6-11-2009 Minnesota:
Two men convicted of criminal sexual conduct for cutting the underwear off a female acquaintance at a Sartell bar will be required to register as sex offenders.
Stearns County District Court Judge Vicki Landwehr ordered Russell Baumgardner and Michael Puhalla to register as predatory offenders, a requirement that will follow them for at least 10 years.
Baumgardner and Puhalla’s attorneys initially intended to challenge Stearns County’s efforts to force the men to register. They dropped their opposition, and Landwehr modified a previous sentencing order to include the registration requirement for the two men.
Baumgardner, 42, and Puhalla, 41, were sentenced by Landwehr to 15 days in jail and the equivalent time in community service. Landwehr convicted the two of misdemeanor fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct but found them not guilty of the more serious felony charges of second-degree assault and second-degree criminal sexual conduct.
Puhalla admitted holding the woman’s hands while Baumgardner used a pocket knife to cut both sides of her panties and then tried to pull them off. Their attorneys argued the incident was a playful game between them and the woman at the former Dam Bar. The county argued that the woman was the victim of an assault at knifepoint.
State law requires a defendant to register as a sex offender when the original charge is a felony that requires registration but the conviction is for a misdemeanor.
The law requires such registration until 10 years have elapsed since the person initially registered or until the probation, supervised release or conditional release period expires, whichever occurs later. ..Source.. by David Unze
2 comments:
You ask if this is the sort of thing for which the registries were meant. Probably not, but as they were based on a false premise and maintained purely for self-serving purposes then the more outlandish they become the more likely they are to be discarded.
Followup to Zot's comment: The Rockefeller drug laws are a prime example of laws thought to capture the worst and in fact captured the least more often, and ultimately have been shown to be useless as are these sex offender laws.
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