Bush urges quick action on child-protection bill

President Bush urged the House on Friday to quickly pass a child-protection bill written by Sen. Orrin Hatch and named in honor of Adam Walsh, who was abducted and murdered when he was 6 years old.

Hatch is hoping aloud that Bush can sign the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act into law next Thursday, which would be the 25th anniversary of the abduction of Adam, whose father, John, is host of "America's Most Wanted" and a founder of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

"I applaud members of the U.S. Senate for voting to strengthen our laws against convicted sex offenders," Bush said Friday, after the Senate passed the bill the night before. "The Senate has taken an important step towards providing our country with a strict, uniform system for monitoring sex offenders to ensure they do not commit additional crimes against our nation's children."

John Walsh said, "This may be the toughest piece of child-protection legislation in 25 years."

The bill would create a national database of convicted sex offenders and require them to register their whereabouts every month in person. Failure to register would be a felony. Currently, most offenders must register only once a year by mail, and failure to do so is only a misdemeanor.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said the whereabouts of about 100,000 of the 550,000 registered sex offenders nationally are currently unknown — leaving big holes in state Web sites that list sex offenders.

"Before this, we tracked library books in this country better than sex offenders," Hatch, R-Utah, said of his bill. "Now law enforcement will have the best means possible to throw the book at sex offenders."

"Sex offenders use the Internet as an open game preserve to prey on kids," Hatch added. "With the law, now the good guys will use the Internet to hunt them."

Kidnapped-but-rescued Elizabeth Smart and her father, Ed, lobbied hard for the bill earlier in the week, visiting numerous senators and appearing on national news programs.

Ed Smart, who worked for the bill for a year and a half, also wondered aloud from Washington whether the bill might have helped prevent the disappearance of Utah girl Destiny Norton if it had passed earlier. Norton has been missing since Sunday.

"In the case of Destiny, we don't know whether a sex offender took her or what happened," Smart said. "But keeping better track of sex offenders will help make them a little more responsible."

The bill authorizes funding for tracking devices for the worst sex offenders. It also creates within the Justice Department an office specifically to help track and apprehend sex offenders. The bureau would go by the acronym SMART — Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registration and Tracking office.

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E-mail: lee@desnews.com