WI- Parents say assault charges against son too much

. 12-8-2008 Wisconsin:

In a case his parents consider prosecutorial overkill, a 14-year-old Mequon boy has been charged with five counts of fourth-degree sexual assault and faces the prospect of being tagged a sex offender for touching several girls in what his parents admit was an inappropriate manner.

So, last week in Ozaukee County Circuit Court, the boy's parents said no when Ozaukee County District Attorney Sandy Williams offered to reduce the charges to two counts of fourth-degree sexual assault and, if he pleaded no contest, to expunge his conviction if he stayed out of trouble for a year.

The parents said their son was guilty of nothing more than disorderly conduct.

"We don't want to have anything to do with sexual assault," said the boy's father, who along with the boy's mother is not being identified to protect the identity of the juvenile boy. "He could be put on a sex offender registry list that would come back to haunt him."

Now the boy is scheduled to appear in court again Feb. 3 for an evidentiary hearing, which amounts to a trial, in which the girls are likely to be compelled to testify and experts will be called to give their opinion on whether a 12- or 13-year-old boy can be sexually aroused by grabbing a girl's buttocks.

The maximum penalty for each of the five misdemeanor charges is nine months' incarceration, according to a juvenile delinquency petition. According to state Department of Corrections spokesman Rachel Krueger, those convicted of fourth-degree sexual assault are not required to register as sex offenders, but a judge could order the boy to do so, especially since the alleged victims were children and because of the number of counts against him.

According to the petition filed in July by Williams, here's what happened:

Two girls at Steffen Middle School in Mequon told officials June 6, a Friday, that the boy, 13 years old at the time, during class had grabbed the buttocks of one girl, 14, and unhooked the bra of the other girl, 13.

Under questioning by police, officials learned of other unreported incidents going back to October 2007, when the boy was 12, when he grabbed other girls' buttocks or their breasts, licked a girl's neck and tickled another girl in the stomach, according to the petition.

The boy's father met with Steffen Principal Deborah Anderson later that day and was informed that his son would be suspended for the last four days of the school year and that the matter was being referred to the school's police liaison officer "as matter of routine," the father said.

Mequon-Thiensville Schools Superintendent Demond Means declined to comment.

On the following Monday, the parents learned that what they thought was a school issue had become a police matter when the boy was called into the Mequon Police Department to be interviewed and was arrested.

The father had hoped that a visit to the police station would be little more than an attempt to help his son "man up" to what he had done, he said.

"I was in total shock" when his son was arrested, he said, especially after he had told the police officer they had already taken steps to discipline their son.

The weekend before the arrest, the boy's parents had made arrangements for their son to be taken to a wilderness camp for troubled teens in Utah.

It was a surprise to the boy when he was whisked away in the middle of the night on Wednesday and flown to the camp.

He stayed there for the next two months.

Mequon police Capt. Dan Buntrock, who recommended the charges to Williams, said the charges are appropriate for the behavior.

"If someone touches someone sexually in a bar, is that fourth-degree sexual assault? Yes," he said. "It doesn't really matter where it occurs. And when the victim is of a certain age, it's even more serious."

State law says fourth-degree sexual assault occurs when someone intentionally touches another person to gratify himself sexually, or sexually degrades or humiliates that person.

In the opinion of Buntrock and Williams, that's what the boy did.

To the parents, however, their son is guilty of inappropriate behavior, disorderly conduct and "numskull friendliness," the mother said, quoting a therapist with whom her son has met.

"A 12-year-old boy does not do these things to sexually gratify himself," she said.

According to affidavits submitted in court Thursday in an attempt to block an order to testify in court, the girls and their parents said they did not feel degraded by the boy and that they did not want him criminally prosecuted, only disciplined by the school for the two events on June 6.

Their son and the girls remain friends, the boy's parents said. ..News Source.. by Dan Benson of the Journal Sentinel