On August 11, 2026, the Florida Action Committee filed one of the most ambitious civil rights lawsuits in the history of sex offense registry litigation. The caption alone runs for pages: Florida Action Committee v. Mark Glass, Case No. 4:26-cv-00388, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, Tallahassee Division — naming the head of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, 33 counties, and 17 cities as defendants. Brevard. Broward. Calhoun. Citrus. Clay. The list marches through the alphabet.
Six counts. Seventy pages. Nine exhibits. Expert declarations with maps.
If you follow registry litigation, your instinct is probably to celebrate. Resist that instinct — at least for now. Because the single most important fact about this document is also the least exciting one: it is a complaint, not a decision. Nobody has won anything. No judge has adopted a word of it. Every dramatic line about banishment, every statistic, every map is an allegation put forward by counsel.
That said, how a case is built determines whether it can ever be won. And on that measure, this filing does something registry challenges have persistently failed to do. It brings evidence.
The Difference Between Arguing and Proving
Registry challenges lose for a predictable reason. Litigants show up with adjectives and feelings — “this is devastating,” “this is punishment” — and no record. Courts don’t rule on adjectives.
Under Smith v. Doe, the controlling framework asks whether a scheme the legislature labeled “civil” is actually punitive. To overcome that civil label, a plaintiff needs what the Supreme Court calls “the clearest proof” of punitive effect. That is a brutally high bar, and you do not clear it with rhetoric.
Here is paragraph 56 of the Florida complaint:
The statewide residence restriction alone renders between 57 and 60 percent of all residential housing units in Florida legally unavailable to registrants, depending on how the authorities measure distances.
And then — critically — a citation. See Exhibit 3, Declaration of Dr. Kelly Socia. That’s not a lawyer asserting a hardship. That’s an expert who has done the mapping work, run the numbers, and signed a declaration under penalty of perjury. Experts like that cost real money, and their absence is exactly why so many prior cases collapsed.
The numbers escalate from there. Once the complaint folds in financial constraints and actual rental availability, paragraph 57 alleges that a person newly subject to the statewide residency restriction is denied access to 98.9 percent of residential housing units in the state.
County-level figures in paragraph 62 are worse in the places where people actually live:
- Broward County — 99% of residential housing legally unavailable
- Miami-Dade County — 93%
- Duval County — 81%
- Palm Beach County — 73%
At those percentages, “residency restriction” stops being an accurate description. That’s a wall.
The Art Gallery That Became a Park
Then there’s Brevard County, and this is where the complaint stops reading like a legal brief and starts reading like satire.
Brevard maintains a 1,000-foot exclusion zone around any school, daycare center, park, or playground — standard fare. But the county recently began permitting businesses to self-designate as parks for purposes of the ordinance. Per the complaint, at least 39 businesses have done so, including an art gallery and a clothing store. The footnote cites the county’s own portal.
Sit with the mechanics of that for a second. A person is living somewhere perfectly lawful. A boutique three blocks away fills out a form. The 1,000-foot bubble snaps open around it. That person is now living unlawfully — and potentially facing a felony.
They didn’t move. The store didn’t move. A piece of paper moved.
Brevard isn’t alone in the improvisation. Palm Beach pushed its buffer from 1,000 feet to 1,500, then to 2,500, then reverted to 1,000. Jacksonville adopted 2,500 feet, then supposedly cut it to 1,500 — except the complaint alleges the code was never actually amended, so nobody knows the operative number. And Duval County’s restrictions are described in the filing with three flat words: “Duval County’s restrictions are unclear.”
Which raises the obvious question: how do you obey a law when the government itself cannot tell you what it says?
“We’ll Know It When We See It”
That question is Count Two, and it may be the strongest claim in the case.
Florida makes it a felony to loiter within 500 feet of a place where children are congregating. So plaintiffs’ counsel did something refreshingly practical — they filed public records requests asking sheriffs to identify those places. Paragraph 70 records the results:
When asked to produce records identifying the locations that constitute places where children were congregating within the meaning of the section, three county sheriff’s offices expressly stated that it was a case-by-case determination made in the field according to the officer’s discretion. Most offices simply stated that no such records exist.
