GEORGETOWN, Texas — For more than 20 years, Troy Mansfield was branded a “registered sex offender,” a shameful asterisk by his name that followed him everywhere.
“I took my stepdad’s name and I wanted it to be a good name,” Mansfield said. “And I felt like somehow or another it got trashed by me, and I didn’t mean for it to.”
The father of two sons struggled to support his family from a cleaning business, purposely in his wife’s name, Amy Mansfield.
“We lived between $16,000 and $19,000 a year, for a family of four – so very tight and very hard – because I’m trying to make a living but everywhere we go we get the door slammed on it because of this,” Troy Mansfield said.
One of his worst days came when he was kicked out of his church.
“They came in that Sunday they said, ‘We want y’all to get out. You haven’t done anything wrong, we don’t have a problem with you but public opinion is killing us in this church and you’ve got to leave,'” he said.
But Williamson County prosecutors and a judge now agree Troy Mansfield should have never been a registered sex offender or convicted of a crime.
“They came in that Sunday they said, ‘We want y’all to get out. You haven’t done anything wrong, we don’t have a problem with you but public opinion is killing us in this church and you’ve got to leave,’” he said.