Four Years in Prison for Driving His Son to a Ball Game

2014:

In his 2014 book, Our Kids, sociologist Robert Putnam breaks down the ways that America is failing its less-well-off children. His isn’t a liberal or conservative story–a lot of the book focuses on the terrible impact that family breakdown has in perpetuating poverty (a conservative narrative) and how widening inequality means rich and poor kids live in completely different worlds (a theme of liberals).

Putnam also notes a point that routinely gets ignored in discussions of family stability: the link between rising rates of imprisonment since the 1970s and the increasing number of single-parent families. Mass incarceration, writes Putnam, “has certainly removed a very large number of young fathers from poor neighborhoods, and the effects of their absence, on white and nonwhite kids alike, are known to be traumatic, leaving long-lasting scars.”

We’re All Offenders Who Haven’t Been Caught

11-24-15 New York, Virginia:

BY LENORE SKENAZY | Are we all sex offenders?

That’s the question posed to the audience of mostly college students by Galen Baughman, a Soros Justice Fellow and the final speaker at the City University of New York TEDx talks at the Borough of Manhattan Community College last week.

TEDx talks are known for introducing new speakers with new ideas on everything from tech, to teaching, to society — but Baughman was the first TEDx presenter to address the issue of sex offenders from an unusual viewpoint: He is one. And he must register as a sex offender forever.

His crime?

He had consensual sex with a teen when he was a teen. He was 19, his boyfriend, 14. They had sex once. It was consensual. The younger teen did not want to prosecute, but his parents did.

Tide turns against US residency restrictions on sex offenders

11-11-15 Texas:

Nearly two decades have passed since Josh Gravens, then 12 years old, was playing with his 8-year-old sister and touched her body in an inappropriate way, landing himself on a sex offender registry.

His sister forgave him long ago but Gravens still worries that the incident could force him out of his Dallas home.

Concerns about sexual predators have led communities in 30 U.S. states to adopt laws limiting where registered sex offenders can live, typically keeping them away from schools, parks or other places where children congregate.

Gravens, now 29 and an advocate for prisoner rights, spends a lot of his time courting Dallas City Council members, including volunteering on election campaigns, in hopes of preventing them from imposing rigid limits on where sex offenders may live.

“It would be absolutely disruptive and possibly push me out of a town where I finally feel like I’ve found my way,” said Gravens, who lives near a park. “Dallas is the first city I felt I had a chance. A lot of places I was terrified of my own name.”

Increasingly tough laws adopted in the United States over the past 20 years have had the unintended consequence of forcing many of the nation’s 800,000 registered sex offenders into homelessness. That in turn makes them harder to track, according to law enforcement, and strips them of the stable homes advocates say are key to getting a job and rehabilitation.

Lawsuit: California breaks the law on sex offender website

This post is a continuation of "Registrants sue CA DOJ — Demand improvements to, or end of, Megan's Law Website"

11-10-15 California:

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - California is breaking the law by failing to include updates about sex offenders on its Megan’s Law website, leading some offenders to be targeted by vigilantes, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The suit filed by two offenders says the California Department of Justice has not updated the sex offender registry to include the dates offenders were convicted and released from prison. That has been required under state law since 2010.

The information is important so citizens can better gauge if an offender is an immediate threat, said Janice Bellucci, president of the advocacy group California Reform Sex Offender Laws. The website includes a current photo and home address for offenders, no matter how old the crime.

“Most people jump to the conclusion that it must have happened recently,” she said. “We have people who have been on the registry for 50 years or more.”

The law says the department must have the date of conviction and the date of release before it can post either detail. It also must say if the offender was later imprisoned for any other felony, or say it doesn’t know of any subsequent incarcerations.

‘Lie’ begets lifetime of regret for Clay County father, son

10-24-15 Missouri:

Highlights:
1) Brodie Leap says he felt pressured as a boy to say his father had touched him inappropriately

2) Now 31, Brodie is trying to get his father’s name off Missouri’s sex offender registry

3) Across the U.S., more are questioning the public benefit, legality and appropriateness of registries

Brodie Leap was 5 years old when he told what he now calls The Lie.

