The Georgia law bans the state’s 16,000 sex offenders from living, working or loitering within 1,000 feet of schools, churches, child-care facilities and other areas where children gather.

Ahmed Holt, manager of the state’s sex offender administration unit, told The Associated Press that the camp is a “last resort” for homeless offenders who can’t find another place to live that complies with the law.

He said probation officers direct them to the outpost if other options fail, such as transferring to another county or state or sending them to a relative’s place that meets the requirements. Homeless shelters and halfway houses are often not an option, he said, because of the restrictions that bar them from being near children.

Since the story broke, the sex offenders have been evicted from the woods.  Is it any wonder that some of these men might re-offend or commit other offenses as the state of Georgia has left them little other choice?  Normal people would think forcing sex offenders to live in the woods is far scarier than providing free half-way houses for them to live in.

Thirty-five of the accused committed suicide. It’s not easy to think of many things that are worse than being convicted of a paedophile offence when you are innocent of that ghastly crime. Once you are stamped as a paedophile and placed on the Sex Offenders Register, you will probably lose your family, for your wife will divorce you, if only to ensure she can keep custody of the children whom you will now be forbidden to care for. You will lose your friends and you will lose your job.

That’s exactly what happened to dozens of men who either pled guilty or were convicted as a result of Operation Ore. The sole evidence against them was that their credit card details and computer passwords were found on the list of subscribers to websites with such repulsive names as “child rape”.

The most disgusting, and inexcusable, part of this entire mess is that their computers were checked and found free of child porn.  Their alibis checked out.  Yet, judges and juries convicted these men solely on the basis of the electronic credit card details.

But the electronic data wasn’t irrefutable. One simple possibility appears not to have occurred to the police or any of the lawyers assigned to the accused: that they had been the victims of identity theft. Someone had got hold of their credit card details and identified the perfect way to rack up charges: create a subscription service child-porn web site (it need not actually have any child porn on it, just a suitably disgusting name), then charge a subscription to the stolen card.

It took a computer expert named Jim Bates to notice that on the full electronic log, the same credit card frequently subscribes to the same child porn site several times on the same day – and yet the “subscriber” never actually visits the site. Moreover, Mr Bates noticed that the same credit card number was being used to subscribe to child porn sites at the same time on three different continents.

Great.  So a computer expert finds that there are many discrepancies and many men aren’t guilty of what they are accused of.  Does this information come to light so these men might try to repair their lives after being accused of being pedophiles?  Nope.

Mr Bates’s discovery that the electronic data was riddled with fraud did not find favour with the police. His reward was to be smeared as a paedophile himself: the cops searched his house and accused him of – you’ve guessed it – “conspiracy to obtain indecent images of children”. Employed as an expert witness, he had, in the course of his work, examined computers with paedophile material. The police search was ruled illegal and last week he received back the material that they had confiscated.

Remember when you were a child and told that if you do the right thing you will be rewarded?  Well, here’s your reward.

Chris Saltrese, a Merseyside solicitor, believes he can demonstrate that scores of the men caught by Operation Ore are not paedophiles, but victims of identity theft. If his arguments convince the Appeal Court – with whom he has just lodged a specimen case – the police may be forced to apologise for their role in causing this country’s most colossal example of injustice. It will be too late for most of the innocent men they convicted. Their lives are in pieces. And they will never be able to put them back together.

Unfortunately, these men will never be able to recover their lives.  As the article stated, 35 men have committed suicide.  35 men.  Let that sink in for a moment.  How many of those 35 men had wives and children?  At a minimum that’s 35 families torn apart and ruined, with the actual number of people likely in the hundreds.  This is all a result of the prosecution wanting convictions instead of actually conducting a proper investigation.

Defrauding the court is a serious offense and anyone involved in this should face prosecution themselves.

How many of you still think Pete Townshend is a pedophile?

On March 25, 2004, Amber and Jeremy took digital photos of themselves naked and engaged in unspecified “sexual behavior.” The two sent the photos from a computer at Amber’s house to Jeremy’s personal e-mail address. Neither teen showed the photographs to anyone else.

