originally posted 4/9/2010
I am a RSO in Illinois. I was forced to plead guilty to a crime I did not commit. My brothers ex wife was trying to gain full custody of the kids (two of them) so she could move to another state with her new boyfriend and used me to get it. She made her daughter(who was 4) claim that I had touched her during a Halloween party. The child was interviewed by police and a psychiatrist and she kept telling them that “‘mommy says uncle (my name) did it” but it didn’t matter.
I was later arrested (four months later) and spent almost a year in jail. The other factors that prove my innocence are as such: I used to have a lot
of friends (now I’m a social outcast) that I was with on a daily basis and a steady girlfriend. They were with me every day and she was with me every night, so my whereabouts can be accounted for. During the time that the offense was supposed to have happened I was already in jail (long before and after halloween) for failure to appear on a driving charge. during the interrogation I divulged this piece of info and I watched the detective change the police report to make the offense(s) happen before and after I was released. The detectives also threatened me with harm if I didn’t “‘say what they wanted to hear”‘ and with a long prison sentence. I have never been an angel by any means, but never have I thought of a child in a sexual way. It was my first time in an interrogation room and never have I been in a more terrifying situation. I was molested when I was young by my step dad’s friend and now still to this day (25 years later) males in a dominant position scare the s@#t out of me and to have three detectives threatening and screaming at me for almost four hours was too much to handle. I signed the statement that the lead guy wrote (I still don’t know what was in it completely) and they let me leave. I was arrested a week later and then did my time in county.
My family knows I am innocent and supported me to the fullest, but as we are not a wealthy or even middle class family I was stuck with a public pretender and she told me that I was going to get convicted anyway regardless of any evidence to my innocence because Illinois “doesn’t mess around with those types of cases.” She told me to plead guilty and she would save me from prison. I accepted. I received four years’ probation and have to register for life.
The biggest slap to the face is the guy that my brother’s ex is with is a suspected child molester and can’t see his own kids because it is alleged he had sex with his three year old daughter before he met my brother’s ex. She has caught him watching pornographic movies with her daughter (my alleged victim) who was almost six at the time. He also stopped her mom from punishing her so that he could videotape her being spanked in her underwear so he could watch it later. There is also a tape he made of him ordering her and her younger brother to perform sex acts on an anatomically correct statue yet I am the one prosecuted, persecuted and labeled as a sick individual and I wasn’t even around to commit that act.
I have had my time watching my nieces and nephews grow stolen away and a few of them I will never get to see again. I won’t get the pleasure of seeing them graduate and become the people they will eventually become. The justice system is a joke and all of these fanatical religious and parent groups are making life miserable by pushing for stricter laws with ridiculous expectations. Soon it will be impossible to not violate some law or another and then prisons will be full of people that don’t deserve to be there. Something needs to be done and it needs to be done fast. People have gotten my name off the registry and because of the registry I have been harassed, assaulted and my life threatened and the county sheriffs told me tough luck, they were not going to do anything about it. No one should have to live in fear and the registry is the tool that is used to track down RSOs and attack them. When is enough really enough?