An Iowa Legislative Review committee will hear testimony tomorrow (Wednesday) at the capital in Des Moines concerning the newly implemented Sex Offender Registry Law.
Marshalltown State Senator Larry McKibbin co-chairs the committee. McKibben says Iowa toughened the laws last year but they’ll take a look “to see if they’re as tough as they can be.” He says the committee will hear from local county attorneys and corrections officials, and ask how Iowa’s law is working and how we compare with other states. McKibben says the law should be a strong one. He wants the toughest law and says right now Florida’s Jeb Bush is claiming his law is the toughest in the nation. “If there are things that they’ve got that we need, we’ll look at ’em and see if we can get ’em done,” McKibben says.
Marshall County Attorney Jennifer Miller says the current statute needs some tweaking by the legislature. The law right now doesn’t specify which daycares it applies to, and she points out the 2000-foot limit doesn’t say if that’s the distance measured from door to door, or the border of one real-estate parcel to another. Miller says nobody’s suggesting easing the oversight of known past sex offenders. Miller says the intent isn’t to water down the law and all county attorneys probably think there should be some restrictions on where offenders can reside, but she says the law needs to be written more effectively.