Stalking Law Violator Has New Trouble : Courts: First Orange County man convicted of harassing a woman in violation of new law pleads guilty to violating court order to stay 10 miles from her.

The first Orange County man convicted under the state’s anti-stalking law pleaded guilty Tuesday to violating a court order that he stay more than 10 miles away from the woman he was accused of harassing for more than a decade.

James Otis Sims, Jr., 39, was convicted in January, 1992, of stalking Sandra Potter, 33, of Westminster, and was sentenced to 60 days in jail under a new anti-stalking law that went into effect one year earlier. A condition of his probation was that he remain more than 10 miles from Potter’s work and home.

Sims was arrested July 13 in a Garden Grove park, when an alert detective recognized him. While there was no evidence that he was trying to harass Potter, he was in violation of the court-imposed terms of his probation, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Mike Molfetta.

Defense Atty. James Brott said his client has vowed that he will never contact Potter in any way, but the tough probation terms “basically drum him out of Orange County, away from his friends, his family and his doctor.”

Sims asked to be sent to jail for a sufficiently long term to be “free” from any probation requirements when he is released. But the judge ordered him jailed at least until January, and indicated that Sims would be required to complete a period of probation after his release.

For reasons that were not explained, Sims asked to remain in jail in Santa Ana, which the judge was able to accommodate.

Sims previously violated the terms of his probation last November and was sentenced to 60 days in jail after he was discovered in a Garden Grove theater a few miles from Potter’s residence. When he caught sight of the detective who caught him last week, he said, “I know, I know, I’m not supposed to be here,” Molfetta said.

Potter, meanwhile, said she has “really given up any pretense of ever living a normal life without constantly looking over my shoulder. I know that this will go on until one of us is dead,” said Potter, who dated Sims for a few months in 1979, but broke off the relationship because “he became too possessive.”

For the last 14 years, Potter said, she has endured beatings, slashed car tires, countless phone calls and driving with an eye on the rear-view mirror to make sure Sims was not in pursuit.

Potter said Sims called an insurance company in 1991 and claimed that she was attempting to secure a life insurance policy on her husband, because she was planning to kill him. “That was really the last straw, because I’m the kind of person who would rather put up with something (myself) than have my family deal with it,” Potter said.