He says he knew it was a lie the second he said it. He is 31 now, living in Oakview in Clay County, and he has known his entire life that it wasn’t true.

“Have you been touched down there?” his mother asked him.

Leap insists he told the truth at first. “No,” he recalls repeating to his mother as she asked him time and again. The date was Dec. 1, 1989. Karen Leap, then 36, was asking her son about his father and her ex-husband, Earnest Leap.

The couple, separated for three years, had just ended their seven-year marriage that September. Despite their bitter parting, the parents received joint custody of Brodie and his toddler brother, Josh.

To Karen Leap’s grave disappointment, Earnest Leap was named prime custodial parent, meaning the boys lived mostly with him.

“Have you been touched down there?”

Mom of NC sex offender concerned for son’s safety in prison

The mother is justified in her worry: See Killed/Murdered Archive and Current (Prison Stats on right side)

October 2015 Anywhere USA:

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) – Last year, the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation worked hundreds of child pornography cases just within the WBTV viewing area. Hundreds of cases. It’s a disturbing crime with helpless victims, and the accused criminals range from a school teacher to a church deacon.

But WBTV discovered the other victims of child pornography, the families of those accused.

“I used to have the preconceived notion it was the monster, the stereotypical guy that hangs out at the park and that’s not really who it is anymore,” said Special Agent Alan Flora with the SBI. Flora has worked computer crimes for 8 years.

“The SBI’s computer Internet Crimes against Children Task Force, or I-CAC Task force, is comprised of 140 member agencies; state, federal, and local agencies,” he told me at the SBI’s Harrisburg offices.

Retired judge: Michigan sex offense registry 'like a cancer'

9-8-15 Michigan, Indiana:

Elkhart teenager still awaits new ruling in Berrien County case

On Aug. 5, Berrien County District Judge Dennis Wiley raised Zachery Anderson’s hopes with a promise of a new ruling in his case “soon.”

A month later, Zach Anderson — who at 19 met a Niles girl online who told him she was 17, had sex and later learned she was actually 14 — and his family are still waiting.

A month later, Zach’s story — that of a young man whose punishment has included a jail term, being listed on two sex offender registries for 25 years and subject to long lists of restrictions from two probation departments — continues to spread, most recently the subject of a TV network’s crime show to be broadcast this fall.

But a month later, a former Michigan judge hopes the increased attention and public outrage will spur legislators to take action.

Retired Van Buren County Circuit Court Judge William Buhl has long lobbied his state’s legislators to reform its sex offender registry, ever since he decided during his 36 years as a judge that the registry is ineffective and overly broad.

Elkhart teen Zach Anderson’s sex offender status changes his daily life, raises broader questions about registry

7-31-15 Indiana, Michigan:

Zach Anderson can’t be near a computer anymore. He can’t own or use a smartphone, and his family had to use a screwdriver to knock the camera off his new flip phone.

The Elkhart 19-year-old can’t use the Internet for five years, but his legally required web presence on the sex offender registry will affect the rest of his life.

Anderson must register as a sex offender for the next 25 years after being convicted of criminal sexual conduct with a minor in Michigan — a misdemeanor offense that will be public record at least as long as he has to register.

In December, Anderson had sex with a 14-year-old girl who told him she was 17 and whom he met through a dating app. Both teens say the encounter was consensual. A judge in Berrien County, Mich., sentenced Anderson to 90 days in prison, five years on probation and 25 years on the sex offender registry.

Anderson served 90 days in Berrien County Jail and was released Thursday, July 9. By the following Saturday, he was a registered sex offender in Indiana.

Think All Pedophiles Need to Register as Sex Offenders? You're Wrong

7-8-15 National:

How can someone who had consensual sex with a person who misrepresented her age end up on the sex offender registry for life? The case of Zachery Anderson has many asking if sex offender registries are fair. In the New York Times William Buhl said, "The whole registry is a horrible mistake. I think it is utterly ridiculous to take teenage sex and make it a felony. This guy is obviously not a pedophile."

There is a scenario even more troubling than Anderson's. Can someone who committed a sexual crime against a child not have to register as a sex offender? Yes, and it happens every day in Maryland where people who committed sex crimes before 1996 do not need to register regardless of when they were sentenced or released from prison.

