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Everyone wants children protected against sexual predators. Few crimes are more heinous than rape or murder of a child. Even lesser molestation can spell years of depression, anxiety and nightmares for victims. Some even suffer self-mutilation and suicidal tendencies.

But the national surge of states adopting S.O.R.N.A., the Adam Walsh Act, Megan's Law and Jessica's Law--online registries of convicted sex offenders and stiff restrictions on where they can live--is going way overboard and causing more harm than good.

The statutes are named after young girls who were abducted, raped and murdered by convicted child molesters. Now there's federal law virtually forcing states to set up publicly accessible Internet registries showing sex offenders' residential addresses.

But the laws are turning out to be crude instruments with disturbing impacts.

First, they don't differentiate between truly serious sex offenders and others convicted of lesser charges such as urinating in public, or teenagers having consensual sex, or kids who expose themselves as a prank.

For one and all, there's a "scarlet letter," notes Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit monitoring group. The Internet registry sites can be accessed by anyone and use often-misleading criminal justice language--for example, "indecent liberties with a child"--to depict simple teenage sex. Former offenders have a tougher time getting a job or adjusting to normal life. Vigilante violence has led to instances of stabbings, houses burned, even targeted killings by strangers who found names and addresses through online registries. Other registrants have been driven to suicide.

Now things are turning even worse with a spate of laws restricting where former sex offenders can live. Twenty-two states, plus hundreds of municipalities, are setting minimum distances--from 500 feet up to 2,500 feet--that a former offender's residence must be from such places as schools, daycare centers, parks, movie theaters, stores, swimming pools, even public transit.

The result, all too often, is to make most--or in some cases virtually all--of a community off-bounds for a former offender to live. An expose last spring by reporter Isaiah Thompson of the Miami New Times revealed a whole colony of former offenders camping out under the noisy Julia Tuttle Causeway because a stiff Miami-Dade County residency requirement left them practically no other place to live.

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When a person commits a crime, and is sentenced or takes an offered plea agreement, that person enters into an agreement with the state which he or she is being sentenced for that crime.

The united states constitution and the constitution of every state in the union strictly forbids anyone from creating a new law that again punishes, or adds more punishment on that person for that same crime.

That is called Ex Post Facto law, or Retroactive application of law.

The United States Constitution says this:

The Constitution says in Article I, Section 9, that "no state shall pass any bill of attainder or ex post facto law."

In the Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, Harvard's Professor Laurence H. Tribe has defined a bill of attainder as a legislative act "that inflicts punishment without a trial." The late Edgar Bodenheimer, professor emeritus at the University of California, identified an ex post facto law as a statute "that prescribes a greater punishment for a crime already committed."

When an ex-offender is forced to move from his/her home, thus having to sell it, cannot find another home within the law due to the residency “buffer” zones, get fired from their jobs due to being on the registry, cannot find a new job due to being on the registry, their husband/wife lose their jobs due to a significant other being on the registry, their children lose their friends and are harassed and bullied in school due to a family member being on the registry, thus destroying the children’s lives, ex-offenders are forced into homelessness and to live under bridges, harassed by police, neighbors and probation/parole officers, have to wear “I’m a sex offender T-shirt” or have a neon green license plate on ALL their cars, have “sex offender” on their drivers license and forced to renew their licenses every year, forced from shelters during tornadoes or hurricanes, cannot give blood at some places due to being discriminated against for being on the sex offender registry, denied housing due to being on the registry, signs placed in their yards inviting harassment and ridicule from the neighbors, forced to move when the neighbors start picketing outside the ex-offenders home, the list is endless.

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