MN- Court sides with convicted sex offender in fight over name change

12-3-2008 Minnesota:

Court says prosecutor's protest isn't enough to deny sex offender's request

People who want to legally change their name usually draw little controversy. Few make their way to the Minnesota Court of Appeals.

But few of them are like Ozhaawaskoo Giishig.

Giishig, 37, is committed to a state hospital as a dangerous sex offender. He assaulted his girlfriend — then eight months pregnant with their child. He has at least 12 felony convictions, a number eclipsed by his 14 reported aliases.

But when he went to court last year to change his name to what it had been, Guy Israel Greene, a prosecutor objected and a judge in Carlton County denied the request. Acting as his own lawyer, Giishig appealed to the Court of Appeals, arguing in part that his religious freedom had been violated.

The reason: He said he changed his name after being told by an Ojibwe medicine man that Ozhaawaskoo Giishig was his "spirit name," then found out later that such names should be uttered aloud only in American Indian ceremonies. Not letting him change his name back violated his constitutional right of religious expression, he said.

The appeals court ruled Tuesday that the district judge erred in rejecting Giishig's request. In a tartly worded opinion, a three-judge panel remanded the case to the lower court, saying the original judge failed to lay out adequate reasons for rejection.

"We are especially concerned with the paucity of findings because the district court order gives the impression that if a felon applies for a change of name, the prosecuting authority need merely object and the application will be summarily denied," Judge Natalie Hudson wrote for the panel.
The prosecutor who objected to the name change, Sherburne County Attorney Kathleen Heaney, said she would object when it comes up again.

"We have an individual who has been convicted of person crimes — serious person crimes in my opinion — and secondly, an individual who was committed indefinitely," she said. "Given those two factors, we look at what the safety would be to the community. Taking those in consideration, we felt it was appropriate to object."

Giishig has a lengthy criminal history, which continued in prison, state records show. Since 1995, he has amassed four convictions for assault, four for aggravated robbery and two for burglary, as well as convictions for theft, making terroristic threats and giving a false name to a police officer. The convictions were in four different counties.

Court records show Greene was raised in Detroit Lakes, but his family moved several times and he attended schools there and in Moorhead and Spring Lake Park. In 1986, at age 15, he sexually assaulted a friend of his mother and was adjudicated delinquent. He was placed in the Hennepin County Home School Sex Offender Program.

In 1989, he was sentenced to 44 months in prison after pleading guilty to criminal sexual conduct. Then 18, he had sexually assaulted a woman in a parking lot.

While at the state prison in St. Cloud in 1992, Greene went to court to change his name to Ozhaawaskoo Giishig.

While name changes spurred by marriage or adoption or other reasons are routine, prosecutors get involved if the petitioner is a prisoner, said Carlton County Attorney Thomas Pertler, who has the Moose Lake prison in his jurisdiction.

"We routinely object to those requests," he said.

From a public safety standpoint, constant name changes can make it hard to keep track of offenders, he said.

But a judge granted Greene's request, and he took the name Giishig.

He was released from prison to a halfway house in December 1992, but he left without permission after three weeks. He did begin sex offender treatment in March 1993, but he went to only one session and left after 30 minutes.

Six months after getting out of prison, he robbed a man at knifepoint. While free on bail in that case, he broke into a woman's home, threatened her with a gun and stole her car.

He was eventually sentenced to 62 months in prison for the robbery and 88 months for the car theft.

Over the next few years, he was in and out of prison for a variety of offenses. His freedom ended in January 2004 after he assaulted his pregnant girlfriend.

Giishig was sent back to prison and later diagnosed as having drug and alcohol problems and adult antisocial personality disorder.

In 2005, Sherburne County became the second entity to seek to have him committed indefinitely to a state hospital. At his commitment hearing, Giishig claimed he was no longer dangerous because he had gotten engaged to a woman and had undergone a religious conversion.

He said the chances he would commit a violent act in the future were "slim to none." He also said his belief in Christ was "better than any civil commitment."

A judge ruled Giishig met the law's requirements to be committed as a sexually dangerous person. He was sent to the Minnesota Sex Offender Program at Moose Lake. A state appeals court upheld the finding.

Last year, Giishig sought to change his name back to Guy Israel Greene.

Heaney, the Sherburne County attorney whose office handled the assault involving the pregnant girlfriend, protested. She argued that granting the name change would compromise public safety. Giishig replied that because he is committed indefinitely and his status probably won't change, public safety was not an issue.

He argued that the district court's refusal to grant his name change violated his right to religious expression.

If Giishig "proved that failure to grant the name change infringed on a constitutional right, the district court was obligated to grant the name change," the appeals court said in its ruling. ..News Source.. by David Hanners