The Six-year-old Registered Sex Offender

The Six-year-old Registered Sex Offender

By Billy Moffat (25/11/2011)

356 words

Tagged: america, crime, current affair, lolwut, news, school

A six-year-old boy from Wisconsin, USA has been charged with 1st degree sexual assault (a Class B felony). He was found guilty of playing "butt doctor" with a five-year-old girl. Once he turns 18, he will be listed as a sex offender.

As one might expect, the parents of the boy have appealed, by suing Grant County District Attorney Lisa Riniker.

When a motion was made to have the charges dismissed, Riniker said "The legislature could have put an age restriction in the statute if it wanted to. The legislature did no such thing."

The full complaint (as a PDF) can be found here (chicagotribune.com)

The complaint says that the five-year-old girl is "the daughter of a well-known political figure in Grant County". It also claims that the girl's brother (who is the same age) was also involved in the game of Doctor - but was not charged.

As well as DA Riniker, the lawsuit also lists retired Grant County Sheriff's Sgt. James Kopp. It also lists Jan Moravits, an investigator with Grant County Social Services "whose regional supervisor...is the political figure's wife's sister-in-law" - or the aunt of the girl.

This is another case that makes some people question the sex offender system, such as Jacob Sullum in his article, Perverted Justice - Sex offender laws represent the triumph of outrage over reason. He explains:

The panic that followed Megan Kanka's murder produced an alarm system that often fails to distinguish between dangerous predators like Timmendequas, who had a record of assaulting little girls, and nonviolent lawbreakers like Elliot, who posed no discernible threat to the general public. They are all mixed together in the online registries of sex offenders that every state is required to maintain as a condition of receiving federal law enforcement funding - a mandate imposed by another Megan's Law, enacted by Congress in 1996.

Whether you believe a publicly-accessible sex-offender registry is a good or bad idea, I'm sure few of us can disagree that a six-year-old boy being forced to register to the same list as paedophiles, rapists and murderers in twelve years is nothing short of disgustingly ridiculous.

Author - Billy Moffat

Owner and sole developer of Meercat9.com, he attends university full time but has a passionate addiction to the internet, particularly programming. Due to the lack of other developers for the site, he is often forced to write about himself in the third person.