Ohio Sex Offender Residency Restrictions Not Retroactive

The Ohio Supreme Court yesterday ruled that Ohio’s residency-restriction statute prohibiting certain sexually oriented offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school could not be applied to an offender who had brought his home and committed his offense before July 31, 2003, the effective date of the statute.( Ruling )

The case had been submitted to the Supreme Court by the First District Court of Appeals as a certified conflict between that court and the Second Appellate District Court, which had held the opposite review on the exact same day as the First District’s decision.

In making its decision the Supreme Court looked first of all at Van Fossen v. Babcock & Wilcox (36 O.St.3d 100), which had held in 1988 that “a statute is presumed to be prospective in its operation unless expressly made retrospective.” The Court next looked at its 2006-decision in State v. Consilio that held, first of all, that “in order to overcome the presumption that a statute applies prospectively it must ‘clearly proclaim’ its retroactive application.” It then went on to say that “a retroactive statute is unconstitutional if it retroactively impairs vested substantive rights, but not if its merely remedial in nature.”

Ohio Revised Code §2950.031 was renumbered by Senate Bill 10 last year and is now §2950.034. References to the wording used by the Court can be viewed in 2003 Am.Sub.H.B. No. 5.