grey-at-law

is that they are inflexible. A decision released this past week by the Michigan Court of Appeals is an illustration of this feature of the Michigan SOR statute. In the published opinion PEOPLE OF MI V ERIC J HESCH (opinion here) the court followed the letter of the Michigan statute and concluded that Mr. Hesch was properly denied his petition to be removed from the requirement that he continue to register as a sex offender.

Mr. Hesch was age eleven at the time that he committed the acts that led to his guilty plea to second degree criminal sexual conduct.

He sought the removal on the grounds that he was 11 years of age and had a low maturity level at the time of the offense. Defendant, age 19 at the time of his petition, presented evidence that various psychologists and psychiatrists had concluded that he is not a sexual predator and is not likely to commit another sex crime. Defendant did not have any subsequent arrests or convictions for criminal sexual conduct or related offenses.

But by the letter of the law, these mitigating factors are irrelevant.

If you look Hesch up on the MIPSOR web site, you will see that his registration requirement expires in 2024. Doing the math, he will be aged 38 when that occurs. But look down the page for his conviction date, and you will see ¨Not Available¨. That is because his was a juvenile adjudication.

The State of Michigan properly keeps facts about juvenile criminal histories hidden from public scrutiny. This is proper because juvenile behavior is recognized as not being as reasoned as adult behavior. The juvenile mind is more impulsive and less reflective than the adult mind. This is not just my opinion, this is public policy of most, if not all states.

But this policy does not attach to the broad category of ¨sex crimes¨. Despite the immature state of Mr. Hesch´s mind at the times of his actions, despite the testimony of psychologists and psychiatrists that he does not pose a current danger of re-offending, he has to be subject to registration and public notification for the full statutory period of twenty five years. Or longer, if the registration period is lengthened, as it has been since the registry was originally created.

Consider the position that this puts Mr. Hesch in. At the future date when he is age 35, he will still be branded a molester of a child under age thirteen. (That amount of detail is not supplied by the MIPSOR web site, but it is a reasonable conclusion for the average person.) The date of his conviction will not be shown, and it will take an informed person to realize that this was a juvenile offense. That being the case, most people will conclude that he is one of the people that the registry was designed to warn the public about. If Mr. Hesch is a model citizen despite the difficulty in obtaining good employment and housing that public sex offender registration can cause, the State of Michigan will continue to warn the public about his location, employment, and whatever else the legislature chooses to add to the current notification requirements.

If you watched John Stossel´s 20/20 reports on Age of Consent as noted in an earlier post, you saw a legislator state that we are a nation of laws. This Court of Appeals decision is in strict accordance of the laws that we have. But laws can, and should be changed when they cause unjust results. In my opinion, this case illustrates one situation where legislative change should occur.

The court should be allowed to consider evidence that Mr. Hesch has outgrown the immaturity that contributed to his juvenile offense. That change in maturity or any other mitigating set of facts should be allowed to balance against any aggravating factors surrounding his offense. The court should have the leeway to make a reasoned decision to let Mr. Hesch get on with his life without the burden of public shaming that is the Michigan Public Sex Offender Registry.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 10:36 am and is filed under Michigan, sex offender registry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.