Amber and Jeremy were arrested. Each was charged with producing, directing or promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child. Based on the contents of his e-mail account, Jeremy was charged with an extra count of possession of child pornography.

Under a 1995 ruling, in a case called B.B. v. State, the Florida Supreme Court said that minors can have carnal relations with each other and it is not a crime unless they document it.

The problem with the appeals court is that they felt Amber was guilty because the computers could be hacked and people could sell the photos.  This ultimately says that merely owning naked pictures of yourself, on your own computer, is illegal because someone could hack it and take the photos.

If someone’s stealing pictures of you in a compromising position and using it for blackmail or simply to profit off of your body, that makes you a victim. It’s not a crime to place yourself in a position where you may be compromised; it’s not a crime to walk alone in a bad part of town, or to wear “provocative” clothing.

The dissenting judge in the case agreed.  While taking naked pictures of yourself as a teenager should be discouraged because it could lead to future problems, it should not make you a sex offender.

Another girl in Pennsylvania is refusing to be bullied by the district attorney for taking photos of herself and her friend in their bras.

A 14-year old New Jersery girl posted multiple photos of herself naked on MySpace so that her boyfriend would see them.  While this is stupid, does anyone really believe that this girl should be charged with child pornography.  She simply does not understand the ramifications of her actions.  If she is convicted, she will be forced to place her name, for life, on the sex offender list.  This will permanently prohibit places where she can live and work.  Is the girl an idiot?  Yes.  Should her life be ruined because of it?  No.

It’s time for those in positions of power to educate instead of prosecute.  If we don’t, matters will become worse.  Many of these children do not understand the consequences of their actions.  They should not be labeled for life for something idiotic they did as children; something which they didn’t even understand.

One such case is the story of Ting-Yi Oei, a 60-year-old assistant principal at Freedom High School in South Riding, Virginia. It all started when rumors flew about students sending one another naked pictures of each other on their cell phones. Known as sexting, several teenagers across the country are participating. Oei was asked to check it out. Oei found a student who had the photo and showed it to him.

The image depicted only the torso of a girl — later determined to be a 17-year old student — wearing only underpants, her arms mostly covering her breasts. The boy claimed he didn’t know who sent him the photo or who the girl was.

Oei says he showed the image to his boss, Principal Christine Forester, who told him to preserve a copy on his office computer for the investigation. A computer neophyte, Oei didn’t know how to transfer the image from the boy’s cell phone,  so the teen sent the picture to Oei’s phone,  and told him how to forward it to his work e-mail address. When the process was complete, Oei instructed the student to delete the image from his phone.

More students were investigated, but the identity of the girl in the photo was not discovered at that time. It was concluded that the girl probably wasn’t a student at the school. Oei informed the principal of his findings and the matter was closed.

Two weeks later, the boy caught with the photo was in trouble again — he’d pulled down the pants of a girl in class. The school suspended the student for 10 days. But when the boy’s mother learned from Oei about the earlier photo incident, she was outraged that Oei hadn’t reported the picture to her. She called his house at 7:00 a.m., screaming at him that the suspension had to be revoked.

Oei refused, so the mother called the police to report the incident of the photo. The police had to help Oei retrieve the photo from his phone and learned that the girl was indeed a student at the school.

A month later, the first charges were filed against Oei: failure to report suspicion of child abuse, a misdemeanor. The charge alleged that Oei had a legal duty to report the girl’s photo to her parents, and to state agencies or law enforcement.

How is Oei supposed to report the photo to the girl’s parents if he was unable to identify the girl?  And why is a pissed off mother allowed to destroy a man’s career just because she’s angry at school officials for disciplining her son?

The photo didn’t show sexual activity or genitalia, and even the sheriff’s office conceded it was “inappropriate” but not “criminal” — making it unclear what the “child abuse” was supposed to be. In any event, as a matter of law, Oei was only required to report suspected abuse to his principal, which he’d done.

The principal didn’t defend Oei in the case. Oei did what he should have done, but it was the principal who dropped the ball. Unfortunately for Oei, the prosecutor in the case, James Plowman, decided to proceed with the case. Politically motivated, Plowman wanted to be tough on crime and was going to make an example of Oei. When Oei refused to resign, Plowman changed the misdemeanor charge into a felony charge. Oei’s life then became a nightmare.

