With 20,000 Names Struck From Michigan’s Sex Offender List, Victim Rights Advocates Wonder What Good It Is

Michigan’s public sex offender registry shed nearly half its names in the past six weeks, but it turns out the most notorious name many assumed had been scrubbed from the list was never actually on it. The purge has victims and prosecutors asking whether Michigan has lost the thread.More than 20,000 people came off the list after a unanimous Michigan Supreme Court ruling on September 9 found that. On October 1, the Eaton County Prosecutor’s Office announced that the former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University doctor, Larry Nassar, was among them, despite his still being incarcerated. Within a day, Michigan State Police admitted that he had never been on the list because he wasn’t required to be. Nasser is serving his sentence in Pennsylvania, not Michigan. The news angered survivors, who questioned the purpose of the list if it omits one of the most prolific abusers in American sports history. But a public health researcher who first heard about it from one of his victims says Nassar’s exclusion is how registries are built to operate.“Someone in prison does not represent a threat to the safety of children or adults in the community,” the director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Elizabeth Letourneau, tells The New York Sun. “If you included everyone currently in prison for crimes of a sexual nature, it would make the registry harder to use as intended.”A Ruling That Cut the List Nearly in HalfThe removals trace back to a single case that began in Kent County and worked its way up to the state’s highest court. The case, People v. Eddie Lee Smith, involved a man who pleaded no contest in 2010 to first- and second-degree criminal sexual conduct for offenses committed in 1995 and 2010. The justices held that the 2021 revisions to the 2011 Sex Offender Registration Act cannot be applied to anyone whose offense predates July 1, 2011. To do so would be considered an ex-post facto, or after-the-fact, punishment barred by both the federal and state constitutions. Smith’s attorney, Drew Walbeck, says his client had already served his sentence and finished parole. He cannot be held to additional requirements not included in his original punishment.“Both the federal and state courts have agreed that Michigan can’t retroactively change the rules and impose a punitive registry law decades later,” the director of strategic litigation at the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, Miriam Aukerman, tells the Sun.About 43,000 people were registered or required to register when the order came down. Within two days, state police had removed more than 20,000 people whose crimes predated the original sex offender registry law of 2011. Those removed no longer have to register, report, or verify their information in Michigan. No conviction is overturned.“This most recent decision concerns people with very old convictions, many of whom have lived successfully in the community for decades. It does not affect the registry for anyone with a conviction for an offense committed in the last 15 years,” Ms Aukerman noted.Why Nassar Was Never on the ListThe confusion over Nassar began with one of the offices that helped convict him. After pleading guilty to three counts of criminal sexual conduct, an Eaton County judge sentenced Nasser to 40 to 125 years in February 2018. That was two weeks after a judge in Ingham County, Rosemarie Aquilina, sentenced the coach to 40 to 175 years in state prison for a guilty plea on seven additional counts. Nassar is also serving a 60-year federal sentence for child pornography, which a federal judge ordered in December 2017 to run consecutively with his state sentences. Federal records place him at FCI Lewisburg in Pennsylvania. In a Facebook post calling the court’s decision “deeply concerning,” the Eaton County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office wrote that it assumed Nasser was removed from the sex offender registry because his conduct predated 2011, even though his conviction dated to 2018. The office is led by Doug Lloyd, the Republican nominee for state attorney general.The next day, a state police spokeswoman, Lori Dougovito, said that because Nassar is incarcerated in Pennsylvania, he has no duty to register in Michigan. Mr. Lloyd’s office then issued a correction, along with a lengthy post apologizing for the error but expressing concern over the hasty removal of sexual offenders from the list.“As prosecutors, we have a responsibility to provide information to victims and survivors of sexual assault. These victims and the People of Eaton County deserved to know that the one-page order of the Supreme Court existed and that there were people in the community, including those who sexually assaulted them, who were no longer on the public registry,” the office wrote. “We also have an obligation to be forthcoming with our citizens, and so we acknowledge that we have found that we were incorrect when we stated that Nassar was recently removed from the Michigan Sex Offender Registry by People v Smith. We apologize for the confusion caused by the post,” the post continues.Nasser may have been listed briefly in 2017 before leaving Michigan custody in 2018. State police say he will be registered if he ever returns to Michigan.States and localities run offender registries in the United States. The federal Bureau of Prisons does not register sex offenders before they are released. It notifies local authorities when a prisoner who must register is let out.That design is typical nationwide, Ms. Aukerman observes. “There is no point in requiring people to register when they are in prison, much less in prison out of state,” she says. “Those people are, by definition, not living in the community so they can’t be required to report regularly to the police.”