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07/30/2007
Law mandates certain underage offenders go on public list despite consensual acts
WAUPACA — Three years ago, Jenna Simons was an honor student who played softball and loved to baby-sit.
By her junior year of high school, though, a rebellious streak set in. She began experimenting with sex, drugs and alcohol.
Two years ago, a judge found her guilty of a sex crime after she and two friends engaged in consensual sex.
"I started doing some pretty stupid things," recalled Simons, 19. "I knew what I was doing was morally wrong. I just didn't know it would ruin my life."
Simons is now a registered sex offender.
Her conviction brought mandatory inclusion on Wisconsin's Sex Offender Registry, enacted 10 years ago to protect the public from perverts, predators and pedophiles.
Critics of the law contend that the statutes defining who must be registered, combined with a broad child abuse law, unfairly ensnare teens and young adults who engage in consensual sex, and undermine the registry's credibility. State officials in charge of maintaining the registry, however, say the law is doing what it was intended to do.
Simons' lawyer sees her case as an example of get-tough-on-crime laws gone bad.
"It's wrong," said Kaukauna attorney Gary Schmidt, who is hoping to get Simons off the publicly available list. "She had a wild and reckless streak, but she's not a sex offender."
State Department of Corrections officials point out that the registry has a built-in exemption for young people and that prosecutors are following the intent of the law.
"I don't think we've seen a pattern of district attorneys in our state of overcharging people," said Melissa Roberts, director of sex offender programs for the agency. "They understand who (belongs) and who doesn't belong on the registry."
Age of consent
In April 2005, Simons and three of her friends skipped school. Simons brought along a video camera to record their activities. They figured they would go to the mall and goof around, she said. Then they ran into to Sam Roloff. Simons had been having a casual relationship with the 20-year-old man.
On a whim, she said, they went back to his house. The get-together turned sexual. Simons and another girl videotaped the encounters. Simons' mother discovered the tape and turned it over to police.
Her daughter needed help, Julie Simons said, and with police intervention she thought the family would have a better chance at qualifying for social services.
"If I could do it over again, I'd have burned that tape," Julie Simons said. "Jenna was depressed and doing drugs. We had exhausted our insurance coverage and she needed help."
Instead, Jenna Simons was charged with four sex crimes. Roloff was charged with 17.
"They were minors having sex," said Waupaca County Circuit Judge Philip Kirk, who heard Roloff's case. "It was consensual sex, absolutely. However, the law doesn't allow people that age to give consent."
Wisconsin's legal age for consent is 18. Additionally, a state child abuse law makes it a felony for anyone — even teens the same age — to engage in sexual activity with someone younger than 16.
One of the girls involved in the incident was 15. Simons was 17. In a plea bargain, Simons pleaded no contest to sexual exploitation of a child.
The charge is among the 29 sex crimes that require registration. Though there is an exemption to keep types of consensual sex — so-called Romeo and Juliet situations — from landing minors and young adults on the registry, it didn't apply to Simons' case.
Waupaca County Circuit Judge John Hoffmann, who heard her case, sentenced Simons to four years of probation and ordered her on the registry, where she must remain for 15 years.
"For what she was convicted of, it was mandatory sex offender registration, which I had to impose," Hoffmann said.
Hoffmann would like to see more leeway.
"There are a number of cases that are consensual in nature that may not be consensual under the law," he said. "In general, I would say judges probably need more discretion in those types of situations."
Waupaca County Dist. Atty. John Snider could not be reached for comment regarding the case.
Caught in the net
Each year, thousands of teens in Wisconsin are referred to child protective services for having "mutual sexual contact." That's because another state law requires teachers, counselors and health care workers, among others, to report it. If they don't, they could face up to a $1,000 fine and six months in jail.
Last year, Outagamie County, for example, received 195 referrals for mutual sexual contact involving children under 16. They represented about 7 percent of the county's total child protection referrals that year.
It is not discernable from county reports or statistics how many resulted in prosecution. And it is also unclear how many go on to be included on the state registry.
But anecdotally, critics say it's happening too often.
"I think it's a problem and we are diluting the registry with people who don't need to be there," said Mark Martens, youth and family services manager for the Outagamie County Department of Health and Human Services. "We've cast this wide net and in the net we've caught young adults who are having mutual sexual contact."
Stephanie Hueseman, clinic manager of Reach Counseling Services in Menasha, agrees.
"Jenna is not the first example, but this is by far the most troubling and sad case I've seen," said Hueseman, a licensed therapist who has been seeing Simons for more than a year. As a condition of probation, Simons was required to go to therapy.
"I will never consider Jenna a sex offender," Hueseman said. "Absolutely not."
Compounded consequences
With a flurry of new laws cracking down on sex offenders, the stakes continue to rise for teens who make bad choices, said Wendy Henderson, policy analyst for the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families.
"There are a lot of unintended consequences for teenagers engaging in adolescent behavior," Henderson said. "We are taking kids who are sort of doing the same things that kids have done forever (and) giving them a lifetime of consequences. But there's a real difference between two 15-year-olds having consensual sex and a 30-year-old having sex with a 12-year-old."
The council is lobbying lawmakers to return 17-year-olds to the juvenile court system, which would afford them more protections. Wisconsin is among a dozen states that automatically charges 17-year-olds as adults in all crimes. Juvenile court may stay the imposition of mandatory sex offender registration; adult court cannot.
Simons was charged as an adult in her case. Yet she was considered a victim in Roloff's case.
"It's fine if no one reports it to the district attorney's office," Kirk said. "Then they come into family court, the father admits paternity following the birth of a baby, and we break out the brass bands and say it's wonderful. …
"Yet they've engaged in the very same behavior that gets others arrested, put in jail and on the sex offender list."
State Rep. Garey Bies, R-Sister Bay, is drafting legislation that would target sex offenders on a number of fronts, from limiting where they can go in public to needing permission to change their appearance.
"Our focus has been on the predatory offenders," Bies said. But if judges are concerned about youths who pose no public threat winding up on the registry, then the issue deserves consideration, he added.
"I will have to take another look at that and confer with some judges and the commissions and panels I sit on," Bies said.
'A scarlet letter'
Simons, meanwhile, has been hired and promptly fired from several jobs, following background checks. She's too fearful to go to college. And she says she has been abandoned by nearly everyone, save for her family.
As neighboring communities draft ordinances to ban sex offenders from living near places where children gather, she worries she will never be able to move out of her parents' home.
"It's a scarlet letter," said Simons, who is eight months pregnant. "For the rest of my life, I will be classified as this dirty person, the scum of society."
Simons' baby is due at the end of August. For now, the baby's father is out of the picture. Her dreams of a college degree in accounting are dashed for the time being. She plans instead to finish cosmetology school sometime next year.
"I'm good at math and I'm smart, but now I'm going to be a cosmetologist," she said. "I don't know if a salon will ever hire me."
A bigger worry for the moment, she said, is how people will react when they see a "sex offender" with a baby.
"It's so scary."
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