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| Shauquana Green |
Shaquana Green and her toddler daughter disappeared during a weekly Saturday afternoon visit in 2012, an incident that Upper Darby police described in court documents as a custody dispute.
Fewer than three hours later, the girl was found unharmed near where she was last seen and returned to her legal guardian, who's her paternal grandmother, according to court records. Green was arrested for violating a court custody order that barred her from unsupervised contact with her child.
That event is how the 26-year-old Bethlehem woman, a single mother with no prior criminal record, ended up a Pennsylvania sex offender. It’s a life-crippling label that Green wouldn’t have if she lived in any other state.
But when the Pennsylvania Legislature expanded its sex offender law in 2011 in response to federal legislation, it added new crimes, including the one that Green pleaded guilty to in 2013 — interference with child custody. Under the amended law, which became effective in December 2012, conviction of that crime carries a 15-year requirement to register as a Megan's Law child sex offender. There is no exemption for parental custody interference with no sexual abuse.
The result is that at least 34 Pennsylvanians, including one resident in each Bucks and Montgomery counties, whose “primary” offense is the same as Green’s, are on the state’s sex offender registry. This is without any evidence they've been accused of a sex crime, according to an extensive records search of 6,000 active sex offender profiles on the state’s Megan’s Law website, court documents, Sex Offender Assessment Board documents obtained under the Pennsylvania Right to Know Act and media accounts of cases.
After this news organization raised questions about its findings, the Montgomery County lawmaker who chairs the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee and the committee’s legal counsel vowed to draft legislation to fix what they called the law’s unanticipated “serious collateral consequences.”
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| Sen Stewart Greenleaf |
Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, R-12, of Upper Moreland, expressed concern upon learning that people like Green were being listed as sex offenders. He insisted it was never the law's intention to place someone who has never committed a sex crime on the Megan's Law registry.
“That is certainly not an intended consequence,” the judiciary committee chair said. “This has to be fixed.”
At least one-quarter of the 34 Pennsylvanians were found to be noncustodial parents convicted of violating child custody orders. Others committed unrelated crimes, such as stealing a car in which a child was a passenger. Two people were convicted of interference with child custody in New Jersey, where it’s not an offense requiring sex offender registration. But since it's considered a violent sex offense in Pennsylvania, anyone who lives, works or attends school here must register.
A review of sex offender registration laws in all 50 states found only one other state — Louisiana — includes interference with child custody as a crime requiring sex offender registration. But that state provides a registration exemption if the defendant is the parent of the victim child.
“It’s a disservice to the public,” said Jill Levenson, a social work professor at Barry University in Florida who studies sex offender registration laws. “When you have people on the registry who aren’t sexually dangerous, it dilutes the public’s ability to find out what they need to know to protect themselves.”
Worse, people with no known history of sexually deviant behavior experience wide-ranging consequences, including loss of personal freedom, loss of privacy, and social ostracization, according to experts in sex offender laws.
One woman's experience
Tier 1 sex offenders, like Green, must update personal information with Pennsylvania State Police annually and within three days of changing a job, a residence, a vehicle or a school, according to the law. They must give police a DNA sample and palm prints. They must notify state police when traveling to another state for longer than a week. International travel requires 21 days notification and a foreign country can refuse an offender entry. They cannot have unsupervised contact with children in school settings. And failure to follow the requirements is a third-degree felony.
Shaquana Green, of Bethlehem, was convicted of interfering with child custody in Delaware County after she took her then 23-month-old daughter for three hours in 2012. She landed on Pennsylvania's sex offender registry for the next 15 years, though she has never been accused of or charged with a sex crime.
But the hardships go beyond those requirements, said Green, who now has a nearly 2-year-old son. Her daughter, now 7, remains in the custody of her paternal grandmother, who was made her legal guardian because of Green's admitted mental health problems.
Potential employers are wary of her sex offender status, she said. Landlords are reluctant to rent to her. Daycare center operators don’t want her son. A homeless shelter turned her away. And she said a transitional housing program rescinded her admission after two days because the program’s sponsor was uncomfortable after learning Green was a sex offender.
“The toll it takes on your life, it’s not just registering, it’s everything. It’s the community, all my friends knowing about it, but not understanding. Just constantly having to explain it and be judged about it,” Green said recently. “My life is just consumed by this now. The more I try to talk about it, the more I try to get understanding about it, the more I try to research about it, I just wish I could wake up and it was a nightmare, it’s not true. But it’s reality.”
U.S. act's genesis
What happened in the Pennsylvania Legislature in 2011 started with Congress in 2006, when the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act became law. The act is named after a 6-year-old Florida boy, son of "America's Most Wanted" host John Walsh, who was kidnapped and murdered in 1981. The widely publicized case was a catalyst for the U.S. child safety reform movement.
The federal legislation urged states to create more unified sex offender registration requirements that encompassed more crimes, including non-sexual "offenses against children " — and to apply those expanded registration requirements retroactively. States that don't “substantially comply” with the law are penalized by cuts in federal funding for crime prevention programs.