I became aware of this troubling reality in September 2014 at the sentencing of my perpetrator, Christopher Huott, who sexually abused me for years starting when I was seven. Since the crimes took place in the 1980s my perpetrator was sentenced under those guidelines, which were more lenient than today's statutes. There was also no sex offender registry in place when he was sexually abusing me. So, when Mr. Huott is released from prison -- in as little as two years -- he will not have to register as an offender.

Second Elkhart family fights to get son off sex offender registry

7-8-15 Indiana:

ELKHART - Older teenagers - considered sexual predators - for having sex with teens who are underage. Is it justice? Or as some parents argue, sex crime laws gone too far?
?
Darian Yoder was 19 years old when he found a girl claiming to be 17 on a Facebook dating app called "Hot Or Not." After chatting online for a couple weeks, she asked him to come over late one night. They had sex.

Nine months later, state troopers arrested Yoder for sexual misconduct. A judge telling him that girl was only 13-years-old.

Heeding advice from his probation officer, Darian Yoder agreed to talk to us, but asked us not to show his face. He says he knows he made a mistake, but he's not a sexual predator.

"I know I'm not a sex offender," said Yoder. "Had I known her age, I never would have even talked to her."

Polygraph rules for sex offenders rile refugee family

7-7-15 South Dakota:

Not long ago, Congolese pastor Jerome Muturutsa was fighting deportation from Sioux Falls to his home country.

The 60-year-old was in danger of ejection to his war-torn country over his conviction for a sexual contact crime his family and friends swear he didn't commit.

An immigration judge chose to let him stay, but the parole rules for sex offenders have been so restrictive that his family now says they wish they'd have let him leave the U.S.

Muturutsa's currently detained at the Jameson Annex in Sioux Falls over inconclusive polygraph test results.

"Here, you have no freedom," said his son Michael Gahakanyi. "In the refugee camp, he would be free. Even in the year and a half that he was out of prison, he was not free."

Muturutsa's family, along with supporters like Pastor Dennis Thomas, are learning the strict reality of life for sex offenders on parole in South Dakota.

All paroled sex offenders are given a regular polygraph tests in South Dakota. Dishonesty, dangerous behavior, failure to comply with parole terms or inconclusive test results can land an offender back in prison with the stroke of a parole officer's pen.

Teenager’s Jailing Brings a Call to Fix Sex Offender Registries

Note how the sentencing judge totally misconstrues the relationship; there isn't an ounce of proof the fellow was TROLLING for sex! To accept the judges reasoning would require convicting anyone who meets an under 18 yr old on any dating or other Internet site; so much for teenage dating sites.

7-6-15 Michigan:

ELKHART, Ind. — Until one day in December, Zachery Anderson was a typical 19-year-old in a small Midwestern city.

He studied computer science at the local community college. He lived with his parents and two younger brothers in a sun-filled home on the St. Joseph River, where framed family photos hang from the walls and a pontoon boat is docked outside.

And he dated in the way that so many American teenagers do today: digitally and semi-anonymously, through apps where prospects emerge with the swipe of a finger and meetings are arranged after the exchanges of photos and texts.

In December, Mr. Anderson met a girl through Hot or Not, a dating app, and after some online flirting, he drove to pick her up at her house in Michigan, just miles over the state line. They had sex in a playground in Niles City, the police report said.

'You can't be bitter,' says man who spent 17 years wrongfully imprisoned for child rape

7-1-15 Michigan:

GRAND RAPIDS, MI – After spending 24 of his 40 years as a convicted criminal, Quentin Carter is now officially an innocent man.

But for a man who spent 17 years in a prison, framed by a convicted murderer for the rape of a child, Carter says he is not filled with rage or even a desire for revenge.

Perhaps remarkably, he expects nothing to really change in his life because through it all, he remained true to himself.

"I knew I was going to get out some day," said Carter on Tuesday, days after a judge officially declared him exonerated for the 1992 conviction for raping a 10-year-old girl. "I knew I wasn't going to do life."