So there is a felony statute, and when you ask law enforcement where the prohibited zones are, the answer is: we’ll decide when we see you.
The statute doesn’t define “loitering.” It doesn’t define “children.” It doesn’t define “congregating.” The complaint had to resort to a dictionary at paragraphs 65 through 67 — which is itself a tell. And at paragraph 68 it invokes City of Chicago v. Morales, where the Supreme Court struck down an anti-gang loitering ordinance precisely because the definition of forbidden conduct was unclear and failed to give ordinary citizens adequate notice.
This is the entire theory of void-for-vagueness in one clean package. Criminal law — especially felony liability — cannot be conditioned on guesswork. Legislatures have an obligation to draft so that people can know what is required and what is forbidden. Florida didn’t.
Sheriff’s Office Open Tuesdays. Notice Required 48 Hours in Advance.
The travel claim is where the case moves from legally interesting to viscerally unfair.
Under Fla. Stat. § 943.0435(7)–(8), a registrant leaving the state for three days or more must report in person 48 hours before departure, and 21 days ahead of international travel. Onerous, but at least theoretically doable.
Then the complaint lists actual sheriff’s office registration hours (paragraphs 50 and 90):
- Highlands County — open for registration Tuesdays only
- Baker, Charlotte, Columbia, Glades, Lafayette, Liberty, Manatee — two days per week
- Jackson, Leon, Putnam, Sarasota, Suwannee — three days per week
Run the scenario. Your mother dies Wednesday in Georgia. The funeral is Friday. Your sheriff’s office is open Tuesdays. There is no window. The next available Tuesday falls after the burial.
Paragraph 90 states it plainly: if an opportunity for interstate travel arises on short notice, there is no way to comply, and the travel becomes categorically illegal.
The statute does contain a wrinkle, acknowledged at paragraph 49 — untimely notice is permitted where travel plans were “not known within the notice period.” But the complaint immediately closes the escape hatch: the in-person reporting requirement is not waivable. You still have to physically appear at an office that is padlocked.
A law that makes compliance physically impossible and then criminalizes noncompliance isn’t a regulation. It’s a trap.
Count One: The Banishment Problem
Count One is the Eighth Amendment banishment claim, and it’s where the writing gets ambitious. The complaint reaches for the Scarlet Letter, the Grand Remonstrance against King George, Roman exilium, Seneca’s eight-year exile. It’s a genuinely entertaining history lecture.
It is also not what wins the case.
What matters is paragraph 127, because there is already controlling circuit precedent sitting directly in the path: McGuire v. Marshall, decided by the Eleventh Circuit in 2022. Florida sits in the Eleventh Circuit. In McGuire, the court held that Alabama’s registration scheme did not impose punitive banishment, because registrants there retained a meaningful ability to live and move within their communities.
There’s also a doctrinal irony worth naming. Many people in this community favor originalism — words should carry the meaning they had when written. Under that standard, colonial banishment meant you cannot be in this town. Be inside the limits after sundown and you’re jailed. Florida’s scheme, however brutal, still lets a person shop, work, and spend money in a county where they can’t sleep. It’s approaching banishment. Making that final step is the plaintiffs’ burden.
So how does the complaint handle McGuire? Exactly the way it should — by distinguishing on the facts. Paragraph 93 puts it in writing: whatever the Eleventh Circuit previously held, Florida’s scheme today “stands out as particularly, even uniquely, punitive.” They’re not asking the court to overrule McGuire. They’re arguing McGuire never reached facts like 99 percent of Broward County.
That’s what the maps are for. That’s what Dr. Socia is for.
What the Legislators Said Out Loud
The civil-regulatory fiction depends entirely on the state saying: we aren’t punishing anyone, we’re protecting the public. Florida’s lawmakers made that considerably harder to say with a straight face.