Kidnapping and false imprisonment offenses against minors are specifically included in the Adam Walsh Act. Both exempt parents and guardians, but states also can enact more restrictive registration requirements, which is what happened in Pennsylvania.
The original state Senate version of the bill adopting the Adam Walsh Act included parental registration exemptions for interference with child custody, unlawful restraint and false imprisonment of a minor, Greenleaf said. But that bill underwent extensive changes in the House and only parental exemptions for unlawful restraint and false imprisonment made it into the amended bill, which received unanimous approval in the House and Senate.
Dauphin County Republican Rep. Ronald Marsico, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote and introduced the House amendments. Marsico’s chief of staff, Autumn Southard, said the amendments were based on the advice of legal counsel and follow the federal law’s guidelines.
The attorney who provided that guidance, Gregg Warner, is no longer with the Senate Judiciary Committee and efforts to reach him for comment were unsuccessful. The state Senate library has no record of judiciary committee meetings held on the updated bill.
Patrick Crawley, the current counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, said one reason the exemption might have been removed was that it was seen as redundant with the Pennsylvania crimes code, which includes defenses for parents charged with interference with custody of children.
Theories on inclusion
Specialists in sex offender laws suggested that lawmakers might have included the offense because it falls under the broader category of kidnapping by a related person. But none could suggest how including those offenders on a registry benefits public safety.
“Quite honestly, I have no idea why a state would include that,” said Eric Janus, a law professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Minnesota, and a nationally recognized expert on sex offender registries. “Though it clearly has a relation to child protection, it has no obvious relation to sexual offenses.”
Wayne Logan, a professor at Florida State University Law School, theorized that child custody interference falls under kidnapping offenses, a common trigger for sex offender registration. “The rationale being that sex abuse often accompanies the crime,” he added.
Barry University’s Levenson called it “highly, highly unusual” for someone without a sex crime conviction to be on a Megan’s Law registry.
Sex offender registries that include non-sexual offenses confuse the public, added Catherine L. Carpenter, a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, and a nationally recognized expert in sex offender laws.
“You get a disconnect between protecting the children because of the crime, and the remedy, which is to track them as sex offenders,” Carpenter said. “This is just, sadly, another example of this broad painting with a broad brush to capture people who shouldn’t be captured.”
Views on the law
Former Montgomery County prosecutor, Rep. Todd Stephens, R-151, of Horsham, said including non-sex offenders on the Megan's Law registry benefits the public because it identifies those who commit offenses against children, which is what Congress intended when it adopted the Adam Walsh Act.
State Rep. Todd Stephens, R-151
Rick Kintzel/Photojournalist
“I do think people who commit crimes against children are a unique subset of criminals, worthy of greater attention," Stephens added. "The federal government expanded (the law) to include more than just sex offenders, so I don’t believe it’s just a sex offender registry since the Adam Walsh Act.
But Greenleaf, who said he voted for the law in 2011 though he didn’t agree with all of it, expressed growing concern that sex offender laws have become far more encompassing than their original intended target: violent and habitual child sexual predators.
The veteran lawmaker said he would like to see the reinstatement of the original Senate exemption for parents convicted of interference with child custody. He cautioned, though, that changing the law would be a “hard push,” in part, because of politicians’ general aversion to scaling back laws involving sex offenders.
Other states have faced similar problems with registries.
Georgia now allows some people who were convicted of a non-sexual crime against a child (like kidnapping) to petition for release from the registry. No such options exist in Pennsylvania, but after 10 years, a Tier 1 offender with a "clean record" can petition to reduce the registration obligation by five years.
Aaron Marcus is an attorney with the Defenders Association of Philadelphia, an independent, nonprofit firm that represents indigent criminal defendants.
Courtesy of Aaron Marcus
Philadelphia attorney Aaron Marcus agreed that state lawmakers appear reluctant to take action on the overreach of the sex offender law, calling it a "careless bill." He works with the Defenders Association of Philadelphia, an independent, nonprofit firm that represents poor criminal defendants.
“Very few legislators, at least in the last couple of years, wanted to touch this issue in any respect because anytime you remove an offense, you’re seen as soft on sex crimes, which is why these laws don’t get reined in,” he said.
And that's why Green said she has such a hard time convincing people that she didn't commit a sex crime — even though she's on the sex offender registry and even after she shows them paperwork that includes a letter from a child welfare caseworker confirming her crime wasn't sexual.
“There is a lot of ignorance to it because they don’t understand. They think of Megan’s Law — that is what you associate it with — some kind of sexual offense, some kind of sexual inappropriateness with children,” Green said. “I just pray the law does get changed and that they see the effect it is having on people. When you never did a sex offense. When you never did anything sexual to any children.”
Jo Ciavaglia: 215-949-4181; email: jciavaglia@calkins.com; Twitter: @JoCiavaglia
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