Made a really stupid joke to 17 year old female via text. No pictures, no swear words, signified as a joke , granted a stupid one, with emojis to emphasize the non serious intent of the statement. Very very stupid. I know. I had just gotten out of a horrible marriage, was a single dad suddenly and turned to drinking and benzos to cope. Very Very stupid. I know. Anyone who has ever mixed those two potions knows it is an outer body experience. I literally have no recollection of weeks at a time. I needless to stay was not myself when I sent the stupid text. Arrested and booked looking at 70 years out of the gate. After being told by the 17 year old that she wanted nothing to do with any of the police involvement, and the State realizing it was a text message nothing more, offered a probation class 6 open, meaning successful probation can equal misdemeanor. I can do probation, I am not the go to jail type. But there was one catch…..the probation was what they call “SOTP”. This program met biweekly and was all about full disclosure. The mantra was if you can talk openly about what you did you were less likely to re-offend. As if sitting next to some individuals who shared some of the most disgusting things I have ever heard in my life wasn’t challenging to the psyche enough, this program retains full control over visitation with your children, who you can socialize with, who you can date, if you can date, where you can work, if you can work. The hardest part wasn’t the polygraph or the psycho-sexual evaluations that showed little boys in bathing suits and you had to say if you were aroused and the test Administrator would determine in some magical way if you were being truthful, the hardest part was being told by the SOTP program that now I was unable to see my son until I demonstrated progress. I sent a stupid text message. Now I must perform psychological feets of strength to demonstrate to some stranger my fitness to see my own son. After a year of being told I was not ready to see my son, I became hopeless. I was 300% compliant, listening to the disgusting stories,, working a recovery program, taking parenting classes and holding down 2 restaurant jobs. But I wasn’t ready to see my son? For years I drank and smoked pot like the rest of you and the State didn’t mind but now I was sober, educated and serious but that was not good enough for the SOTP. I couldn’t figure out what they were waiting for. Then I relapsed. Let’s see, if we subject an addict to sick stories and obstruct his ability to even see his son, how long until he relapses. Well I made it 4 months and started drinking. You sit next to someone who put it in their daughter week after week and not scream, cry, not become violent, just what? Empathize? Day of my first polygraph…..I had the great idea to show up with a buzz on. Stupid I know. But hear me out, your freedom, your ability to see your child, keeping your name off the registry, if you can date, have friends, leave your house ALL hinges on a machine that at best, with the best examiners in the world stands at somewhere in the 80th percentile. That means even if I am 100% truthful, the test or the test admin will likely get it wrong 2 times for every 10 questions. Oh did I tell you that if the human reading the test cant figure it out, it’s recorded as deceitful and you are deemed a liar. For all I know the person giving me the exam could be a little off one day hell even Babe Ruth went 0 for 21 in June of 1934. And there had been no word on the street that the sultan of swat of the polygraph world lived in Arizona. Just look at these odds, you wouldn’t drink? Well needless to say the ca. predicated right, and they would be able to slap a DOC number on me and turn my incarceration into money in the bank.
