(Posted by eAdvocate) 4-5-2009 National:
Fear came so easily when I first heard about you, a child convicted of sexual assault, a child who would soon join my daughter’s homeroom class. I felt fear, based on the approximately seven sentences of information I knew about you from a closed meeting and a website. I wanted to warn my daughter that you might be a possible danger. I wanted to warn my friend that you had moved in with a family just three doors down from her house.
But I had a position that demanded, by its very name, confidentiality and balance and care. I was a member of the school board, with the title of Trustee. And if I couldn’t be trusted to stay calm and rational now, when the stakes were so high, how could I be trusted with anything?
I didn’t feel like I could even tell anyone anonymously. I did not want to expose you to hatred or possible danger based on fear and seven sentences.
So I kept my silence, and five days after that first meeting, my silence didn’t matter anymore. Parents began calling me as rumors spread and they learned of you through the sex offender website.
(Posted by eAdvocate)
Parents wanted more information, and I referred all questions to the administrator, exactly as I was supposed to do. People seemed mostly understanding about my reticence, with the exception of the friend who lived just a short walk away from your new home.
“I just want you to answer one question,” she said. “When did you know?”
“I found out five days ago,” I said. “I was told I couldn’t legally discuss it with anyone. I’m truly sorry.”
She hung up. I never have found out whether she was angry about the five-day silence, or perhaps suspected I had known for even longer. She has been friendly since then, but never again a friend.
Otherwise, people in our community shocked me with their calm, careful response to your arrival. I expected a large group of parents at the next board meeting, and crazy, enraged public comments; believe me, previous meetings had set the precedent. But parents instead scheduled quiet, private appointments with the administrators to ask what we were doing to keep their children safe. At least two parents threatened to withdraw their child because of you, but in the end, no one did.
* * *
I saw you on your first day of school. I came to the office to deliver my daughter’s forgotten lunch, and you were there with your backpack, waiting for your schedule. I recognized you from your photograph, a picture that now dissolved into a tall, awkward, long-legged boy wearing absurdly-large, black Converse tennis shoes. Normally, parents or relatives at our school wait with their children until they get their schedule straightened out. Normally, they embarrass them with hugs or goodbyes. You were on your own, and fidgety; you rocked on your feet and rubbed and squeezed the padded straps of your backpack.
The secretary handed you your schedule, then her phone rang, three calls at once. She put her hand over the receiver and whispered, “Would you mind walking Andrew to his class?”
So we walked down the hall together, and I talked too much. “You’re going to be in my daughter’s homeroom,” I told you, a stupid comment; how could I know what homeroom you were in without looking at your schedule? “This is it,” I said when we arrived at the door. “Have a good first day, Andrew.”
You flushed. Your skin is very pale, and your cheeks and neck turned red as you looked down at the floor and mumbled a single word: “Andy.”
I never did have to warn my daughter about you. You did that work for me in your second week of school. My daughter plopped into the car one afternoon and announced, “We’ve got this new kid? This Andy kid? He’s kind of perverted. I dropped a book, and I bent to pick it up, and he said, ‘You know, I could totally see all the way down your shirt right now. I could see everything if I wanted to.’”
So far, you were not doing a very good job accommodating my need to feel safe about you attending our school.
Your first days were not smooth: you spent at least a month on the margins. Other students spoke to you, and you had somewhere to sit at lunch. But I kept hearing worrisome details from parents, teachers, and my daughter. “Andy says he used to be in jail because he raped some kid,” she told me one day, but you had not said this directly to her. Supposedly you said it to Lyssa, who told it to Jennifer, who passed it to my daughter. Maybe you had said such a thing. Or maybe it was a third-hand rumor based on a comment a kid heard from a parent.
You definitely opened new topics of conversation in our school and community. A group of parents arranged for a counselor from a nearby Children’s Advocacy Center to talk about sexual abuse. The topic turned – carefully, theoretically – to you. “Children who engage in sexual activity at a young age have usually been abused themselves,” the counselor said. “A certain amount of experimenting between boys of similar ages is fairly common. There is a wide spectrum of ‘normal.’”
“What if the kid was convicted of sexual assault?” one mother said. “Surely that’s not normal.”
