Teen Ordered to Sex Offender Registry for 25 Years

Zach Anderson hugs his parents, Les and Amanda Anderson, upon his release from jail last month after serving 90 days for criminal sexual conduct for having sex with a 14-year-old who lied about her age. (Screenshot via ABC’s “Nightline”)

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Zach Anderson, 19, says he’s no “monster,” but judging by the punishment he received for having sex with a girl who told him she was 17, the law is treating him like some of society’s most despised people, registered sex offenders .

For the next 25 years, not only must he add his name to the same rolls as violent rapists, he is forbidden to live in certain places, including his family home, and he faces tight restrictions on where he can work. He cannot own a smart phone. He cannot use a computer. Aside from immediate family, he cannot speak to anyone less than 17 years old.

He will be 46 when his name finally comes off the registry, in 2040.

Anderson was arrested last winter and charged with a sex crime after having sex with a girl he had met through a dating app, he told ABC’s “Nightline” in a program that aired Thursday.

They flirted through text messages and, having been assured by the girl that she was 17, he drove the 20 miles between his home in Elkhart, IN, and hers in Niles, MI, and the two had sex at a playground, he said.

Anderson found out after the girl’s mother reported her daughter missing that she was only 14. He was arrested two months later, and pleaded guilty last spring to fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct in a Michigan court.

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The now 15-year-old girl admitted she lied about her age, and she and her mother both pleaded with the judge not to tag him as a sex offender.

But Anderson drew a tough judge who condemned what he called a culture of, “meet, hook-up, have sex, sayonara, totally inappropriate behavior,” according to court records. He sentenced Anderson to 90 days in jail and ordered him to register as a sex offender.

Anderson was released from the St. Joseph County Jail last month after serving his sentence, and is now adjusting to what life is like for a registered sex offender.

For the next five years, being a registered sex offender means he can’t have a smartphone or use the Internet. So much for his Plan A, a career in computer science.

Other than immediate family, he can’t speak to anyone younger than 17. He can’t frequent places that serve alcohol, and he has an 8 o’clock nightly curfew. He can’t pursue a favorite activity, skateboarding, because he’s banned from public parks.

There are more places where Anderson can’t live than places that meet 1,000-foot distance requirements intended to separate sex offenders from places children might congregate.

His parents’ home is 800 feet from a public boat ramp, so Les and Amanda Anderson had to use some of their savings to buy their son a fixer-upper across town.

“They make me out to be a monster,” Anderson told the news magazine. “I can’t even look at life regularly.”

Had he known the girl’s true age, he wouldn’t have pursued the flirtation, he told ABC.

“I wouldn’t even have gone to her house, like I literally wouldn’t have gone to her house at all,” he said.

Attorney: “No Criminal Intent”

The Andersons are waging a public fight on Facebook and through other channels to get sex offender registry laws changed. They wonder how many other people landed on the registry through circumstances similar to their son’s.

“If our son’s a sex offender,” Les Anderson said, “there’s a lot of other people on that list like him which dilutes the list, and it almost makes it meaningless.”

Zach Anderson’s attorney, Scott Grabel, told “Nightline” the intent isn’t to loosen the law to the point that predators who prey on young people escape prosecution. “They absolutely should be” prosecuted, Grabel said, but he emphasized:

“This is an instance in my opinion that you rarely get to say the defendant had no criminal intent, and I don’t think the defendant was even negligent in engaging in the encounter.”

But State Sen. Rick Jones, R-Grand Ledge, who wrote Michigan’s sex offender registry law, a code so tough there’s no automatic defense when victims lie about their age, told ABC that Anderson should have been more careful.

“As you grow up, I mean young men are told, you know, in high school, 15 is jailbait,” Jones said. “Now that’s a slang term, but that’s what young men are told … I would hope that somebody who was 19 years old would say ‘Well do you have a driver’s license or something? You don’t appear to be the appropriate age.’ ”

Anderson is due back in court in Niles to appeal his sentence on Aug. 5, according to the Justice 4 Zach Facebook page. His parents told ABC they hope their son will be removed from the registry, and that his ordeal will lead to reform of the law.

“We hope that they stop putting people on the sex offender registry like they’re passing out traffic tickets,” Amanda Anderson said. “There are hundreds and hundreds of people that don’t deserve to be on that list, and it’s supposed to be a safeguard for the community. And instead, they’re just publicly shaming these people and our son for life.”

Law’s Author Opposes Reform

The Michigan registry, which contains 43,000 names, is already under fire, according to a Detroit Free Press report this spring. Each state has a digital registry, and collectively they contain about 800,000 names. Michigan ranks fourth in the nation with the number of offenders on the registry.

Jones, a former county sheriff, told the Free Press that he opposes narrowing the circumstances that require registering as a sex offender.

“The problem I have is should we go back and say only pedophiles have to register?” he said. “Do we want violent sex offenders on the school grounds? Do we want public masturbators on the school grounds? I’m not prepared to change the way the list operates.”

State sex offender registries have been around since the 1990s, but lawmakers have expanded them over the years to include teenagers like Anderson, who had consensual sex with a minor, and, until 2011 in Michigan, people arrested for public urination.