VT: City won’t fight sex offender ruling

The Board of Aldermen will not challenge a superior court’s decision that strikes down a city ordinance restricting where convicted sex offenders can live in Rutland. …

Hoar’s ruling said Rutland had “not meaningfully articulated” the danger posed by sex offenders and said the city “declares plaintiffs nuisances for no discernible activity but drawing breath.”

“What the city has done here is effectively to declare an entire class of persons to be a public nuisance by simple virtue of their physical existence,” Hoar said. “Plaintiffs have been convicted and punished; the city cannot now say to them, any more then they could to any other citizen, ‘we don’t want your type in our town.’ The boldness and breadth of this assertion is virtually without precedent.” Full Article

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“The role of government is to protect our citizens,” he said. “By basically striking down that segment of the ordinance, they don’t allow us to do our job. By not appealing it, it’s the same thing. It’s us not willing to make the fight to protect our most vulnerable citizens.”

To the extent that it is the job of government to protect citizens, it is the responsibility of elected officials (who swear an oath to uphold the constitution) to protect the constitutional rights of all citizens — including registered sex offenders — from these kinds of arbitrary and capricious laws.