Legislative Session Help
The 2024 Legislative Session for the Florida Legislature convenes today, January 9. Last spring’s session was very active with a few proposed laws that were extremely harmful to this community. With tremendous assistance from you, the Florida Action Committee was very successful in advocating to prevent those bills from passing.
That success can never be taken for granted.
If you have interest in helping review proposed bills, discussing steps to take and helping to contact legislators, please consider joining the Legislative Committee. Email jennifer@floridaactioncommittee.org with an indication of your interest.
And they always state that since it is not punitive, they can apply them retroactively. According to lawmakers, anything having to do with sex offenders is non punitive as long as they say so.
(My opinion that a large % on registry would share that belief)
The whole “part of a day counts” issue is back on the ballot. See
SB 1230: Sexual Predators and Sexual Offenders
GENERAL BILL by Bradley
Sexual Predators and Sexual Offenders; Revising the definitions of the terms “conviction,” “permanent residence,” “temporary residence,” and “transient residence”; specifying that, in order to qualify for removal of certain registration requirements, certain sexual offenders must meet specified criteria; authorizing sexual predators to report to the Department of Law Enforcement through the department’s online system within a specified timeframe required vehicle information changes after any change in vehicles owned, etc.
” For the purpose of calculating a temporary residence under this paragraph, the first day that a person abides, lodges, or resides at a place is excluded and each subsequent day is counted. A day includes any part of a calendar day.”
This bill not only adds this to all definitions of “residence”, it is adding specific provisions regarding travel, including a 21 day advance notice for Int’l travel.
It also adds a provision to immediately register those they arrest.
Similar provisions are in HB 1235: Sexual Offenders and Sexual Predators
GENERAL BILL by Baker
What does that mean ? Are they intending to remove the 48 hours notification all together?
Hi, Derek
A similar bill was introduced last year but didn’t progress in the 2023 Legislative session. The 21 day advance notice for international travel is already in the Florida statutes and is also a requirement under Federal SORNA, which many (although not all) Florida registrants have an independent legal duty to comply with. I’m sure the FAC Legislative Committee will have more to say about this bill in the coming days.
SB 1230 / HB 1235 Sexual Predators and Sexual Offenders
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/1230
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/1230/BillText/Filed/PDF
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/1235
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/1235/BillText/Filed/PDF
I encourage everyone to read these bills carefully, paying attention to the underlined (new) passages and striken (removed) passages. Please feel free to share your interpretations here.
This is my interpretation.
The good: This bill would us to register changes to vehicles owned (which as well all know means a lot more than that) online, using the FDLE cyber system. That would save a lot trips to the sheriff’s office and make it easier to add and remove vehicles for people who come and go quickly at multifamily residences.
The bad (but not as bad as last year): For purposes of calculating days at residences, “any part of day is a day” could cause problems, although I discern a difference from last year’s attempts at this in that this bill specifically adds “for the purpose of abiding, lodging, or residing” for counting any part of a day, which would seem to exclude merely being present at a place, passing through, eating there, working there, etc.
The really bad: This bill would make every single slip-up during registration a separate third degree felony, so getting a phone number wrong and failing to disclose an old email address during reregistration would count as two separate counts. This clearly exposes the punitive intent of Florida SORNA.
Probably irrelevant for most of us: The portion adding requirements for removing the requirement to register would only impact people who come to Florida from other states where they are required to register, but would not otherwise be required to register in Florida, which I suspect is a miniscule number of people.
Thanks for your input. I have incorporated it into the 2024 Legislation spreadsheet. These two bills are very similar to 2022’s SB 1932.
https://flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1932
https://flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1932/BillText/Filed/PDF
RM
I will still be doing in person for everything and getting proof and a hard copy receipt. I already had the jerks try and trip me up twice but I have all my registration papers in a safe all the way from when the registry started in 1997.
I still cannot understand a murderer can finish their time and other than having a record, they have no other obligations to the state. We on the other hand, for the rest of our living days, will have to registry every single aspect of our lives at some point. And isn’t it odd if we get a registry violation, we can go to prison for years and yet someone who robbed a bank can get probation.