Legislators are responding to last week’s abduction and murder of a Cedar Rapids girl. House Speaker Christopher Rants says the Iowa House will debate a bill on Wednesday that seeks to improve enhances the state’s Sex Offender Registry. “We know that it’s perhaps not the most user-friendly,” Rants says. “You can’t get the information you want, when you want it, in a usable fashion.” Rants will propose adding another proposal to that bill. Rants, a Republican from Sioux City, wants Iowa law to again forbid convicted sex offenders from living near a school. A judge struck down a previous law that said sex offenders couldn’t live within two-thousand feet of a school. The judge said in some small Iowa cities, that ruled out any house in town. Rants says they’ll try for a one-thousand foot separation.Rants says there’s a law that forbids folks from making or dealing drugs within one-thousand feet of a school. Legislative staffers are researching sex offender laws in other states to see what kind of separation distances have withstood legal challenges elsewhere. Some legislators hope the case gives more momentum to their efforts to re-establish the death penalty in Iowa. House Democrat Leader Pat Murphy of Dubuque says he doubts the death penalty could win the backing of a majority of lawmakers. Murphy says legislators should instead focus on things like living limitations around schools and other ways to protect children from kidnapping. “We can look at the Sex Offender Registry and see what we can do to improve it,” Murphy says. “We’ll probably need more money to do that.”