- Rep. Steel (¶ 98): registrants “should stay in prison, rot in prison forever,” and he’d “love to see a sign that says not welcome in the State of Florida” to eradicate registrants altogether.
- Barney Bishop, public witness (¶ 102): “Just put up a big welcome sign at the border of Florida and say sex offenders, you’re not welcome here. Go to another state. You don’t have any rights… We shouldn’t be doing a single solitary thing to help them find a place to live.”
- Rep. Goldstein (¶ 103), on the original restrictions: designed to get “these people out of our neighborhoods and hopefully our state.”
Why this matters doctrinally: the intent-effects inquiry can end at intent alone. If plaintiffs establish that the legislature intended punishment, courts never reach the Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez effects factors. Intent speaks for itself.
The caveat — and it’s real — is that one legislator’s statement is not the intent of the body. Courts have repeatedly said so. But a pattern across decades of hearings is a different animal than a single stray quote.
The complaint pairs that intent evidence with effects evidence: a combat veteran (¶ 88) who survived three ordnance explosions, qualified for VA residential rehab, and couldn’t use it because the facility sat in an exclusion zone. An elderly registrant barred from senior living because the statute contains no exception for age or disability. “Roving encampments of tents and makeshift shacks” in Miami-Dade parking lots (¶ 84) because nowhere else was legal. An officer telling an FAC member to “get a tent and head for the woods.” Homelessness rates from 7% statewide to 34% in major metros.
The Strategic Gamble: Facial Challenges Across the Board
Every one of the six counts asks the court to declare the laws “unconstitutional on their face in all of their applications.”
That is the most ambitious request available in constitutional litigation. A facial challenge means arguing there is no set of circumstances under which the law could be applied constitutionally — not to your client, not to anyone, ever. The conservative move is an as-applied challenge. This is not the conservative move.
They did hedge in places. On the loitering count, paragraph 142 pleads unconstitutionality in all applications or alternatively as applied to innocent presence — leaving a fallback.
Is the breadth a mistake? Probably not. If a judge gets nervous, the judge narrows it. Aiming high and losing some counts beats going timid and forfeiting opportunities you’ll never get back.
Three Takeaways
1. Rulings count. Filings don’t. Nothing on the ground in Florida changed on August 11. The buffer zones still stand. Highlands County is still open on Tuesdays. Score this case by what a court orders, not by what a complaint alleges.
2. The cleanest counts are vagueness, travel, and the First Amendment. These are the hardest for the state to argue around, because the standardlessness is undisputed — Florida simply never defined the terms. The banishment count is the emotional centerpiece, but McGuire is a real obstacle. Expect survival of a motion to dismiss on several counts, and expect this to reach the Eleventh Circuit.
3. Winning may not end it. The original 1997 Florida registry was a modest reporting-and-notice statute. Nearly two dozen amendments later — seven between 2009 and 2018 alone — it’s what we see today. If plaintiffs win a declaration that the scheme is punitive, nothing stops the legislature from redrafting, adjusting distances, relabeling, and repassing. That’s the Michigan story: a win on paper, followed by years of legislative foot-dragging. Plan for a multi-year fight. Three years minimum, likely longer.
The Part Nobody Wants to Hear
This is not a $20,000 case. It’s not a $50,000 case. Expert declarations, GIS mapping, 50-plus defendants, six counts, and a near-certain appeal put this well into six figures — and Florida will spend whatever it takes to defend it, fiscal-restraint rhetoric notwithstanding. States do not fold to save money.
Which means the people who benefit from this case need to stop waiting to be rescued. Floridians most of all, but also every organization elsewhere that wants favorable precedent on the books. Because the calculus is unforgiving: if a well-organized, well-resourced advocacy group in one of the largest states in the country can’t win this, the odds anywhere else get considerably worse.
Credit where it’s due. This is how you build a record. This is how you preserve issues for appeal. This is the case people have been asking for.
Just keep the champagne in the fridge.