Revocation is a sham. The po lists your violation and you choose to admit or deny. If you deny everything you stay in County Jail while you are supposed to build your case against your po. Or they tell you that if you admit to 2 all the other violations never get seen by the sentencing judge. I will gladly cop to being late for a group session instead of the Judge hearing I showed up for the polygraph and blew a .06. Surely that will ensure reinstatement and avoid time , registry or prison. What they don’t tell you is that the sentencing judge reads the POs narrative. That PO, with no psychological training, Trauma informed care wanna be cop can write anything they want in this narrative. And guess what, you already copped to two of the minor violations so the entire narrative becomes admissible. No rules of evidence, no discovery, no objections, NO DUE PROCESS. Judge looks at the poorly written, barely coherent 5th grade lexicon passed as an excuse for a legal document and gives me 6 months County time followed by the difference in my probation time on IPS SOTP and says if he sees me again, he is going to make me register. That’s right the nonpunative registry will be used to punish me if this Judge sees me again. 30 days from finishing IPS SOTP and suddenly my PO since day one on IPS is gone and 2 very angry County employees are assigned my file. All the rules changed and someone forgot to tell me. Suddenly with 30 days left, if I was 5 minutes out of pocket, VIOLATION. If I worked overtime to close the restaurant and came home late, VIOLATION, if I chose to buy my son a boat present instead of paying my probation fee, VIOLATION. There I was back in front of the Judge being handed a life sentence with no relief in site of being on the registry. No evidence, no chance to contest the POs accusations. I met my public defender 5 minutes before the sentencing on the revocation. She gave a very impassioned statement that gave me goosebumps, without even knowing my name, but the Judge was a man of his word and punished me for violating IPS SOTP probation by giving me 37 days on the yard and making me register for the rest of my life. I can write a book on the bullshit my son and I went through in the Juvenile Courts just to get visitation again, but as it is, I have gone on too long. I have since been fired from every job after they complete their Google search style background check , that I have stopped counting. Thank God for Covid because I would be homeless without the Federal Enhancement on the UI benefits. But as we watch our Republican and Fundamentalist friends die from Covid over the idea of wearing a stupid mask, the benefits have stopped,restaurants are empty and I must resume the humiliating dance of a sex offender job search, I dream of a law that makes the punishment fit the crime, that doesn’t make toilet paper out of our Constitution, and shows the world that you can be put on the list of hopelessness without having “your day in court”. I’m David and I sent a digital collection of letters through the air that would be rated PG13 in the entertainment world, and I am an alcoholic who has a genetic predisposition to solve my problems with wine and beer (thank you Sicilian and Irish ancestors) and now I am excluded from society, shunned from my son’s school and told I am a danger to those around me in the form of a flier and hundreds hate filled websites that prove our society despises SOs more then terrorists. The 20th anniversary of 9/11 just passed and we have forgotten the names of the terrorists that killed over 3,000 of my brothers and sisters, we never even learned the truth of what country sponsored this atrocity, but my name and your name or the name of someone you love, cannot be forgotten as easily. We have in a way forgiven those confused people by letting their names drift into the media ether. But Arizona will see to it that my name and the name of 600,000 other people will NEVER be forgotten. “We will never forget” is suddenly not a positive thing. Please forget? Even those on Death Row are granted the courtesy of people forgetting their names, but not the dangerous text messenger, my name will never be forgotten, why because I relapsed? Do the math…..give an addict 3 years, turn up the heat in sick and twisted ways, and guess how long until they relapse. That’s like betting on there being a cloudy day or Babe Ruth breaking out of his slump, or the disease doing exactly what science knows it is going to do……90 % of people in recovery relapse. You can almost set your watch by it. Today I am sober and still very angry. As many of you, I don’t deserve to have my Civil Rights taken forever, because the County Attorney knew an addict would easily relapse at some point in 3 years and then the plea becomes garbage anyway. We live in the United States in the year 2021 and allow our democracy to condemn people for eternity, as they did in the Salem Witch trials or the Roman Colosseum. What have we learned in the hundreds of years since those primitive days? How are we anymore civilized or evolved if we still shit in the face of justice or won’t even wear a mask to prevent from killing our family members. Insert definition of insanity here! I will keep fighting but I am a little intimidated by oh the Supreme Court and the very real chance I will piss off a cop or another Judge and be sent back to the yard for sending a stupid text message. What would the Founders say if I could share my story with them? Why do we stand for this, why do we sit idly by and let them wipe their ass with the Constitution and scream about voting machines and mask mandates? Here’s a mandate, that we treat ALL people with dignity and respect and condemn no person without giving them the chance to demonstrate rehabilitation. But apparently just as with our Republican friends and their defiance of the Covid vaccine, I am a lost cause.

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The opinions expressed within posts and comments are solely those of each author, and are not necessarily those of Women Against Registry. Women Against Registry reserves the right to edit or delete any content submitted.