What's "unusual" is removal from the sex offender registry

Kaitlin Durbin has written a touching story about a young man, David, who has been on the Colorado sex offender registry for over a decade for consensual teenage sex with his girlfriend. She tells, briefly, some of the difficulties that public registration posed for him in his attempts to live a normal life, and she shares his relief and joy that he has now successfully been removed.

The title given the piece -- and writers and journalists seldom select their own titles -- is "Colorado Springs man removed from sex offender registry in 'unusual' case." Several times in the article the fact that this case was so rare was referenced. The attorney spoke of the case as having no precedent.

From what I could tell -- and my legal acumen is somewhere down there with what I know about building rocket ships -- the only thing "unusual" is the fact that he was actually removed.

Young men being on the sex offender registry for consensual sexual involvement with a partner under the age of consent is quite common. David was 17 and his girlfriend turned 14 during their relationship.

Young men being on the registry for a decade, over a decade, and in some states for life, for such activity is common. Young men having their futures ruined due to such registration is common.

Often couples such as this remain together in a committed relationship or marry. One such couple in Texas has also had their share of media attention. In spite of marrying and raising a family, he will be on the Texas public sex offender registry for life for "sexual assault of a child." He was a high school senior and football star; she was a sophomore and a cheerleader when they started dating. Many years later, he couldn't coach his girls' soccer games. He couldn't take his family on an out-of-state vacation without the permission of law enforcement.

These two couples are representative of countless thousands. No one "wants" teenagers to have sex, but turning them into criminals because they do and making it difficult for them to go to college, be hired at meaningful employment, and exercise the rights of the productive citizens that they most likely would otherwise be is, of all possible "punishments," the most extreme and least productive imaginable.

No, teenagers having sex is not unusual. The boys ending up on the sex offender registry due to it is not unusual. Being removed from the registry -- now that is unusual.

And that needs to change.

But you can't do that -- I'm not a sex offender

Source 

A horrible thing has been happening in a town in Texas. A family has, for the past month or so, been subject to a barrage of harassment. Strangers have been driving slowly past their home in this Dallas suburb and yelling horrible things at them.

The family has expressed fear for their lives, and of course the police are taking this very seriously. They got to the root of the problem quickly and are taking action to rectify it.

Apparently a month or so ago, the DPS mailed postcards to each home in the community within four blocks in every direction from this family’s home. The post cards gave the address where the family resides along with the information that a registered sex offender lives there.

Except he doesn’t.

It was a mistake. The registrant in question once lived there but then moved away. Apparently his moving back into the area triggered the postcards to be mailed and gave his prior address, thus marking this family, who have no registrants living with them and no connection to the registrant, to be targeted as sex offenders and subjected them to a taste of the harassment, vandalism, and physical assault that hundreds of thousands of registrants, along with their children and family members, are subject to as a matter of course.

The police in the area are trying to determine how to better assure that registered citizens are living where they should be.

A better task would be for them to determine how to prevent vigilantes from using the public registry as a hit list.

If the registrant had been living in the house, is there any reason at all to believe that the same incidents would not have occurred? No, none.

And if they had, and he notified police and asked for protection, is there any reason to believe that the story would have made headlines in the local media, spurred law enforcement to immediate action, and produced 18 hits when entered into an online search engine? No, none.

The message is clear: Incidents like this one, so shocking and urgent when they affect "normal" people, are acceptable in the eyes of law enforcement and the public when carried out upon those on the registry. They are everyday occurrences; they create scarcely a ripple in the fabric of society.

In spite of the ordeal the innocent family has suffered, they can at least be thankful there is no one living in their area of the mind set and inclinations as Jeremy and Christine Moody of South Carolina.

They can also be thankful their ordeal is over. They need no longer fear for their lives. That cannot be said for the several million American citizens whose addresses are listed on public sex offense registries throughout the United States.

Really--the nerve of some people!

~~by Shelly Stow

The headline says it all: "Freed Texas day care owners still want exoneration."

I mean, they spent only 20 plus years in prison for a crime that never happened, but they are free now. Isn't that enough?

They--Fran and Dan Keller--ran a day-care facility in the 1980s. They were charged with "child abuse involving satanic rituals." Sound familiar? And yes, this one came complete with "recovered memories" also. "... therapists testified that they helped three children recover memories of satanic rituals and sexual abuse at an Austin preschool the Kellers operated."

But they weren't convicted solely on the testimony of the therapists, goodness me, no. There was physical evidence too. "During their trial, the only physical evidence came from an emergency room doctor who testified that internal lacerations on one child were evidence of abuse."

And that was enough for a jury of their peers to find them guilty of the charges and sentence them to 48 years in prison, of which they served 21. They maintained their innocence for every day of those 21 years, but hey, doesn't everybody who goes to prison say they are innocent?

In 2013, Dr. Michael Mouw, the emergency room doctor whose testimony was instrumental in the guilty verdict, said, according to official court records, that "...what he thought were lacerations were actually normal physiology." Based on that, the Travis County prosecutors agreed that "...the case's evidence was faulty..." and the Kellers were released on bond a year ago.

And now they have the audacity to ask that their convictions be thrown out.

Well of course the Travis County Prosecutors' Office isn't about to do that. You just can't go around proclaiming people innocent once they have been found guilty in a court of law, especially not on a charge of sexually molesting children, not without "... new evidence that unquestionably establishes innocence — something like an ironclad alibi or DNA proof."

What a shame that the burden of proof hadn't been that high in order to find them guilty.

They have lost 21 years of their lives in prison for something they did not do, something that never happened. They were divorced in prison, so they have lost more than the years. There will be those--probably many--who will continue to believe they were guilty--the "Where there's smoke, there's fire" principle.

I pray I am wrong, but I do not believe they will win this. They have been told they must prove their innocence. How do you prove that you are innocent of doing something that didn't happen? This will be decided by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, a group of judges who "typically takes a skeptical view toward overturning jury verdicts. The court will be guided by the recommendations of Senior District Judge Wilford Flowers, who presided over the Kellers' 1992 trial and their recent appeals — and who has already twice ruled that they had failed to prove their innocence."

I am not a jurist nor an attorney; I have in the past described myself as someone who can't read legalese without my eyes rolling back in my head, but it seems to me, in my simple, ignorant, non-legal mind, that the state of Texas failed in 1992 to meet its burden of proof in finding them guilty.

Shouldn't that be enough for an exoneration?