Perhaps the tide is turning on these online databases of offenders.
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/ne...D1DA022EE321AE898625715300514098?OpenDocument
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/ne...D1DA022EE321AE898625715300514098?OpenDocument
Sex offender gets his name wiped off state registry
By Jeremy Kohler
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
04/17/2006
For most of this year, Missouri's lawmakers and Supreme Court judges have been weighing separate proposals to reform the state's sexual offender registry.
In coming weeks or months, new laws or decisions could release some people from the onus of registering as sex offenders.
With the matter yet unsettled, one convicted offender who was featured in a Post-Dispatch story earlier this year found his own way to clear his name.
Sylvester Adaway, 30, 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.
When Adaway was 18, he had sex with a 13-year-old girl. 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.
It meant he served two years of probation in return for having no felony conviction on his record.
Many people agree that public safety outweighs concerns about the privacy and comfort of convicted rapists and child molesters.
But a growing chorus of voices in Missouri has questioned the fairness of including nonviolent offenders - such as Adaway - who seem little risk to reoffend.
The Missouri Supreme Court has been chewing for more than three months on a challenge to the sexual offenders registry.
Arthur Benson II, a Kansas City lawyer, argued Jan. 10 that the list unfairly punishes those who believed that suspended sentences would give them fresh starts. He also argued that Missouri's registry burdened lesser offenders in the same way as it did serial rapists.
If his challenge prevails, Missouri could be ordered to limit the registry only to those guilty of more severe and recent crimes. The court could issue a decision as soon as May 2.
Meanwhile, the state House and Senate have each approved legislation that would remove certain offenders - such as those who have pleaded guilty of nonsexual child abuse - from the registry. It also would allow certain others - such as those guilty of some statutory rapes - to petition for removal. The two bills, while similar, have subtle differences that would need to be hammered out before joint passage.
Adaway and his wife, Kayla, live in Jonesboro, Ark., with their three children. His status as a sex offender caused him to lose his job as a police officer and his wife to lose her license for an in-home day care.
It happened in 2003 when authorities in Michigan, where he had briefly lived, charged him with failing to register as a sex offender.
Prosecutors ultimately dropped the charge, but Adaway was exposed to his employers and friends as a sex offender.
After the publicity, Arkansas added him to its own sexual offenders registry.
Adaway might rate a footnote in the annals of Missouri criminal law.
In a state with more than 10,000 registered sex offenders, he was one of the first to be removed by having a judge throw out his case.
The Missouri Highway Patrol, which compiles the list, says perhaps two or three others have been removed from the list by having a judge set aside their guilty pleas.
The Adaways, who want their careers back, are now seeking to clear his name in Arkansas and anywhere else he is listed as an offender.
His lawyer, John McMullan, believes it will be arduous task.
"We'll go out and stamp out fires wherever they are," he said. "There will be people who won't even believe that, who won't believe it's accurate."
McMullan believes that other offenders will try to have their names cleared in the same way his client did.
"I think there will be lots of attempts, I just don't know how it will work for them," McMullan said. "It takes a compassionate and understanding prosecutor and judge to look at a case that old and try to right a wrong."
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:banghead:
