Is there a "middle ground" on California's sex offender residency restrictions?

The question in the title of this post is prompted by this press report on yesterday's argument before the California Supreme Court concerning the state's sex offender residency resrictions.  Here are the details:

The California Supreme Court appeared to be searching for a middle ground Tuesday in a dispute over whether thousands of formerly imprisoned sex offenders must live at least 2,000 feet from parks and schools, a voter-approved restriction that would exclude them from most of the state's urban areas.

A state lawyer argued that Proposition 83, a November 2006 initiative, imposed the residency restriction on all 65,000 registered sex offenders in California and subjected them to prosecution for violations.

An attorney for four paroled offenders, two from the Bay Area, said the restrictions covered, at most, only those who committed sex crimes after Prop. 83 passed — and made little sense even for that group.  "It is not rationally related to the harm the voters were trying to prevent," attorney Ernest Galvan told the court. The law limits only where ex-convicts can live, and doesn't prohibit them from entering parks or school grounds where children would be found, he noted.

Kenneth Mennemeier, lawyer for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, countered that Prop. 83 reflected voters' "desire to protect children from the threat of recidivism that sex offenders pose."  He said it should be interpreted broadly to apply to anyone who has ever been convicted of a sex crime requiring registration.  Those crimes range from indecent exposure to forcible rape.

Justice Marvin Baxter said both sides were "arguing extremes."  The court spent most of the one-hour hearing debating how the initiative affects offenders who were on parole when Prop. 83 passed, those who were paroled afterward, and those who have completed parole supervision but are still subject to the lifetime registration requirement.

The state says about 6,800 registered sex offenders are now on parole.  Nine months after Prop. 83 passed, parole officers began ordering them to leave their homes if they lived less than 2,000 feet from a park or school, and arresting them for parole violations if they stayed.  Under those rules, "San Francisco is one big exclusion zone," Galvan said. Because authorities have refused to let parolees move to other counties, he said, their only choices are homelessness or prison.

Baxter noted, however, that Galvan's four clients had all been paroled before Prop. 83 passed, and would not be subject to the residency restrictions if the court interpreted the measure to cover only post-November 2006 parolees.  That was the most logical interpretation of the measure, said Baxter, generally the court's most conservative justice.