“Consider that the child may not have had a good lawyer,” the counselor replied. “The DA’s office in my city doesn’t usually pursue these cases as a criminal offense. They usually come to us to get help for the child and the victim and the family. Sexual abuse is often a problem passed from generation to generation. The entire family needs help for that cycle to be broken.”
* * *
Months passed. Our weather turned to its familiar, bipolar spring pattern: sweaters one day, shorts the next. I asked my daughter about you sometimes, inquiring whether you were still making rude comments. “I guess,” she said. “Not any more than some of the other guys, really. Especially Kevin. He’s such a jerk. So immature.” I knew and liked Kevin and his family. If Kevin’s outdoing you in rudeness, I thought, you are definitely making some progress.
You joined the track team. You were the tallest from our school; not the fastest, but you could clear hurdles like a gazelle. At our last home track meet of the year, I stood near the fence with another track mom, watching you run in the finals of the 300 meter hurdles. You started in last place, and then you began to surge ahead, running, leaping, just behind the top runners. My friend and I began jumping and yelling for our school and for you. “Andy! Go! You’ve got this!”
You came in second place. I remember this, and how you looked so focused as you ran. Not blank, like your website picture. Focused. You ran your hardest all the way through the finish line, ending strong, just like the coaches taught you to do. I watched your teammates give you high fives. I watched you sit on the field with the other boys, waiting until the scores were announced, saw your face turn a bit red when the coach walked over and handed you your silver medal.
I know about one more event that happened during your time with us. You attended a worship service for teenagers at one of our neighborhood churches. I am not a fan of this church. They are Bible literalists, they enthusiastically proselytize, and one of their deacons had once sent me an e-mail explaining my duty as a Christian to vote for George Bush over Al Gore. So I was not, of course, there for this service, and neither was my daughter.
But my daughter’s carpool friend told me about the service: how at the end, you had walked forward during the altar call. “Pastor James asked him if he wanted to say anything, and Andy shook his head,” the girl said. “He just stood there, and then he started crying all of a sudden, and James hugged him, and a bunch of us came forward and hugged him too, and everybody was crying.”
I have never known what to think of this story, and thought this young girl might perhaps be exaggerating. But if you were crying, were your tears from shame, or the pain of a desperately hard two years? Were you manipulating people somehow? Did you suddenly accept God into your life? Or were you crying because you had friends who suddenly seemed to have accepted you? What did I know about you? Snapshots and conversations. You came to us with a record. You were terribly nervous your first day. You never seemed to have stopped making provocative comments to your classmates. You were often in trouble with teachers because of your rude remarks, and because you never stayed still, never. You ran track. You won second place in a race. You once cried during a church altar call. Seven pieces of information. Not enough to know you. But enough to strip away a label. Enough to change you from predator to person.
And then, one day in May, my daughter came home and told me you would soon be going back to juvenile jail. “Andy has to wear this ankle thingy now,” she said. She did not know much more. I learned during one final, closed meeting that your relatives had taken you across the state line to visit a family member, violating your probation.
“How can that be fair?” I asked. “He didn’t go across state lines on his own; his relatives took him there. How can they send him back to jail for that?”
No answers; only speculation. I had fought against you coming to our school. I now surprised myself by being sorry to see you leave.
* * *
POSTSCRIPT I
In June, the administration called a special closed meeting of the board to tell us that a twelve-year-old had been sexually assaulted at our school during the last track meet of the year. The victim was cornered under the bleachers, pushed, slapped, and sodomized through his clothes with a practice relay baton while two boys stood and watched.
The story made the newspaper: “Twelve Year Old Brutally Attacked at Junior High Track Meet.” My phone began to ring. This time, parents conveyed all the rage and fear and hysteria I expected when you first arrived. Some parents demanded names: Who did this? Who watched? Some made a connection to you, and demanded to know, Was it that sex offender kid, what was his name, Andrew?
Legally, once again, I could say nothing. The case was in the hands of police investigators, who told us very firmly that anything we said could hurt an eventual case against Kevin. Kevin, the child who my daughter said was ruder than you, and “such a jerk… so immature.” I had not listened carefully enough to her comments because I knew Kevin, and his mother, a kind and quiet woman who had helped me organize the PTA bake sale that fall.
