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...registered sex offenders can't find shelter. In Georgia, a group living in tents in the woods near Atlanta was recently ordered out of even that refuge. But the Miami shantytown, with as many as 70 residents, is the largest of its kind, thanks to a frenzied wave of local laws passed in Florida after the grisly 2005 rape and murder of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford by a convicted sex offender. The state had already been the first to enact residency rules for convicted predators, barring them in 1995 from living within 1,000 feet of schools, playgrounds...
County officials, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, hope the law will prod states and perhaps even the U.S. Congress to craft more-uniform laws to prevent the kind of residency-restriction arms race that Florida let local governments wage. "The safety of Floridians has suffered as local politicians have tried to one-up each other with policies that have resulted in colonies of homeless sex offenders left to roam our streets," says state senator Dave Aronberg, a Democrat running for state attorney general. The excessive rules, he adds, "have the effect of driving offenders underground...
Theoretically, Florida's 1995 legislation should have pre-empted more-severe local ordinances. Yet most state politicians didn't want to be seen as coming to the rescue of sex offenders. Governor Charlie Crist, now a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate who is facing a more conservative opponent for the GOP nomination, has largely ignored the municipal laws as well as the Julia Tuttle eyesore, even as it has become a cautionary symbol of how restrictions can backfire. (See pictures of crime in Middle America...
...some point he embraced Islam and became the local leader of a Muslim sect known as the Ummah. In court documents, federal authorities describe the Ummah as a "nationwide radical fundamentalist Sunni group consisting mainly of African Americans" who converted from Christianity while serving prison sentences. The Ummah's national leader is Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, a militant civil rights-era figure once known as H. Rap Brown. In 2001, al-Amin was convicted of fatally shooting two Georgia police officers; he remains in a federal prison...
...informants to target mosques with poorly educated people, many of whom are felons with bleak job prospects. "Although Luqman was a black man, he was an imam. If one imam can be killed by law enforcement, any imam can be killed by law enforcement," says Dawud Walid, a local Muslim leader...