Court Tosses “Wholesale” Ban of Registered Sex Offenders

April 6, 2010

Citing an individual’s right to receive information as paramount, the U.S. District Court of New Mexico has overturned a two-year-old mayoral regulation that banned anyone who is a registered sex offender under federal or state law from visiting the 16-branch Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Library. Albuquerque officials were considering their options in light of the ruling, according to the April 2 Albuquerque Journal.

Filed in October 2008, John Doe v. City of Albuquerque claimed that the plaintiff, who lives on a fixed income, had been a frequent library visitor until receiving a letter banning him from the premises and threatening him with prosecution if he violated the regulation. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico represented Doe.

“There can be no doubt that the City possesses a significant interest in protecting children from crime, in general, and from the danger and harm associated with their coming in contact with sex offenders, in particular,” U.S. District Court Judge M. Christina Armijo wrote March 31. Acknowledging the libraries’ after-school partnership with nearby public schools to offer homework programs on weekdays from 3 to 5 p.m. for young adults, Judge Armijo concluded: “A complete and wholesale ban that prevents all registered sex offenders from entering any and all public libraries within the City of Albuquerque imposes a greater restriction on the burdened parties’ protected First Amendment rights than is essential to further the City’s purpose.”

Judge Armijo went on to state that minors could be more precisely shielded from “the targeted evil” by tailoring such a ban to libraries’ time, place, and manner restrictions on patron behaviors similar to those that passed judicial muster in a 1992 ruling about the ejection of a homeless New Jersey man and a 2002 civil suit by an Ohio man.

The opinion cited a footnote in the city’s filing that may explain then–Mayor Martin Chávez’s motivation for imposing the ban. The footnote referenced the January 2008 molestation of a 6-year-old in the New Bedford (Mass.) Public Library by a registered sex offender as “hypothetically” precipitating the former mayor to issue the regulation some six weeks later. New Bedford library trustees tightened security by modifying NBPL’s patron behavior policy to forbid conversation between adults and children in the library unless the adult is the minor’s caregiver.

Elsewhere, library service to registered sex offenders is usually handled on a case-by-case basis; many ex-convicts have as a condition of their release banishment from public areas frequented by children. Iowa officials enacted a law in 2009 that bars those convicted of a sex offense against a minor from setting foot “upon the real property of a public library without the written permission of the library administrator.” The Iowa Library Association has posted a webpage of legal information about compliance.

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