07/13/2011
By Abigail Pesta
It was a classic teenage love story. He was a football star, and she was a cheerleader. They met, they fell in love, they started having sex. And then the cops got involved. Fifteen years later, they're still paying the price.
[ex-offender name withheld] cannot coach his children's soccer teams. He can't get a job at a major corporation. He can't leave the state without registering with local law enforcement. A married father of four girls, he is a convicted sex offender. Neighbors can find his name and address on a public registry online.
His crime? Sleeping with his high school sweetheart 15 years ago. At the time, [ex-offender name withheld] was 19 years old, a recent high school graduate in the town of Caldwell, Texas. That's when he first had sex with [girlfriend], his future wife. The two had been dating for nearly a year; the sex was consensual. However, the legal age of consent in Texas is 17, and [girlfriend] was just shy of 16. [girlfriend]'s mother, worried that her daughter's relationship with [ex-offender name withheld] was getting too serious, reported [ex-offender name withheld] to the police. She expected the cops to issue a warning, but instead she set in motion a legal nightmare from which [ex-offender name withheld] would never recover. He became a registered sex offender — for life.
Today, [girlfriend], 30, and [ex-offender name withheld], 34, both say they unequivocally support laws that put sexual predators behind bars and protect children from attacks. "The registry isn't a bad thing," says [girlfriend]. "It's a good thing. It's just that [ex-offender name withheld] shouldn't be on it."
[girlfriend] and [ex-offender name withheld]'s predicament is not an isolated incident. Across the country, young lovers are increasingly finding themselves caught in the nation's complicated web of sex-offender laws. Teenagers wind up on the public sex-offender registry, alongside violent predators, pedophiles, and child pornographers, for having consensual sex with an underage partner (or, sometimes, for streaking or sexting — sending racy self-portraits, which can be considered child pornography). The stigma of the sex-offender label is difficult to shed: "Once you're on the registry, good luck trying to explain it," says Sarah Tofte, who has studied sex-offender laws for the nonprofit group Human Rights Watch. "It's like you're in prison proclaiming your innocence. People think, Right, that's a likely story. Especially potential employers."
There are now more than 650,000 registered sex offenders nationwide. There are no reliable statistics on the number of juveniles — but the problem is clearly on the rise. Each of the 50 states now has at least one grassroots group dedicated to getting young people — many high school age, but some under the age of 10 — off the registry. The effort includes judges and other legal experts who say they have seen the problem often enough to persuade them that the system needs adjustment.
Still, the problem is poorly understood. Partly out of embarrassment, some parents don't want to talk about this issue — even as they work to try to remove their own children from the registry. To get some answers as to the extent of the problem, we conducted our own survey, state by state. What we found: Not all states register juveniles, and of the 34 that do, only 23 keep track of the number of juveniles on the registry. In those 23 states, there are nearly 23,000 registered juveniles. No states monitor whether the number of juveniles is on the rise or not, but one state, Oregon, provided an estimate, reporting a 70 percent jump in that state since 2005.
Undoubtedly, some of the juveniles on the list are guilty of violent sexual crimes. The grassroots movement is trying to help a different group of people: high school students who get labeled as sex offenders for teenage sexual behavior that can be technically criminal, but which, activists argue, should fall into a different category. Under the current system, kids' futures are being ruined, says William C. Buhl, a recently retired Michigan circuit judge who became an activist after overseeing 12 convictions of teenagers for consensual sex. Says Buhl, "What we have done, to young men, mostly, is destroy their lives, for somewhat common behavior."
[girlfriend] remembers the night that sparked her embattled future — the night she first met [ex-offender name withheld]. At a mutual friend's house one evening on spring break, she and [ex-offender name withheld] began chatting, and quickly clicked. She was a 15-year-old freshman in high school, a self-described "clumsy" cheerleader. He was an 18-year-old football star, a confident, outgoing high school senior. They soon began calling each other every day. At the time, [girlfriend] lived with her mother, stepfather, and four siblings on the grounds of a church camp that the family ran in Caldwell, a town of around 3,500 people.
