Man acquitted for failure to register as offender

OK folks, everyone is so wrapped up in the theory that, once a sex offender the person is no good, that here, the powers that be, failed to do their jobs and the registrant suffered.

Lets take a closer look, likely after the uninformed tipster tipped the police, the man was arrested, charged, and a case prepared by the prosecutor. Then a defense attorney was hired, and they all go to court, attorney, prosecutor, judge, and a jury (how many people is that?). 30 minutes to decide that, law enforcement failed to even look on the registry to see that the guy (defendant) had properly registered his new address.

OK, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid! And it cost the state a pile of money! OH, its Florida...

7-11-2010 Florida:

Bay County man Benjamin Judson, 44, of Panama City was acquitted Thursday on charges of failing to register as a sex offender.

According to a press release from the Public Defender’s Office of the 14th Judicial Circuit, Judson was found not guilty by a Bay County jury after approximately 30 minutes of deliberation.

Assistant Public Defender Laura McCarthy represented Judson, and stated that the charge against him was based on a tip received from another sex offender.

The claim made was that Judson had moved. However, according to the release, law enforcement failed to verify that the defendant had actually changed his residence.

Instead, the release states, law enforcement relied on the misinformed tip from the other sex offender.

At trial, the tipster refused to testify, the release states. ..Source.. JCFloridan Staff

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Luckless Predator Only Attracted to Undercover Cops

8-18-2009 National:

It’s official. There’s nobody in the chat rooms but pedophiles and undercover police.

On Thursday, a federal appeals court upheld the conviction of an Indiana man whose online efforts to proposition underage girls led him to not one, not two, but three undercover cops, none of whom apparently knew about the others.

The case began in August 2006, when aspiring sexual predator James Daniel started an online conversation with Amanda_13, a fake 13-year-old girl voiced by Sergeant Richard Howard of the Porter County Sheriff’s Department.

After several highly explicit chats, Daniel asked Amanda_13 to meet him at a park in Valparaiso, Indiana, to have sex. When he showed up, he was arrested for inducing an individual under 18 to engage in criminal sexual activity.

When Secret Service agents searched Daniel’s computer, they found logs of chats with two other apparent minors, who described themselves as 13 and 15 years old, respectively. Federal prosecutors introduced the chats at Daniel’s trial as evidence of his perverted motives.

Supposedly, it was only after Daniel was convicted that the feds realized that one of those girls, daisy13_Indiana, was also a cop working the very same Secret Service operation. They informed Daniel’s attorney, who appealed on the grounds that the government improperly withheld information that would have proven entrapment.

The case became even more bizarre when the three-judge appellate panel reviewing the conviction saw the screen name of the third supposed teenager, blonddt, and recognized it from an earlier case.

“To our surprise, the government was unaware until this panel told it at oral argument that the other screen name, blonddt, was also an officer from the Indiana operation,” wrote Judge Diane Wood (.pdf) on Thursday.

Despite the prosecutorial missteps, the panel upheld Daniel’s conviction, ruling that the additional chat logs still showed his intent to commit a crime. Daniel is serving a sentence of 17-and-a-half years in prison, followed by supervised release for life.

There’s no evidence in the record that he ever succeeded in talking with a real underage girl. ..Source.. by Kevin Poulsen, Wired News

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