go watch his son play baseball.
I bet you don’t even remember all the steps this case went through, which is usually what happens in these situations because people simply get fatigued and quit paying attention.
But I’m still watching, so let me refresh your memory. It started in Jeffersonville City Court, and then moved to Clark County Circuit Court to Clark County Superior Court to the Indiana Court of Appeals.
The city tried to take it to the Indiana Supreme Court, but this court declined to hear it, so in the end, the city lost. Now Jeffersonville is spending more time and money to rewrite the ordinance.
I tried to convince them to just leave Dowdell alone, but I failed. Sorry. And if you review the above list, you’ll note that this battle involved more than just city court, so everyone reading this helped pay for this. Sorry again.
Is this what people mean when they tell me we need a monopolized government-funded court system? To pay for a city to use the court system rather than admit their mistakes is one of those essential services we’re supposed to be thankful for?
What I’d really like to know is, when a city council and its lawyers go overboard and create extra costs and waste time in the court system, why aren’t they held accountable somehow? Could it be that one of the reasons we see such blatant misuse of the system is precisely because there are no specific accountability measures on the government side?
I guess the best we can do is to protect our children from ever getting near these people so they can’t corrupt them with their misguided ideas of right and wrong.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 22, 2009 11:07 AM
Posted to Indiana Law