Resident lays flowers at Megan’s Place (AP/Wide World)

The house where Jesse Timmendequas lived -- and where Megan died -- is gone. The local Rotary Club bought it for $105,000 and tore it down not long after Timmendequas confessed to the rape and murder. They seeded it with grass, planted pink flowers in it -- pink was Megan’s favorite color -- and they placed a small stone angel in the center. They named it Megan’s Place, a place of solitude and safety, and a cement plaque bears the words: "One is nearer God's Heart in a garden than anywhere else on Earth."

The garden would serve as the backdrop for the official ceremony in which the governor signed the package of bills known as Megan’s Law.

It had taken just 80 days for Megan’s Law to become reality. In hindsight, many of the principals involved in drafting it say, it may have been rushed. There may have been consequences to the bill that they had not foreseen. Certainly, few of the legislators who developed the law imagined that there would come a day when the president of the United States would sign a version of the bill into federal law. They never imagined that the law would be as complicated as it turned out to be. They didn’t foresee the cases of mistaken identity that would drive some innocent people into hiding. They didn’t imagine that the law would be used on juveniles who -- though in most cases they are unlikely to reoffend -- would be labeled for life as sex offenders.

Despite all the problems, the framers of Megan’s Law, men like Dick Zimmer, insist that they did the right thing, that the law that they designed helps make kids like Megan a little safer. The Supreme Court has agreed. The law is sound, it is reasonable, the court ruled, and above all it is constitutional.

Oddly, one of the first defendants to cite the potential negative impact of Megan’s Law was Jesse Timmendequas. When, after three years in jail, Timmendequas was finally about to stand trial for the rape and murder of Megan Kanka, his lawyer -- and many legal observers --wondered aloud whether the man accused of the crime that sparked the creation of Megan’s Law could get a fair trial anywhere.

Defense lawyer Barbara Lependorf  argued that the publicity surrounding the law made Jesse Timmendequas a household name and that anyone even passingly familiar with Megan’s Law would know all about Timmendequas’ sordid history of attacks on children. That sort of information is usually hidden from jurors in criminal trials, Lependorf maintained. As result, there was little chance that Timmendequas could ever find an impartial jury.

A state Superior Court judge disagreed. But one concession was made to Timmendequas’ sudden notoriety: the trial was moved from Trenton, the seat of Mercer County, where Megan had lived, 40 miles north to the seat of Hunterdon County, Flemington,