'Old-fashioned scarlet letter': Elkhart 19-year-old fights sex offender status after encounter with Michigan teen

This is a case of "Victim Entrapment" likened to police entrapment. Seems a lawsuit -or several by anyone else so entrapped- suing the website that permitted her to lie and open account, and the girl who lied (or her parents), would eventually curtail this esp. if enough families are held accountable for the actions of their children.

6-7-15 Michigan:

ELKHART — As Zach Anderson sits in the Berrien County Jail in St. Joseph, Mich., his parents worry.

And plead.

And fight.

The young man from Elkhart, 19, pleaded guilty in Berrien County, Mich., Trial Court in March to a misdemeanor count of criminal sexual conduct for having sex — consensual sex — on Dec. 19, 2014, with a Niles, Mich., teen. She said she was 17, and met him in person after a whirlwind courtship in cyberspace that started with a meeting via the social app Hot or Not.

It turns out she was only 14, though, two years under the age of consent in Michigan. And now, Anderson finds himself sitting out a 90-day jail sentence, with another five years probation and, of particular concern to his parents, 25 years on Michigan’s sex offender registry. Worse yet, Les and Amanda Anderson, who run a small Elkhart media and printing company, fear their son could face a lifetime on Indiana’s sex offender registry on returning to the Elkhart area after his jail sentence is up.

“Here’s the thing: This mistake should not haunt him the rest of his life,” Les Anderson says from the family home in east Elkhart. That’s where his son — a 2014 Concord High School grad and Ivy Tech Community College student until his jailing — lived before Judge Dennis Wiley handed down the sentence on April 27.

For Juvenile Sex Offenders, State Registries Create Lifetime Of Problems

5-28-15 Texas:

Forrest Hampton is about to become a family man and he couldn't be happier. He's 25 and he lives in a suburb of Dallas with his fiancée, who's due to have their baby practically any minute. They've already picked out a name: Raven.

In most ways they are a normal family. Except for one thing. Until last year, Hampton was a registered sex offender.

"I honestly don't believe I was supposed to be registered in the first place," he says, "but I wasn't in the position to fight my case."

That's because Hampton was found guilty at age 13 of having sexual contact with a 9-year-old girl. He says he was a troubled kid, but not a pedophile.

Texas is one of about 40 states that will put children on sex offender registries; half make those registries public. Hampton went through an adolescent sex offender therapy program, and, by the time he was 18, was ready to start fresh. But he says being registered made that impossible.

Women seek to dissolve sex offender registry

5-3-15 Wisconsin:

One local woman is caught in the middle of a battle over the public's access to sex offender registries and the right to keep her family together.

"Families are the collateral damage of the sex offender registry,” said Rayida Grooms, a former St. Joseph resident who married a registered sex offender in 2013. “The sex offender registry doesn't really protect anybody, because it just gives a false security.”

All 50 states have a registration and tracking system in place to monitor sex offenders, their location, identifying features and vehicles. For Mrs. Grooms, the public’s access to the database has affected the guardianship of her three children.

“Because of his status alone”

After a divorce in 2007, Mrs. Grooms said she fell in love with her neighbor — a registered sex offender who was convicted of sexual assault of a minor in Maine in 2003. Even after learning about his past, the couple got married and began a life with her children.

A nasty custody battle, however, prompted her to lose her three children.

One Survivor's Crusade Reveals a Plague of Errors in Nation's Sex Offender Registries

4-21-15 National:

Estimates of the number of entries with crucial mistakes run into the tens of thousands. One man—and pretty much only one man—is trying to fix them.

Tim Fisher steps slowly up the driveway, glancing back with mournful eyes a few times toward his sister-in-law across the street, silently pleading for her encouragement. With neat, shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache, dressed in a plaid button-down shirt and shapeless jeans, Fisher is 49, but in his mind he’s the cherub-cheeked boy with the sun-bleached bangs who walked this asphalt hundreds of times, every Saturday for seven years. Today he trembles with the same trepidation that his boyhood self felt.