“We had to tell all our friends when they sent us e-mail that police could seize computers at any time so anything they wrote us could be accessed,” Curling says. “Any phone call they made to us could be recorded.”

Oei suffered the usual humiliation of someone who was arrested on child porn charges. He endured and, with the help of many, he continued to fight.

Then last month, Oei’s defense attorney, Steven Stone, filed a motion to dismiss the charges on the grounds that the photo didn’t constitute child pornography. In a ruling on Tuesday, Loudoun Circuit Court Judge Thomas Horne agreed. Citing a long history of state appeals court decisions, Horne noted that nudity alone is not enough to qualify an image as child pornography. The image must be “sexually explicit” and “lewd.”

Plowman still contends that Oei was wrong and should not be in the education profession. Oei, who was able to keep his job and his pay throughout the ordeal, isn’t sure he wants to return to a school where the principal won’t back him up, but he is also stuck with the reality that no one else will want to hire him. Though the charges were dropped, a google search will turn up his name, likely preventing him from finding work elsewhere.

A three-year pilot project in East and West Midlands will aim to establish whether polygraph testing should be introduced across England and Wales.

Between 350 and 450 offenders are expected to be tested over the three-year period of the latest pilot scheme. Those who refuse risk being sent back to prison.

Claude Knights, director of the children’s charity Kidscape, said she believed the tests could help to assess risk.

“I’m hoping that this will be an incentive for paedophiles to disclose more information, which would help us to manage their release more effectively.”

What she really meant to say is, “We must think of the children.  Oh, and we must keep these dirty bastards off the street.  This sort of testing is just what we need as an excuse to throw people back into jail.”

The long-expected move had been a commitment of the government, he said, and he was “proud to say that this can now legally happen from Wednesday”.

Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the government is now happy and proud that this can legally happen now?  Have they been doing this all along and just now legalized it?

Up next, all criminals on probation will be required to submit to a polygraph.  Once the criminals are finished and in a database, we’ll move on to people arrested for anything.  Next we’ll move on to speedsters, boy racers, and loiterers.  Don’t worry, citizen, we’ll get to you soon enough.

“There’s certainly a privacy concern,” said Sara Totonchi of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights. “This essentially will give law enforcement the ability to read e-mails between family members, between employers.”

Staton said although the measure may violate the privacy of sex offenders, the need to protect children “outweighs a lot of the rights of these individuals.”

Oh, it’s for the children.  Alrighty then.  That makes it all okay, right?  I mean, it’s not like the whole world isn’t safe for children.

“We limit where they can live, we make their information available on the Internet. To some degree, we do invade their privacy,” said Staton, a Republican from Macon. “But the feeling is, they have forfeited, to some degree, some privacy rights.”

If you’ve done your time and allowed to leave prison, you were deemed not a threat to society.  Otherwise, there really is no equality under the law.  No one, ever, should be punished in perpetuity for their crimes.

So, if you live in Georgia and you’ve been convicted of urinating in public, this law applies to you.  If you live in Georgia and have been convicted of having oral sex with your girlfriend/boyfriend because she/he was under the age of consent, this law applies to you.  If you live in Georgia and take naked photos of yourself and put them online, this law applies to you.  If you live in Georgia and go streaking, only to be arrested for indecent exposure, this law applies to you.

If you are a violent felon, such as a pedophile or rapist, I don’t have a problem with the government making sure you don’t continue to commit your crimes, but only for a certain time.  After that, much like a car thief or embezzler, you should be free to go.  The law must change to reflect the severity of your crime.  Those who are required to be on the list, but are in no way going to re-offend, should not be required to follow this law.

If the people allow this “inch” the government will take a “mile” and soon, even though you think you’re innocent, you will have to turn over this information as well.  It starts with “save the children” and ends with “do it for your own good.”

Remember, everyone in America has the right to the Fifth Amendment and Ex Post Facto.  These laws violate both.  The Courts will continue [pdf] to have opinions on this matter, but, hopefully, the laws will be overturned as unconstitutional.