originally posted 3/8/2012
I was convicted of sexual assault of a 15 year old. We worked at the same company for over a year and everyone was under the impression she was 18 because that’s what she told us. She worked full time which child labor laws prohibit, which also led us to believe her told age. I got involved with her relation-wise but not sexually active.
The night of my arrest I was under heavy medication due to pulled groin muscle from heavy lifting at work. It was around one in the morning when the police came to arrest me. I don’t remember anything from the time I took my medication at six in the evening to the time I awoke in the city jail being charged for a sex crime. My mother told me that when the police came it took three of them to hold me up because I couldn’t stand on my own due to the medication.
They refused to let anyone in my family be present when they questioned me outside in the rain. She said that one of the officers found a hair ribbon in my room and called the officer who was watching the “”Victim”” to ask her if it was hers. The officer said she claimed it wasn’t, but they said over the radio that they were taking it anyway. I got ten years deferred adjudicated probation. That was the beginning of our hell. I couldn’t keep a job, and then got in trouble for it. I had to keep moving because no-one takes sex offenders. I can’t live in a apartment because of the laws against us. I can’t even live in most extended motel anymore. Understand that after turning myself in to finish my sentence in prison, I have “”NO”” restrictions. I can be around children, go to parks or pools, yet still can’t find employment or housing because of the label stuck to me for life. Just last night I was told I had to leave my place of residence again for being a sex offender. We had just paid all our bills and have no money left to move.
These registration laws are tearing my family apart. I just found out I am going to be a father again, and now I don’t even have a place to raise him/her when he/she is born. All I want, like many others in my position, is to just have a chance to show people that a lot of us are NOT what the title implies we are. We just want a LIFE again. I work hard and do not go out because of the fear that someone will “ACCUSE” me of doing something I didn’t do. Why should LOW RISK offenders with NO restrictions be treated the same as HIGH RISK offenders who purposely hunt down and prey on children? Why should our families suffer for the crimes of true offenders? Why?
s.