TheTrenchcoat Chronicles

Tag: sex offender

  • craigslist babysiter was a level 3 sex offender

    Neighbor catches sex offender seeking babysitting job on Craigslist:

    Gather ’round and listen to the tale of John Gilbert Gray. A level 3 Washington State sex offender who thought he was pretty slick. His original crime was for the sexual assault of a 21-year-old woman. When he got out he told authorities he was homeless. In actuality, he was living with his wife in an apartment. The reason was that if he reported as homeless a sex offender notification would not be distributed around the neighborhood.

    And he would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for those meddling housewives. And the fact that he took an ad out on craigslist for BABYSITTING!!!

    But a young mother in Gray’s neighborhood, who fears retaliation and wants to remain anonymous, says she was checking Craigslist, and found an ad for babysitting that made her suspicious.

    “We decided out of the blue to check it up on Washington State sex offender’s list and lo and behold there was his face,” the mother said.

    In the neighborhood, the woman says Gray went by the name “Logan”. She says she and other mothers were alarmed to realize Gray is a level three-sex offender — the highest risk to re-offend — and that he and his wife were advertising to babysit.

    So she reported him.

    For his efforts, Gray is looking at a year in the pokey.

    I really wonder what made him think that babysitter was the logical career choice for a sex offender trying to hide from authorities. Did he think that no parent would do any kind of background check on him? Not to mention the fact that hiring a babysitter from craigslist is not the most logical choice for a parent.

  • Brandon Bigsby: sex offender and parole violator

    MySpace.com Used To Track Sex Offender:

    Registered sex offender Brandon Bigsby, 24, must have really been addicted to MySpace considering he broke basically all of his parole conditions to use it…

    On Thursday, officers were dispatched to Taft College, where they found Bigsby’s GPS tracking device. He was believed to have left an hour previously to the deputies’ arrival. Deputies tracked Bigsby to the Beale Library in downtown Bakersfield, where he accessed a MySpace forum. Officials arrived and found Bigsby, where he was arrested.

    Bigsby pleaded guilty to one count of a lewd and lascivious with a child under 14 years of age in May 2003, according to Superior Court records. He was sentenced to three years at Wasco State Prison and required to register as a sex offender. He is listed on the Megan’s Law Web site.

    If parole violations aren’t enough to keep pedophiles off of MySpace I don’t see how any legislation could either.

    I was unable to find a MySpace for Bigsby.

  • More on Viriginia’s proposed MySpace legislation

    False promises on MySpace safety:

    I’m kind of relieved that I’m not the only person that thinks Virginia’s proposed MySpace legislation is pointless…

    Flummoxed by bad press, the folks at MySpace.com are scrambling to derail the perception that they’ve become the preferred dating service of pedophiles.

    The first arrow in their anti-Cupid’s quiver is to enact state and federal laws requiring that convicted sex offenders register their e-mail addresses just as they already must register their physical one. Armed with the new database, MySpace and other sites will be able to bar the cyber-gates against perverts.

    On Monday, Virginia’s Attorney General Bob McDonnell announced his backing for the required legislative changes here.

    McDonnell is right to be concerned about the issue, but if his loud endorsement causes parents to ease up on supervising children’s Internet use, the effort will be worse than irrelevant. The idea is so ridiculously full of holes that any predator familiar with such obscure Internet technologies as Yahoo! and Google can get around it with a minute’s effort.

  • Va. Attorney General piles on MySpace

    Virginia Attorney General Proposes MySpace Bill:

    Another State Attorney General who doesn’t get it jumps on the MySpace scarewagon. This time from the Commonwealth of Virginia.

    Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell announced plans today for legislation to require convicted sex offenders to register their online identities with the state.

    That would allow social networking Web sites like MySpace to delete or block access. McDonnell’s says in a statement that Virginia would be the first state to propose registration of e-mail addresses and instant messaging identities on the state’s sex offender registry.

    McDonnell says it’s important these changes be made at a state level because most prosecutions of sex offenders happen at the state level. There are more than 550-thousand registered sex offenders in the United States and 13-thousand in Virginia.

    MySpace officials applauded the Virginia announcement, saying the Internet “is a community as real as any other neighborhood and is in need of similar safeguards.”

    In my opinion, this proposed legislation is just to garner votes from the equally clueless soccer mom types.

    Again I say what’s to stop the sex offenders from creating another account different from one registered with the state. And how will this prevent those predators who haven’t been caught from claiming another victim?

    When you have those questions answered then you’ll have some legislation with teeth instead of the same old crap that legislators have been trotting out.

    Politicians and lawmakers should learn how to use the internet first before they start legislating it.

    And again not one mention of more vigilant parenting.

  • The overlegislation of MySpace continues

    And while we’re plugging other blogs (because you know, we were) Pat from BelchSpeak has a great post about new proposed legislation that would make it illegal for sex offenders to use fraudulent e-mails to sign up for MySpace…

    The danger in this is that the Federal government suddenly gains the power to monitor the email activity of everyone in order to enforce a law against a small portion of the population. Otherwise this law banning the use of non-registered email addresses is unenforceable. Are liberals going to be outraged over the civil rights of sex offenders being violated?

    Thank you, Charles Schumer and John McCain. Is there nothing you two won’t try to legislate?

  • More on the MySpace database

    Can MySpace Protect Its People?:

    This is basically an article from Internet News about MySpace’s declaration of their sexual offender database and how they’re going to keep sex offenders off MySpace and how that’s not going to work…

    “We are committed to keeping sex offenders off MySpace,” Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace chief security officer, said in a statement. The database is a “significant step to keep our members as safe as possible.”

    MySpace said Sentinal Safe resulted from talks with North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. But in a statement, Blumenthal called the new measure “ineffective without age and identity verification.

    “Convicted sexual offenders” can swiftly circumvent these protections by using fake names,” he said. The tobacco and alcohol industries already employ age and identity verification on the Internet, he added.

    Nigam said a gap will still remain in the ability to keep sex offenders off social-networking sites until legislation is passed forcing convicted offenders to use registered e-mail addresses.

    How can you force anyone to continually use the same e-mail address? That sounds like a waste of taxpayer money to me. Just because you can legislate something doesn’t make it feasible.

    The article also quotes some really smart people…

    “If predators really want to get around [the barrier] they can easily do it,” Ron Teixeira, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance, said. A blog titled MyCrimeSpace.com lists news items of adults meeting children on the social-networking site.

    Well, that’s not all I do here but you get the point.

  • MySpace to block sex offenders

    MySpace tool to help block sex offenders:

    MySpace, the popular online hangout that has drawn complaints about sexual predators and other dangers to teens, said Tuesday it will develop technologies to help block convicted sex offenders.

    MySpace is partnering with Sentinel Tech Holding to build a database containing names, physical descriptions and other identifiable details on sex offenders in the United States. The News Corp. site, however, stopped short of adopting Sentinel’s technology for verifying the ages and identities of its users.

    The database, to be called Sentinel Safe, “will allow us to aggregate all publicly available sex offender databases into a real-time searchable form, making it easy to cross-reference and remove known registered sex offenders from the MySpace community,” Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace’s chief security officer, said in a statement.

    This a major leap forward in the right direction in my opinion. However, I hope the database doesn’t return any false positives. Not only that but that still doesn’t do anything to prevent first time offenders.