Indiana judge dismisses suit targeting new sex offender law

A new Indiana law that bans many sex offenders from venturing onto school property doesn't prevent most from worshipping at churches that house schools on their grounds, attorneys in a recently dismissed lawsuit say.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana had sued officials in northern Indiana's Elkhart and Allen counties in July, contending that the new law wrongfully barred two registered sex offenders from attending church services. Because the men go to churches that have parochial schools on their grounds, the lawsuit said, they feared arrest if they continued to worship or take part in church events.

However, attorneys for the state said the men could keep going to church because the tougher restrictions don't apply in either of their cases. With that determination in hand, the ACLU of Indiana and the state's attorneys jointly sought the suit's dismissal last month, and an Elkhart County Superior Court judge dismissed it Oct. 22.

In the joint motion, the state said it determined that "for a church to be 'school property,' the church building or other structure must be owned or rented by a private school."

But in the men's case, ACLU of Indiana legal director Ken Falk said Wednesday, and "in 99.9 percent of all situations in Indiana, it's the church or the religious institution that owns the property."

Sex offenders would only be barred from worshipping at a church with a school on its property if the school — not the church — owned the property, he added.

The complaint was "without merit" because the law doesn't "prohibit the plaintiffs from attending or worshipping" at their churches, said Bryan Corbin, a spokesman for Indiana's attorney general's office, which represented county officials in the suit.

The lawsuit also argued that the new sex-offender law presented an unjustified burden on the men's religious liberties under Indiana's new religious objections law, which also took effect in July. But because Indiana's attorneys found that the sex-offender law does not bar the men from attending church services, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was not triggered.