Legislators Seek to Narrow Megan’s Law

State legislators are attempting to narrow the scope of Megan’s Law, the sex offender registration statute that inadvertently forced some elderly gay men to register as sex criminals along with child molesters and rapists.

Assemblywoman Barbara Alby (R-Fair Oaks), who authored Megan’s Law in California, has submitted a bill amending technical problems with the measure. After meetings between Department of Justice officials and civil libertarians, Alby has agreed to add to Megan’s Law a mechanism to remove the names of improperly registered sex offenders from the state’s databases.

A story in The Times earlier this year showed how youthful indiscretions between consenting adults have come back to haunt otherwise law-abiding men in the current crackdown against child abuse.

For 50 years, California has required people convicted of crimes deemed sex offenses to register with their local police. But these laws were rarely used until recently, when California became one of dozens of states to enact a version of Megan’s Law.

Named after a New Jersey girl allegedly slain by a paroled molester, Megan’s Law calls for a database of the names, photographs and ZIP codes of California’s 57,000 registered sex offenders to be available to the public by July 1.

But among those sex offenders are untold numbers of elderly gay men who were arrested in the 1940s and 1950s for crimes no longer considered sex offenses. In the rush by authorities to update their files over the past year, these men and others convicted long ago of consensual sex acts with adults have been forced to register as sex offenders, casting a Kafkaesque shadow over their golden years.

The specifics of Alby’s bill are still being ironed out, but all sides agree that something must be done.

“We’ve had meetings with the Department of Justice and they have expressed interest in trying to remedy the situation,” ACLU lobbyist Francisco Labaco said. “They do not want the names of these people on the list any more than the ACLU does.”

“This may be the first time the ACLU is backing a Barbara Alby sex offender bill,” said Alby aide George Passantino.

One name on the list was that of a 90-year-old Leisure World resident, who in 1944 pleaded guilty to lewd conduct after police caught him putting his hand on another man’s knee inside a parked car in West Hollywood.

Fifty years later, a letter arrived at his home stamped “SEX CRIME” in red ink. His wife of 50 years received it. Only with the help of a lawyer did the man get his name removed.

The problem, authorities said, is that old criminal records do not specify whether the crime was a consensual act between adults or a violent crime. The Department of Justice even tried to weed out consensual offenders from its records in 1995, but if there was nothing on records to assure agents that the act was now legal, offenders were left on.

One proposal is for judges to be empowered to remove people from the list if they were found to have been convicted of acts that are no longer registerable offenses, said Rob Stutzman, a spokesman for Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren. Registered offenders would make their case to the judge in a private hearing.

“Our point of view is that if they’re not dangerous . . . we’re not interested in them registering on the database and taking up space,” Stutzman said.

That heartens Harold, a 63-year-old Los Angeles resident, Korean War veteran and former registered sex offender.

In 1956, Harold was caught having oral sex with another sailor in a parked car in La Jolla. Nearly 40 years later, he was ordered to register as a sex offender, and his name was stricken from the list only after a 14-month battle involving a bevy of free attorneys and help from the ACLU.

“There’s such a waste of manpower,” Harold said. “All these detectives are sitting around police stations registering people who shouldn’t be registered instead of breaking up gangs or catching murderers.”