By the time he reaches the doorstep, he feels a strange, unsettling vulnerability in being shadowed and hidden from street view by a red-tile overhang. This is his decision, his right, he reminds himself. He just drove five hours from his Las Vegas home to this quiet block in Anaheim, California, fruitlessly trying to release his gathering anxiety with cigarette after cigarette as his sister-in-law soothed him with assurances that she was there for him, come what may.

Interesting that this article points out tens of thousands of errors in registries nationally. These errors caused by the wording and manner in which the Adam Walsh Act was implemented. The Act that was supposed to do the exact opposite; make all states the same, but ultimately caused a mess so bad that it will be impossible to fix. So much for the work of Congress!

... ... ...

Sex Offender Brunch!

3-30-15 National:

Josh Gravens went to prison when he was 12 for touching his sister's vagina. Now he's fighting to change the laws that destroyed his life.

When Josh Gravens was 12, he was locked up for three and a half years for touching his sister's vagina. Upon his release, Gravens was added to the Texas Sex Offender Registry, a publicly searchable database that identifies him as the perpetrator of a sex crime and tracks where he lives. He was ostracized in high school, nearly chased out of college, and as an adult, has found it difficult to find work or lead a normal life.

When he was 19, Galen Baughman was sentenced to six and a half years for having a consensual relationship with a 14-year-old. When his release date came up, the state of Virginia refused to let him go on the grounds that he was a danger to society. So he served an additional three years; under Virginia's civil commitment laws, he might have spent the rest of his life locked up.

Gravens and Baughman were the featured guests at a brunch held on March 22, 2015 at the home of Reason.com Contributor Lenore Skenazy that was aimed at bringing attention to how our criminal justice system tramples on the rights of people charged with sex crimes.

Skenazy decided to host the brunch "not because I'm pro sex offender," she says, "but because there are so many people with this label who pose no threat to children whatsoever, and I wanted the public to start realizing that."

Listen to an mp3 of the entire one-hour-and-25-minute event:

Read Skenazy's article about the event in the New York Daily News.

Read an interview on the topic with Skenazy in Salon.

Learn more about Josh Gravens, who could go back to prison for allegedly failing to register his most recent address with state authorities. ..Source.. by Jim Epstein

Man seeks new trial for vigilante justice in Sterling Heights

And the state calls him a sex offender...????

3-20-2013 Michigan:

A former Sterling Heights man who illegally retaliated against teenagers who had broken into his home is seeking a new trial and new sentencing.

Vincent Bosca, 46, dressed in state prison clothes, appeared March 18 in Macomb County Circuit Court in Mount Clemens for a hearing on multiple motions in his case.

Visiting Judge Robert Chrzanowski on March 18 accepted written arguments by Bosca's attorney and assistant Macomb prosecutor Chad Davis, and indicated he will issue a written opinion.

Chrzanowski also approved a deal between Bosca and Macomb prosecutors in which Bosca's version of the events will be included in his presentence investigation report the state Parole Board will consider when he is eligible for release, Bosca's attorney Geoffrey Walker said. The report already included police reports to help describe the incident, but those include victims' lies to police.

Bosca is serving a minimum of six years and nine months following convictions for holding four male teens in his basement, and beating and torturing them in June 2011. The victims had broken into his home and stolen money and marijuana, or knew who had done so four days earlier, and were induced to return.

Two Teens Have Sex. Neither Could Legally Consent, But Only the Boy Gets a Felony Charge.

3-10-2015 Kentucky:

Underage teens having sex is awkward, but it shouldn't be criminal.

If two people are equally unable to give consent, but have sex anyway, should either be charged with a crime? It's a question that many college administrators wrestle with when drugs and alcohol are factors in sexual assault disputes. The verdict often seems to be that male students are uniquely responsible for ascertaining that their sexual partners are in a state of mind to consent, even when the female is the initiator and both are intoxicated.

This double-standard for men seems to apply to underage teenagers as well. Take, for example, this recent story in The Courier-Journal: the Kentucky Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case of "B.H.," who was 15-years-old when he was charged with sexual misconduct and possessing pornographic material featuring a minor (the latter is a felony charge). B.H. was in trouble for having sex with his 13-year-old girlfriend and exchanging nude pictures with her. The acts were voluntary, though neither teen could legally consent to sexual activities since they were both underage at the time.