The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals recently heard arguments on a case that challenges Alabama state law prohibiting a convicted sex offender from living with a minor after a man brought suit challenging the law keeping him from living in the same house as his child.
In 2013, Bruce Henry was convicted of possessing child pornography. After serving five years in prison and registering as a sex offender, Henry married and had a son three years after his release.
Alabama law currently states, “No adult sex offender shall reside or conduct an overnight visit with a minor.”
The law exempts someone from the law if they are the parent, stepparent, sibling or grandparent of the minor unless the sex offender has been convicted of a sex offense with a minor.
The law is immediately applied in cases like Henry’s without any appeal process. Henry filed suit in late 2021, challenging the constitutionality of those portions of Alabama's Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification Act under the 1st and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
In January, District Judge Austin Huffaker ruled in favor of Henry, prohibiting the state from enforcing the law in its current form. The matter is now before the 11th Circuit, where the state is now defending the law in its current form.
Henry reportedly admitted to downloading and engaging in autoeroticism to more than 300 images or videos of prepubescent children being sexually abused. According to Henry, his possession of child pornography was the result of a pornography addiction and is not indicative of pedophilia. He alleges that he does not pose a meaningful risk to his own child if allowed to reside or have overnight visits with him. He further contended that neither an individual's commission of a sex offense in which the victim was a child nor an individual's commission of an offense involving child pornography, by itself, indicates that the individual poses a danger to their child if allowed to reside or have an overnight visit with their child.
“Henry asserts that [the law] severely burdens fundamental First Amendment intimate association rights and Fourteenth Amendment rights of parents to the care, custody, and control of their children by prohibiting certain sex offenders from ever residing or conducting an overnight visit with their minor children,” Court records state. “Henry does not challenge Alabama's authority to prevent sex offenders from residing with minor children generally; instead, he challenges Alabama's authority to prohibit parents from residing with their children based solely on the parents' qualifying conviction of a sex offense.”
According to Courthouse News, Alabama solicitor general Edmund LaCour insisted before the 11th Circuit panel that Huffaker's injunction was unconstitutional and ignored the state’s “interest in trying to prevent these harms occurring to children, both by punishing those offenders who are caught and by preventing that harm from happening in the first place.” He added that Huffaker’s injunction also prohibits the state from applying the law against any parents, regardless of the severity of the offense.
“At a minimum, this board needs to reverse to the extent that the injunction applies to non-parents,” LaCour said. “There's no basis whatsoever to apply the injunction and prohibit us from applying [the law] to people who have no parental rights at all. Mr. Henry brought only a parental rights challenge.”
Quotes from the proceeding show the three-judge panel taking a dim view of the law as it’s written, with U.S. Circuit Judge Robin S. Rosenbaum saying, “There are so many ways that this could have been tailored better to avoid this problem.”
The 11th Circuit did not immediately release an opinion on the case, but proceedings seem to point towards an upholding of Huffaker’s original injunction, at a bare minimum in Henry’s case alone.
To connect with the author of this story or to comment, email craig.monger@1819news.com.
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