Twenty-five years after Connecticut required them to register as “sex offenders” ex post facto, they hope the legislature will soon take action.
During counseling programs he’s attended throughout adulthood, Aaron Kearney has been told not to let mistakes define him and not to let the past hijack his future. But for a quarter-century, the 52-year-old has worn a label making it burdensome to live up to those ideals: “registered sex offender.”
“The only thing I feel is that I’m just existing. I’m not living,” said Kearney, on a recent windy Thursday at Bridgeport’s St. Mary’s-by-the-Sea, sitting at a picnic bench with the Long Island Sound as his backdrop. “At the end of the day, you should have sentenced me to death.”
The Bridgeport native never imagined that his name would live on the state’s public sex offense registry for the world to see. The Connecticut Mirror could not locate records outlining specific details in his case, but available documents show he was charged in 1997 with third-degree sexual assault for what he describes as assaulting a sex worker. Promptly after, he pleaded guilty and served eight months in prison.
Months following his release, however, Kearney received notification that Connecticut had recently enacted legislation creating the public registry. The new policy, approved during the 1998 legislative session, was retroactive, meaning people convicted of a “sexually violent offense” in the decade prior to the law’s passage would have to enroll.
I know the feeling of surviving, not thriving as I once did and yearn to do again.
As for the intention of the registry, folks need to pull their head out of the sand and realize the intent does not always meet reality in the end of what it actually does. The smart people in this forum probably can cite many examples of intended consequences vs the actual consequences of whatever the purpose was for the intended consequences.
In fact, I believe a list of those would be beneficial, IMO, in further court cases to show the idiocy of continuing that argument to begin with. I’d start with those SCOTUS cases that have been overturned by SCOTUS themself because the intended consequences were not met after the actual consequences were realized. (Have to give @AJ credit for that since years ago he mentioned that same thing in a vein of if precedent was kept from cases nearly two hundred years ago, we still be behind, very far behind other societies.) That, IMO, would hopefully, grab the attention of those judges and justices to see their error of the legal system in their thinking as well as the thinking of those who partake in it from slanted views. Judges and Justices have judged each other in this country to call out legal errors for ages, so don’t stop now when considering “intentions vs realities”.
I don’t know what the problem is, it’s not punitive. (cue sarcasm). I’m right there with this individual. Being on the registry permanently is designed to isolate people from society. It is absolute punishment. There isn’t any point in living beyond the point that you can not do to yourself what the world wants done. So all you can do is just exist, like, literally… Live, breathe, eat, crap, sleep repeat. Personally, I know love is a pure fantasy that will never be in my life again. I accept this and the absence of love has made me a very bitter, hateful angry person, someone I hate. But I have no other choice. I, God, Jesus, all the money on the planet will not change it. I’ve come to accept this as being who I am and will be until I am gone. So my goal for staying here on this earth is so selfish it’s just downright absurd, but it’s purely to just be able to tell God “there, ya happy? I lived that stupid life you wanted me to live”. Go registry! Wonder what articles will be posted this week about the registry? More deaths? Vigilantism? Suicides? One thing I know I won’t read, “SCOTUS repeals any and all registration requirements nationwide, effective immediately”. So those doing time for some registry violation will stay in prison, more lawsuits will be filed and more hatred will be doled out.
They put me on the registry my senior year in high school I had just turned 18, I was so young I didn’t even know how to drive.
24 years later I’m still on the registry, out of those 24 years I can remember every single day and each day on the registry was a complete living HELL, not to mention the 2 failure to register charges I picked up along the way, Now I’m a 3striker under the California three strikes law so all it takes is one little slip up and I’m going away for life..
I personally gave up dating two years ago, because every time someone good comes into my life, the registry just screws it all up.
Not only with relationships anything I accomplish anything that I’m proud of is crushed or stripped away right before my very eyes, Even my dreams and hopes for the future are homeless
This is beyond punishment this is literally a death sentence.
This is an excellent article. I really encourage everyone to read and share it.
I’ll add that one element this article introduces is race, and this is really the lynchpin for taking down the registry in a country that frankly doesn’t care about criminal justice reform beyond racial equity. If blacks and Hispanics are over-represented on the registry, which the article makes it clear they are, then both in-law housing restrictions and de-facto housing restrictions (via shame and harassment) are tantamount to red zoning and racial segregation. There is no small number of judges in this country inclined to believe that differences in outcome–in this case, racial minorities being overrepresented on the registry–can ONLY be due to systematic discrimination and racism. Agree with that or not, that’s the dominant paradigm fueling investment in promoting diversity and is the backbone of possibly MOST new Democratic policies. I suspect that for many years many liberals assumed the registry was full of rich, old white guys and that is what ultimately tempered their sympathy and potentially fueled their support of it. That’s clearly not the case–even in Internet-based crimes, the police reports I see have more and more minorities (across the ethnicity spectrum), and as blacks leave cities, that largely didn’t prosecute statutory rape, and move to suburbs, sex offense prosecutions appear to be rising steadily. In the discourse around Danny Masterson, I’ve actually seen black female activists largely defending the use of personal letters in sentencing, likely because black activists are far closer to the problem of criminal justice in America than white feminists. There are white feminists who are not carceral (I’m friends with a relatively prominent women’s studies professor who hasn’t wavered in her support for me despite my arrest), but among black activists especially there is a greater understanding that crimes against women (such as that committed by George Floyd) should not be treated as punitively as possible, even if they should be addressed and punished by a court. That’s the kind of fairness we need that is missing from almost all political activism.
Follow up
Those retroactively added to sex offender list look to Connecticut legislators for reprieve