I could not reveal Kevin’s name. But I had no ethical hesitation at all in revealing who the abuser was not. “It wasn’t Andrew,” I said firmly. “He was running hurdles. I watched him race. He won second place. I watched him on the field when he got his medal. I watched him the whole time.”
The danger had been the boy we knew, the boy we weren’t watching.
* * *
POSTSCRIPT II
I thought of you this week because you contacted my daughter and her friend through MySpace. “His page is kind of weird,” she told me. “Lots of Emo stuff. He’s wearing all black clothes. He’s holding up his middle finger in one picture, and he has on black nail polish. He told us, ‘I hate my new school and I hate these F-in people.’ He said he wished he could come back to our school.”
Then she asked, “Do you even know who I’m talking about? The kid who went to jail? You remember Andy, right Mom?”
I came home and wrote down what I could recollect to see if I could come to any peace about you. I was not trying to suggest sex offender policy; I don’t know enough for that. In fact, the theme of my life these past three years seems to be learning how little I do know, or can know, about anything or anyone.
I wonder about you, and what will become of you when you turn eighteen, and your record is wiped clean, and you remake your life as a free adult. I wonder about the child you abused three years ago, and think how everyone seems to be a victim here.
I was halfway through this story before I even realized I was writing it as a letter. I have thought of you often, and hope your time with us brought some small hope and acceptance into your life, some meager point of grace that might help you focus, run toward something good, finish strong.
I do remember you. ..News Source.. by Salon
BRANDED FOR LIFE
By Anne Stanton - March 2009
Sunday, April 5, 2009
From Predator to Person, Then Back to Jail Again
BRANDED FOR LIFE
By: Anne Stanton
April 2009
This is the last in a series of articles on sex offenders. This week, the Express focuses on the sex offender registry, which publicly lists convicted sex offenders on the Internet.
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Jim is not proud of the fact that five years ago he inappropriately touched his cousin on the outside of her underwear. He had just turned 10 and his cousin was 11. He then threatened to kill her if she told anyone.
His cousin was deeply upset by the experience and still refuses to talk to him. He doesn’t blame her.
Yet Jim, 15, -- whose name has been changed for this article -- has decided to talk publicly about the crime because he was in the fourth grade when it happened. When he turns 18, his name will appear on the public sex offender registry for the rest of his life. The sex offender registry does not reflect when a sex crime was committed. “So anyone looking at this when I’m an adult will think I was a pervert adult having sex with an 11-year-old,” he said.
His case is extreme, but here is the reality for all juveniles: if a youth is convicted or pleads to criminal sexual assault in the first or second degree, he or she will end up on the public sex offender registry list for 25 years, or even for life — long after the youth has completed probation or served his or her sentence.
If convicted of a lesser sex offense, the juvenile will be on a sex offender registry that is not public, but available to police and other authorities.
The judge has no choice. The sex offender registry is mandatory for all ages.
RAMIFICATIONS
The consequences for Jim is grave. A convicted sex offender is not allowed to adopt children. He cannot be involved in his children’s school or extracurricular activities.
A juvenile convicted of a sex crime is not allowed to participate on a school sports team. He must notify college officials if he’s on a sex registry, jeopardizing his chance of getting into the college. Sex offenders are often denied entrance into the military. A registered sex offender cannot become a police officer, teacher, coach, or work with children. Some employers would naturally feel uncomfortable hiring a registered sex offender. Neighbors definitely don’t feel good about having a sex offender living on their street.
If a sex offender fails to register, he can be imprisoned for a felony.
Yet a sex offender might have been guilty of a “Romeo and Juliet” affair in which both partners consensually had sex, but were under the legal age of consent, which is 16. In one survey, nearly 40 percent of Michigan tenth graders said they had sexual intercourse for the first time before age 16. That statistic was included in a 2007 Michigan Youth Risk Behavior Survey in which students voluntarily and anonymously answered survey questions.
So given that consensual – albeit illegal, sexual activity – is fairly common, prosecution is actually rare. It depends on two things: the zeal of the county prosecutor and whether a parent wants to pursue prosecution.
“The problem is we’re lumping all the kids with the worst of the worst sex offenders,” said Traverse City attorney Jim Aprea, who frequently defends juveniles. “The public doesn’t know what they’re looking at when they call up the state’s sex offender website. It describes the conviction, but certainly not the circumstances or the age of the offender when it was committed.
