What if some little ditz decides she doesn't like you because you looked at her while entering a room? or she's jealous of your wife? What if your own kid has a problem with not being allowed to have the car? Out comes the "sex offender" label. It's not fair to either party--the accused OR the accuser.
By Sharon Coolidge, USA TODAY CINCINNATI — People who have never been convicted of a sex offense still could end up on a public registry in Ohio. A law that went into effect in August targets alleged sex offenders who can no longer face charges or be sued because the time allowed for either action — the statute of limitations — has expired.
The new law allows prosecutors, the state's attorney general or alleged victims to seek to put a person on the registry.
Whoever makes the request must try to present enough evidence to convince a judge that the crime was more likely than not to have occurred. If a judge, after hearing testimony and reviewing evidence from both sides, determines that the abuse is likely to have taken place, then the alleged offender must register with the Ohio Attorney General's Internet Civil Registry.
No other state has a civil registry or is even considering one, said Blake Harrison, a policy analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The law creating the registry was a substitute for a proposed law that would have allowed people to file lawsuits in old cases that otherwise would have been barred by the two-year statute of limitations.
Hamilton County, Ohio, prosecutor Joe Deters is the first to test the new law.
In September, he filed a motion in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court asking that David Kelley, a priest who served at St. Therese the Little Flower in Mount Airy Ohio, be ordered to register with the state's civil registry.
Kelley, who lives in Nashville, is accused of sexually abusing a student at the Ohio church's elementary school in the early 1980s, according to court documents.
"People deserve to know if they live near sexual offenders," Deters said. "The statute of limitations may have expired, but this allows for notification."
A hearing is set for Dec. 6. Kelley, who is on administrative leave from the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, could not be reached for comment.
"This raises a lot of questions for me," said Jonathan Entin, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University who specializes in constitutional law and civil rights issues. "At least in criminal registries, there is some sort of formal determination a person committed a sex offense."
Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), a group that lobbies for abuse victims' rights, supported the bill that would have extended the statute of limitations because hundreds of people who have claimed priests abused them as children are unable to file lawsuits or pursue criminal charges.
"I don't think it will work, and it won't deter the abuse," Christy Miller, SNAP's Cincinnati co-leader, said of the new law. "These people won't be financially responsible, and they're not criminally responsible. All that will happen is their name will go on a list that nobody will see because nobody knows about it."
The registry's creator, state Rep. Bill Seitz, said he knows it is controversial but said it accomplishes the same goal as retroactively extending the statute of limitations.
The Ohio ACLU's legal director, Jeff Gamso, called the civil registry troubling.
"It is a dangerous, troublesome law," Gamso said. "This is punishment without the protection of a criminal proceeding."
Coolidge reports daily for The (Cincinnati) Enquirer