“If you get out of prison, then you get looked at for registration,” adds Ms. Letourneau. “It varies, but generally, before release there’s a review to see whether your crime qualifies you for registration. It also determines whether the registration is public or private, if the state has those tiers, and how long you have to register.”For Nassar, who is 63, that review is unlikely ever to come. “People like Nassar, who are predators, now typically get sentences under which they won’t return to the community while they’re still a threat,” Ms. Letourneau says.What a Shorter List MeansThe removals, however, rattled communities. A Hudsonville father reportedly noticed that a convicted offender living nearby had disappeared from the public list and called police. A Swartz Creek woman, Krystle Steele, who was sexually assaulted in 1998 at age 10 and now runs a survivors group, has begun organizing to push for changes in Lansing. She notes that while Nasser’s name may bring publicity to the issue, the real concern is the large number of offenders removed from the registry.“There are REAL people being removed from Michigan’s registry because their qualifying offenses occurred before July 1, 2011. There are REAL survivors learning that people who victimized them no longer have a duty to register. Those are the stories we need to be telling,” she posted on Facebook.Because the ruling rests partly on the federal Constitution, an appeal to the United States Supreme Court is possible. That is a long shot. In 2017, the Nine declined to hear Michigan’s appeal of a federal ruling that had struck down retroactive add-ons to the law, including a ban on registrants living, working, or loitering within 1,000 feet of a school.Lawmakers cannot overturn the ruling, though they could write a new law that returns some of those removed to the list. No such bill is ready. The state police director, Col. James F. Grady II, has said his agency cannot change the law and must comply with the court’s order.With those avenues limited, a professor of law and economics at the University of Michigan, J.J. Prescott, tells the Sun that a shorter registry may serve the public better in any case. He co-wrote an analysis that used state records to estimate the risk of reoffending for all 45,145 people on Michigan’s original list.“We found that approximately half of those living in the community presented such a low risk of sexual reoffending that their risk was comparable to the risk of a first sexual offense among men in the general population,” Mr. Prescott says. “These are not people who pose some extraordinary danger to the public.”Ms. Letourneau points to time as the clearest signal.“If you’ve been out in the community and haven’t committed a new sex offense for 10 years, the research is very clear: you are really unlikely ever to commit another one,” she says.Michigan’s data point to the same conclusion. Expert analysis of state records, filed in the ACLU’s federal challenge, found that registrants who had lived 15 years in the community without a new conviction reoffended at about the same rate as men in the general population. The same analysis estimated that 93 to 95 percent of people newly added to the list would not be convicted of another registrable offense within 10 years.Keeping those names public can also cut the other way. Mr. Prescott’s 2011 study found that making registry information public may raise the likelihood of reoffending because being marked makes it harder for offenders “to find employment, maintain housing, develop relationships, and otherwise build a stable, law-abiding life.”Others argue the money could be used better elsewhere. The state police registry unit had a budget of about $1 million in 2020. Jailing people for registry violations cost the state more than $11 million a year from 2015 to 2019. Neither figure counts the hours local police spend processing registrants.“We must do everything we can to prevent sexual crimes,” Ms. Aukerman says. “That means we should devote our resources to programs that work, including supporting survivors, investing in prevention, and ensuring people who return to the community after serving their sentences have the resources and support they need to successfully reintegrate.”Mr. Prescott calls the ruling a step toward right-sizing the registry, even if the court acted on constitutional grounds rather than risk. “The objective should be fewer victims, not longer lists,” he insists.For those who prosecuted and sentenced Nassar, the ruling looks very different.Judge Aquilina has warned that with more than 20,000 names gone, authorities can no longer keep track of where those people live. She has called on lawmakers to fix the law. The Eaton County office accused the state’s high court of passing over a narrower remedy and opting to “toss the scalpel aside and use a chainsaw.”“Our community, along with the victims of these crimes, expected the registry to provide a measure of protection and awareness — assurances that have now been removed by the Court’s ruling,” the office wrote.

With 20,000 Names Struck From Michigan’s Sex Offender List, Victim Rights Advocates Wonder What Good It Is

With 20,000 Names Struck From Michigan’s Sex Offender List, Victim Rights Advocates Wonder What Good It Is

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