As a parent, I respect the motivation begind sex offender registries, and I consult them in deciding where to live. But they are overinclusive, and their rigidity can lead to unnecessary hardship not easily reconciled. One Missouri “sex offender” found a way off the registry by getting a judge to throw out his guilty plea.
Sylvester Adaway, now 30, had sex with a 13-year-old girl twleve years ago (when he was 18). She told authorities that she had consented and had not disclosed her age. Adaway agreed to plead guilty to statutory rape in exchange for a suspended imposition of sentence, serving two years of probation in return for having no felony conviction on his record. An untold number of registered sex offenders in Missouri got there in similar fashion, pleading guilty in return for a suspended sentence and no felony record.
Since his conviction, Adaway was charged in Michigan for failing to register as a sex offender, causing him to lose his job as a police officer, his wife to lose her license as an in-home day care provider, and forcing him onto the Arkansas sex offender registry (where he now lives). So Adaway turned to the judge from his 1993 guilty pleas for help.
[Adaway] asked the judge in his 1993 rape case to throw out his guilty plea and dismiss the case.
Judge Stephen R. Sharp did so - and gladly.
Sharp, the presiding judge in Dunklin County, in the Missouri Bootheel, said he had not intended for Adaway’s guilty plea to brand him for life as a rapist.
“My hopes for him are that he can go ahead now without being stigmatized as some sort of threat to his neighbors and people in the neighborhood, which I don’t believe he is or ever was,” Sharp said.
Sex offender registries serve a useful purpose, and their privacy implications can probably be justified under the circumstances. But the law needs to limit what types of offenders must register, and should allow offenders to petition for removal from the registry. Missouri currently does neither, and the legislature or courts should rectify this problem.