"[ex-offender name withheld] was different," [girlfriend] says. "He would pick flowers for me at the bus stop and bring them to school. At lunch, he came and sat with my friends and me, not with the guys." After nearly a year together, she and [ex-offender name withheld] had sex. They had no idea about crime or the consequences. "We were just madly in love," says [girlfriend], while standing on the sidelines of a soccer game in Caldwell on a windy Saturday morning. Watching her 11-year-old daughter, Analissa, bounce around the field, she adds, "Everyone was doing it."
When [girlfriend] admitted to her mother, Melissa Ostman, that she was sleeping with [ex-offender name withheld], tension flared. Ostman didn't think her daughter was ready for a sexual relationship, and the two began arguing frequently. "It's just that [girlfriend] was so young," Ostman says. "I liked [ex-offender name withheld] from day one, but I wanted them to cool off."
One night, after [girlfriend] and her mother had yet another argument, Ostman snapped. "[girlfriend] and [ex-offender name withheld] were supposed to bring her sister home from the fair, but they left her there and went off together," she says. "I said, 'That's it.' I was getting so mad." Fed up after months of feuding, she says, she drove her daughter to the police station that night and reported [ex-offender name withheld] for having sex with a minor. "It was the only thing I could think of to get [girlfriend] to listen to me," she says. "I wanted her to know I was serious." She thought the police would simply scare [ex-offender name withheld], giving him a stern warning. "If I had known the implications," she says, "I wouldn't have done it."
[girlfriend] remembers the police interrogation. "The sheriff said I had to give a statement," she says. "I refused." The officer told [girlfriend] she could be arrested, she says, so she replied: "Arrest me." Then, thinking it would help [ex-offender name withheld], she told the cops the sex was consensual. After that, she was driven to the hospital to be tested for rape.
The next day, [girlfriend]'s mother calmed down. She went back to the police station to rescind her complaint. It was too late. "The police said the state would be taking it from here," she says. "Looking back on it, I just feel horrible. I don't know what the answer is when your kid is 15 or 16 and wants to date. But the answer is not to label the guy a sex offender."
America's sex-offender laws have a noble goal: to protect children from predators. A handful of states have had sex-offender registries since the 1940s, but most states began creating them in the 1990s, after an 11-year-old boy named Jacob Wetterling disappeared while riding his bike in Minnesota. In 1994, Congress created the Jacob Wetterling Act, requiring states to establish registries listing convicted sex offenders. That same year, 7-year-old Megan Kanka was raped and killed by a predator who lured her into his New Jersey home. Two years later, Congress passed Megan's Law, making the registries available to the public.
Other federal acts have followed. The federal rules are broadly defined, and state laws vary widely. In 2006, new federal legislation tried to bring some uniformity to the tangle of state laws. The Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, also known as the Adam Walsh Act (named for a 6-year-old Florida boy who was murdered in 1981), created minimum standards across the states. However, only seven states have implemented the act to date. A main reason cited is cost: Many states, already struggling to maintain expanding registries, say they can't afford any added administrative costs. The government has said that states that aren't compliant with the act will lose a chunk of federal funding, effective as of July this year.
In the meantime, the effectiveness of individual state registries has become subject to debate. Patty Wetterling, a child-safety advocate whose son Jacob sparked the Wetterling Act, now counts herself among those voicing concerns. The registries were designed to be "a very useful law-enforcement tool," she says, "but legislators wanting to appear tough on crime have hijacked that intent, have cast a very broad net, and are causing many people tremendous harm." Parents add that teenagers arrested for consensual sex are diluting the registries — making it hard to spot violent predators.
[ex-offender name withheld] was 19 years old in the fall of 1996 when the police rolled up to his home and arrested him. The eldest of three brothers and two sisters, [ex-offender name withheld] had grown up in Caldwell, where his parents worked for the city and the school system. [ex-offender name withheld] had spent his high school summers working on local ranches, and the physical labor served him well on the football field. Known around town as a star lineman and kicker, he was surprised when the police treated him as a criminal instead of a hero.