“This kid (Jim) will show up on the registry for his entire lifetime for something he did when he was 10 years old. That’s just absurd. I haven’t seen a case like this involving a kid that young. I just haven’t seen it, and the whole thing troubles me. It might be a good test case—a challenge all the way to the Supreme Court on the sex offender registration. To me, the facts are outrageous and this poor kid is a prime example of the inequities in the statute.”
JIM’S STORY
Jim transfered to a new school where he now gets good grades, studies cello, performs in plays, and has a lot of friends. He has a close relationship with his mom and holds a steady job at a restaurant. But life wasn’t always this good. Although he was intelligent, learning how to read at the age of four, he was also lonely, angry and often violent.
Jim got a rough start in life. His mother Sandy (not her real name) said she was a serious alcoholic who fought bitterly and often with her son’s father. One afternoon, she drove her station wagon into him, squishing his leg between her car and an old Malibu. Sandy went to jail and rehab over a period of seven months. Meanwhile, Jim, who was two-and-a-half years old, stayed with his dad. When Sandy finally collected him, he stood filthy in the driveway with a few clothes shoved into a garbage bag. Jim never saw his dad again.
Jim said his memory of that time is fuzzy, but he remembers being scared all the time. “He had a bunch of drinking buddies, and they’d get really drunk on the weekends and thought it would be a good idea to mess with all four of us (Jim and his three stepsisters) in another room.”
Sandy became alarmed by his discussion of sex acts, so she took him to Child Protective Services. The CPS worker was afraid an exam would traumatize the three-year-old. He received counseling at the Northwest Child Guidance Center until the age of six, but then funding for therapy was cut off without explanation. When he was in kindergarten, he played ‘doctor’ with the other kids. Later in grade school, nobody wanted him in the Boy Scout troop. He touched a boy on an overnight stay. Child Protective Services workers came into the school to talk to him, but Sandy said she didn’t learn the specific complaints until much later.
The mother of the abused cousin, said that her sister, Sandy, never drank again after rehab in 1995: “If she would have drank, she would have been as big a mess as before.” But Sandy’s past has haunted her when it comes to how authorities treat her.
Indeed Sandy is a fireplug, and doesn’t mince words. Her conversation is often hard to track because she goes off on tangents. Although she’s never broken the law since her assault with a car, Sandy fears that people haven’t treated her son very well because of her own past.
THE PLEA
Jim was 10 1/2 when he touched his 11-year-old cousin. The girl didn’t tell her mother until seven months later, when it was reported immediately to the police chief who had been mentoring Jim. Jim was questioned by police without an attorney (not uncommon in these cases). He eventually admitted what he’d done. The case went to Antrim County Assistant Prosecutor Mark Fett, who charged Jim with a criminal sexual conduct, second degree (CSC 2). It’s the second highest sex offense and was due to the victim’s age and the threat of violence.
Sandy met briefly with Fett, but most of her conversations were with the court administrator William Hefferan. She claims that he never told her that a guilty plea would mean that Jim would go on the public sex offender registry. Hefferan said he can’t remember whether he told her that or not.
“I can’t assure that every time someone pleads to a CSC, I tell them this is a 25-year registerable offense,” Hefferan said.
The sex registry was not cited in the plea agreement but was included in the ajudication (Jim’s sentence). Sandy missed it.
Sandy quickly agreed to the plea to CSC two without a lawyer. She remembers being told that a plea would expedite the process, which was important to her. She couldn’t have her younger child reinstated in her home until her son was removed. Secondly, she believed a plea was the only way to get her son state-funded counseling and residential treatment, which she could not afford. (She still owes $12,038 to the county).
VICTIMIZED
But the plea bargain was no bargain, Aprea said.
“Most prosecutors want to achieve relative justice without a trial. But there’s nothing worse than a charge of CSC one or two. In this case, the boy pled exactly to what he was charged with. Yes, he made a threat, but a threat coming from a 10-year-old is a lot different than a threat coming from a 15-year-old or an adult. That kid was victimized by the system.”
Immediately after Sandy signed the adjudication papers in April of 2004, Jim, 11, was taken to a lockdown wing at the Muskegon River Youth Home where he was given an orange uniform to wear.
