sex offender registryThere are more than 45,000 names and faces on Michigan’s online public sex offender registry and Francie Baldino is convinced that’s just too many.

But Baldino, the one-woman-Michigan chapter of the national organization Reform Sex Offender Laws, didn’t always think so.

“I never even realized this was going on until it happened to my son,” Baldino, a Royal Oak native, told Michigan Messenger in a recent interview.

In 2004, her son Kenneth Thorsberry was convicted of “criminal sexual conduct” when he was 18 years old. His offense was dating and eventually having consensual sex with a girl who was 14 years old and according to Michigan law, unable to consent. The couple met when he was still 17. Due to a second encounter with the same girl after serving an initial 10 months behind bars — a violation of his probation — Thorsberry was again reported by the girl’s father, and ultimately sentenced to five years in prison.

At the sentencing hearing, Baldino recounts a tearful plea for leniency from her son’s under-age girlfriend, Emily, followed by the Oakland County prosecutor’s insistence that Thorsberry committed rape.

“I wanted to jump up and scream,” Baldino said. “Yes, he made a huge mistake, and I definitely don’t condone teen sex,” she added. “But he’s no threat to anyone.”

As her son serves out the remaining months of his sentence at the state’s Ionia Maximum Correctional Facility — and braces for life on the state’s online sex offender registry for 25 years — Baldino is channeling emotion into activism.

Her ambitious goal is to help convince tough-on-crime state lawmakers to reconsider grouping young scofflaws like her son with more sinister offenders on a public registry that is widely known to severely limit future job opportunities, among other long-term effects.

“For him and others like him to have to register as a sex offender and be thrown in with real rapists and child molesters, that’s just overblown,” she said with a deep sigh. “These kids’ futures are just ruined. Totally ruined.”

A case decided last month by a unanimous panel of judges of the Michigan Court of Appeals provides a glimmer of hope that the state’s punishment for so-called Romeo and Juliet relationships isn’t so severe.

In that case, 18-year-old Robert DiPiazza had been found guilty of having consensual sex with his then 15-year-old girlfriend — now his wife — by a Muskegon County judge. He was required to register on the sex offender registry for a quarter century, and just like the most serious sexual predators, regularly report any change of address — along with a photo — for anyone with Internet access to see, including all prospective employers.

As a result, it became virtually impossible for DiPiazza to land and hold a job.

While DiPiazza’s case turned on other factors as well — including the timing of his conviction, just weeks before a 2004 exemption took effect that allows some young offenders to avoid the registry — the appellate decision is especially noteworthy because it held that listing underage, consensual sex offenders on the public registry amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. DiPiazza’s name and photo have since been removed from the website.

“The decision was tremendous,” said Lyn D’Orio, an Ann Arbor attorney and member of another Michigan group clamoring for reform, the Coalition for a Useful Registry. The decision, she added, could provide a path off the registry for hundreds of other Romeos and Juliets, depending on how the court’s precedent shakes out.

“I would say to anybody, if you had sex before you were 16, you might have been in their shoes,” D’Orio added. She goes on to argue that the original purpose of the registry has been diluted.

“The purpose of the sex offender registry is to inform the public so they can keep themselves and the public safe, and there are a lot of people on the registry who are not dangerous at all,” D’Orio asserted. “There are predators out there, and I want to know who they are, but when you have everyone on that list how do you know?”

That question speaks to a related reform advocates like Baldino and D’Orio would like to see: more leeway for judges faced with these cases.

“The law needs to be changed to give judges discretion,” Cheryl Carpenter, a Redford attorney and also a member of the coalition, said. “We need to put the right people on the registry. Michigan just puts everybody on the registry.”

Carpenter, who said she’s handled at least 20 underage sex offender cases, suggests other reforms she’d like to see enacted.

“One of things we need to have is risk assessments on these defendants to see if the person meets the definition of a pedophile,” she said.

Carpenter points to what she describes as a “logical” comparison: “For drunk driving cases, it’s mandatory that a defendant have an alcohol assessment. Why aren’t we having that in the sex crimes cases?”

Noting the regular sweeps of registered sex offenders by the Michigan State Police, the agency responsible for maintaining and enforcing the requirements of the registry, Carpenter suggests that reform would save the state money.

“The cost of maintaining the registry would come down if you just have the people who are really dangerous on it,” she said.

Registrants are not allowed to live or “loiter” within 1,000 feet of a school zone, a restriction that has been interpreted by some schools to mean that offenders can’t even pick up their own child from school. The terms of parole for sex offenders can routinely include an outright ban on any contact with anyone under 17 (at a park or a public swimming pool or even at home), possession of a computer that can connect to the Internet, as well as GPS monitoring.

“I think the worst thing about being on the registry is all these restrictions about how you live your life,” Carpenter added. “They live in constant fear about what’s going to happen to me next.”

Baldino said that when her son is released next year, he will likely be prohibited from living in her home because she lives across the street from a park. He would have to leave, she adds, if young nieces or nephews were at the house.

“If he’s restricted from living with me, he’s not going be in a stable setting to start his life over,” Baldino said.

Meanwhile, a dispute over how many underage offenders are actually on the registry plays out.

Shanon Banner, a spokeswoman for the Michigan State Police, said in an interview that of the 45,164 individuals currently on the online registry, only 40 are like DiPiazza.

“That’s about .001 percent of the individuals on the registry,” Banner said. “Oftentimes, it’s portrayed to be hundreds or thousands of individuals.”

But according to figures compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, there are more than 246 such cases, 40 of which are “age-only no force or coercion” cases. But a case gets that designation by the state police only if alcohol or drugs were not involved.

Moreover, Carpenter speculates that there could be hundreds more similar cases in which offenders were not sentenced as “youthful trainees,” a legal designation at the center of the DiPiazza case.

Banner did not return subsequent calls seeking clarification about the numbers.

But beyond the numbers, Baldino worries that many politicians will shy away from addressing the problem.

“That’s a huge problem,” she said. “They think they’ll be perceived as condoning teen sex.”

Carpenter agrees.

“This is not an area where legislators want to say, ‘Yes, I’m pro sex offender,’” she said. “There’s a lot of pressure on them.”

Nevertheless, Baldino said she’s not giving up on talking up reform even if few will listen.

“I’ve even done stuff like writing letters to Dr. Phil and asked if he ever heard about this problem and I never got a response,” she said. “I kind of feel no one wants to touch it.”

Still, she’s determined to at least set the record straight about her son.

“It’s just expected that someone would think he’s some creepo rapist when they’re just not realizing that he was just a stupid kid who made a gigantic mistake.”