Wendy Whitaker, symbol of flawed sex offender law, rearrested

Wendy Whitaker, the Harlem, Ga., housewife who was the subject of a 2006 CL cover story about Georgia’s then-new — and constitutionally shaky — sex offender law, has been arrested for failing to register a new address.

Whitaker is the lead plaintiff in a three-year-old lawsuit challenging the law by the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights.

In 1997, when she was 17, Whitaker was convicted under Georgia’s antiquated sodomy law — overturned the next year by the U.S. Supreme Court — for performing oral sex on a 15-year-old classmate. She was sentenced to five years probation and has had to register annually as a sex offender ever since.

At the time the suit was filed, Whitaker had been forced to move from her new house because it was too close to a church day-care. The law’s residency requirement prohibits registered sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school, playground or other place where children congregate.

Since then, several provisions of the law have been struck down or enjoined, including measures that criminalized homelessness among sex offenders; forced sex offenders to leave homes they’d bought before the law was passed; and prohibited sex offenders from volunteering at church. The bulk of the draconian law — authored by state Rep. Jerry Keen, R-St. Simons — remains in force as the lawsuit languishes in federal court.