A juvenile justice worker visited him and told him that if he didn’t hurry up and finish treatment he would be sent to Wackenhut (a youth prison), where, he said, a group of boys dragged another boy into a room and sodomized him until his rectum fell out and he bled to death.
Jim was shaken, hearing about sodomy for the first time. He stayed in Muskegon until August, when a space opened up at Havenwyck Psychiatric Hospital in Auburn Hills for which the minimum age was 11.
He began a sexual aversion therapy, which involved sniffing three ammonia pills after listening to a story of a deviant sex act.
NO PLACE FOR A CHILD
Jim said he has mixed feelings about his treatment. He felt that without intervention he might have become a serial molester. Now a very articulate and pleasant young man, he feels like a success case. But he believes that Havenwyck is no place for a child. He attended group therapy sessions with men who were as old as 19. “If you weren’t bad, you’d know how to be bad now.”
“I worked hard to reach the ‘top level’ in my treatment. I really wanted out of there,” he said.
“They smash you down to nothing and then you rebuild yourself. It gets rid of a lot of negative behavior, but it gets rid of everything. I was an empty shell.
“After I got out, I had no social skills,” Jim said. “For two years, I wasn’t allowed to talk to girls. When I got out, my age group was largely different than me. I cried a lot.”
“… When I got back to high school, I was treated like a sex offender even though I’d just gone through one-and-a-half years of treatment. I wasn’t allowed to participate in gym or use the bathroom. They wanted me to use the teacher’s bathroom, and I didn’t want to be embarrassed, so I just held it all day.”
The same kids who picked on him before picked on him again, so he transferred to his current school. The group of kids at the new school is small; they know his history and respect him; so Jim, who recently broke up with his girlfriend, said he believes this article won’t affect their opinion of him.
BAD NEWS
Jim was home for nine days in January of 2006, when the juvenile justice worker called to inform Sandy that she had only until the next day to get her son registered as a sex offender.
“This was the first I’d heard of such a thing. When I questioned her, she said that she could tell the judge, ‘Oops, my bad!’ but it probably wouldn’t do Jim any good.”
Sandy thought she had to only register her son once. That is until May of 2007, when the Michigan State Police showed up at the house and said he’d have to register quarterly. They took his prints on the trunk of a police cruiser while kids, across the street, were in a football practice.
“We live across the street from the school and they were broadcasting Jim’s name and our address on the scanner. ‘We’re contacting Jim for his failure to register as a sex offender.’ Everyone with a scanner knows now,” Sandy said.
Since then, Sandy has confronted the reality of the sex offender registry. The law regarding juveniles is so vague, it was hard for the Express to get clear-cut answers to such questions from professionals: How long will Jim remain on the sex offender registry after becoming an adult (conflicting answers of 25 years and lifetime)? Even if Jim had the crime expunged, does he still have to register on the sex offender registry (yes, but it’s a start)? How often does he have to register as a juvenile (conflicting answers)?
When Sandy called assistant prosecutor Mark Fett with questions, she says he screamed at her -- “I’m telling you now. Register your kid!” -- and slammed down the phone. Fett did not return a call for comment.
Is There a Better Way?
Michigan has the third largest sex offender registry in the nation—at least it did in 2004 when there were 33,000 people. Today there are 43,964.
“The registry’s growth might falsely indicate to people outside of the state that Michigan is teeming with child molesters and rapists …. ,” reads a 2004 legislative analysis of a bill written by Julie Koval.
Some other states take a more nuanced approach to sex offender registration, and do not require juveniles under a certain age to register, and others do not require that juveniles register at all.
“When working with juvenile sex offenders, the focus should be on rehabilitation to help them stop their abusive behaviors. Adolescence is often a difficult time for many young people; publicly labeling them as dangerous criminals can have devastating effects as they try to develop their identities,” she wrote.
Professionals specializing in the field—counselors Barb Cross and John Ulrich to Todd Heller, a “computer cop” who snags sex offenders, and Noelle Moeggenberg who prosecutes them, all agree: A judge needs discretion on whether to put a juvenile on a public sex offender registry.
