Bill ends sex offender registration for some convicted of statutory rape

BOISE – It’s a common story. A 20-year-old man is dating a 17-year-old woman, and they become intimate. The young woman’s parents find out and demand the man be prosecuted for statutory rape, a felony in Idaho. The man is found guilty and must register as a sex offender for at least 10 years.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Denton Darrington, R-Declo, said he’s heard that story and others like it too many times from constituents and fellow lawmakers.

Now he’s sponsoring SB 1425, which would eliminate the sex offender registration requirement for 19- and 20-year-olds found guilty of statutory rape who are within three years of age of their partner, but only if all involved parties agree or if the offender can prove he or she is not a threat to society.

Those cases are ones where there “was no ill intent except that the moon was out and they were in the back seat of a car,” Darrington said. “They don’t need to have their lives ruined.”

“It’s a small step, and I think at this point in time an important step,” he added.

The American Civil Liberties Union supports the bill, said Marty Durand, lobbyist for the Idaho chapter, which she said is rare for the organization to do with legislation from Darrington, an advocate of extended prison sentences and tougher crime laws.

Durand encouraged the Legislature to do more to lessen punishments for statutory rape, which Idaho law generally treats the same as forcible rape.

“We have always seen a problem with treating consensual sex between young people as a criminal offense,” Durand said. “Even if a young man now does not have to go on the sex offender registry, he is still burdened with the record of having a felony rape.”

Darrington said he recognizes the bill is very narrow. He would have liked to increase the age for eligibility by a couple years and expand the age difference to about five years, he said.

“I went as far as I could go without opposition,” he said.

Darrington consulted the Idaho attorney general when drafting the bill, and the state prosecutor’s association has no opinion on it, he said.

“I’ve been working on this for a long, long time,” he said. “I’m very pleased to get this far.”

Committee member Mel Richardson, R-Idaho Falls, asked what would happen if all involved parties didn’t agree and a young woman’s parents demand the young man register.

That’s when the young man has the opportunity to prove he is not a threat, Darrington said.

“The judge would have to make a decision if he felt comfortable enough by looking into the eyes of that person that he was telling the truth,” he said. “There has to be some criteria and there has to be somebody making judgment, and the one making judgment, of course, ought to be the judge.”

Darrington helped craft the legislation that created the sex offender registry in 1993.