I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
This story was published yesterday, but it’s very much worth the read. In it, AnnArbor.com’s Lee Higgins profiled Matthew Freeman, a 23-year-old Pittsfield Township man who pleaded guilty to fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct — the state’s least serious sex crime — six years ago.
According to the story, when he was 17 he had consensual sex with his then 15-year-old girlfriend, and the girl’s mother wasn’t happy about it.
Because the age of consent in Michigan is 16, Freeman committed a “crime” — and if nothing changes, he’ll pay for it by remaining on the state’s online sex offender registry until 2028. Sound fair to you?
Read the story for yourself and see what you think.
It is the case that Michigan puts more of its citizens on the registry than just about any other state — and with harsh, employment- and housing-denying consequences for years.
About Freeman’s case, I’m left wondering why the description of his 4th degree CSC charge on the online registry includes the words “Force Or Coercion,” when the police report apparently contradicts that. From the story:
[T]he police report says the victim was “not forced to commit any act” nor “did she ask him not to commit any act.”
My hunch is that if either Freeman or his then-girlfriend were consuming alcohol — and that somehow found it’s way into the court record — a by-the-books prosecutor may have decided that “force or coercion” did in fact play a role, even though a common-sense understanding of those words would indicate it did not.
The best (and worst) part of Higgins’ story, in my opinion, is that in includes the recent tip that came to the Michigan State Police from a concerned neighbor.
It was that tip (culled, in part, in error from Freeman’s page on the sex offender site) that brought an officer to his driveway back in August looking into Freeman’s latest problem with the terms and conditions of being a registered sex offender in Michigan: living less than 1,000 feet from a school safety zone. In his case, his family home is across the street from Carpenter Elementary School,
From the story:
The tipster was a mother who lived in the neighborhood. She wrote that a sex offender of a “child under the age of 13” was living in front of the school.
“I can’t let my children play at this school anymore because he is always outside playing basketball, watching the kids that are playing,” she wrote. “How creepy, how disgusting…please help us get rid of him.”
Freeman said the accusation he sexually assaulted a child under age 13, “just kills me.”
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