“I never take any sexual offense lightly, however, 10-year-old children can and do engage in youthful experimentation, exploring their own bodies and the bodies of their playmates. It’s not acceptable, but it’s far, far different than predatory behavior,” said Kenneth Tacoma, chief probate and family division judge of the 28th circuit court in Wexford County.
A DIFFERENCE
Therapist Barb Cross said there’s a lot of difference between a one-time offender versus a teenage boy who molests multiple times. “These two should not be treated the same.”
The way the system is set up, the prosecutor—not the judge—determines a child’s fate, Tacoma said.
Kalkaska County Prosecutor Brian Donnelly said there might be room for discretion within narrow confines, but he believes the public sex offender registry makes sense.
“I’m a believer that once this kid has demonstrated he’s capable of this, we place him in a different class as the rest of us. Harsh as it may be, I like the system. We as a society have already discovered that it’s very dangerous not to know when a sex offender is moving about us. There’s not much worse than talking to parents of a kid who was molested by a kid. I’ve been in that position. The look of shock and horror and disbelief on the faces of parents when they find this out. ‘What? This kid who moved in next door, this kid who is a babysitter, and now my little junior must have years of therapy.’
“The thing I’ve come to realize about sex offenders, particularly those who molest children is they are, by nature, liars. They carry on for years unknown. They masquerade as normal people and pull it off. They’re good at fooling everybody. That’s a common characteristic. And that’s how they gain opportunity with kids.”
Professionals point out that if you sexually abuse someone as a child, chances are very high that you yourself were abused. But what society doesn’t know is, if you were sexually abused as a child, what is the chance that you will go onto abuse someone? One study followed convicted juveniles for five years, and discovered a very low percentage of the kids were convicted of another crime. But critics say that five years wasn’t long enough.
John Ulrich, a counselor who treats sex offenders, said that a new problem has cropped up with the sex offender registry; some parents have become reluctant to get counseling for their kids. That’s because a therapist is mandated to report any sexually illegal behavior to police; a conviction could mean a permanent place on a public or private sex offender registry.
“In the past, I’ve persuaded people to take CSC convictions to get their child into residential treatment. It was a standard in the field to do it.”
Would you do it now?
“I’m grieved that it’s a problem that we have to make our children registered sex offenders in order to get help. I’m much more aware of the lifelong impact on the child. But on the other hand, their risk of being convicted of another sex offense more than doubles if they don’t get treatment.”
HOPE FOR JIM?
Does Jim, the ten-year-old convicted of a CSC two have any way of getting off the public sex offender registry?
His mom, Sandy, has told her story to anyone who would listen: the ACLU, the state attorney general, the governor, attorneys, and media. She gets legal advice from an online free service called e-advocate. Sandy furiously objected to her son’s confinement at Havenwyck Psychiatric Hospital, believing kids shouldn’t mingle with older youth and adults. She believes her son needed therapy, but was, in fact, “tortured” with ammonia pills that burn nostrils and cause nosebleeds. She notes that former Florida Governor Jeb Bush deemed the use of ammonia capsules to be torture and signed a bill banning its use by juveniles. She alleged that North Country Community Mental Health, which oversaw his treatment, failed to ensure that the assigned treatment suited her son’s condition. Her allegation was substantiated, and the agency amended its procedures in July of 2008.
But what about the sex offender registry?
A juvenile can petition the court to shorten the registry period, but the defendant must have been between the ages of 13 and 17 when it happened, and there cannot be more than a three year age spread than the victim and offender, Traverse City attorney Jim Aprea said.
Since Jim was 10, he is not eligible.
Aprea recommended that Sandy go to a state appellate defender, who might take on the case. Jim could petition the court to vacate the conviction based on the fact he didn’t know the full ramifications of his admission to guilt, he said.
“There are a lot of steps, it would take a lot of work. The odds of achieving the desired results are fairly low. But there’s a lot at stake,” Aprea said.
The mother of the girl who was touched, said that what Jim did was wrong and unacceptable; her daughter still wants an apology. But she also believes that Jim should not be on the public sex offender registry for life.
“He was 10 years old and he needed help. He wasn’t given help; he was punished. I don’t think juveniles should be placed in the same sex offender registry as adults. The whole thing needs to be revamped,” said the mom.
SOURCE: http://www.northernexpress.com/editorial/features.asp?id=3730
