News Photo by Julie Riddle Rogers City court participants on Monday debate what to do with a case involving failure to report to the Michigan Sex Offender Registry, which is not being enforced pending legislative action.

ALPENA — Northern Michigan police, courts, people convicted of sex crimes, and victims are in limbo as legislators indefinitely postpone an overhaul to the state’s sex offender registry, despite being told four years ago that the registry was unconstitutional.

The state’s 44,000 convicted sex offenders — including about 300 whose addresses are listed in Northeast Michigan — don’t have to follow the rules of the Michigan Sex Offender Registry Act until state lawmakers fix it, a federal judge ruled in April.

Recent changes to the registry, including the 2011 retractive shift of reporting time, unfairly punish registrants, the judge said, telling lawmakers they had to come up with a new and fair system of tracking the whereabouts of sex offenders, or the registry would be thrown out altogether.

People convicted of a sex offense — including acts from rape and possession of child pornography to urinating in public — must add their private information to a public database, check in with police up to four times a year, and notify law enforcement every time they change homes, vehicles, or email addresses.

Those registrants — and the victims who rely on the registry for a sense of security — now wait to learn the fate of the database, an unknown that hangs on both the action of lawmakers and the longevity of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The instability of the registry is emotionally draining for the victims of sex crimes, said Jillian Ferguson, sexual assault program coordinator for Hope Shores Alliance, an organization that advocates for survivors of sexual assault.

The pandemic already upped the anxiety of survivors, with shelter-in-place rules making it harder to report abuse, social service agency services oversaturated, and offenders being released to empty out jails and prisons — in some cases, Ferguson’s heard, returning to re-abuse their survivors.

Knowing where sex offenders are has always been at least one level of security for survivors, and, now, that isn’t trustworthy, Ferguson said.

The nature of sexual violence — intensely personal, intentional, often laced with betrayal — is part of the reason the registry is needed, Ferguson said, calling it a contract made to protect survivors and the community from people who may hurt them.

“It’s just another way that we are avoiding accountability for perpetrators,” Ferguson said. “We’re not holding up our end of the deal.”

In 2009, a consensual sexual relationship between 19-year-old Nickolas Stoneham, of Onaway, and his girlfriend led to a conviction for second-degree criminal sexual conduct, because the girl was under 16.

He was ordered to register as a sex offender for the next 10 years.

In 2011, the law was changed to retroactively shift Stoneham and thousands of other registrants to a 25-year reporting requirement, leaving Stoneham tethered to the database until 2041 for what many deem a youthful indiscretion.

“There’s a lot of people that the rest of us need to know where they are, no doubt about that,” said Bill Pfeifer, attorney for Stoneham. “But, for somebody that’s trying to get their life back together, it really does unfairly punish them for a long time.”

In January, Stoneham was charged with registry violation when he failed to alert police to a change of address and new social media accounts, Pfeifer said.

In February, a federal judge told Michigan legislators they were out of time to fix the registry’s problems and suspend enforcement of portions of the registry — including that applying to Stoneham — until new legislation was passed.

In April, all enforcement of the registry was halted in deference to the coronavirus pandemic, with legislators given until after Michigan’s pandemic-related state of emergency is lifted to rewrite the act and put another in its place.

The state of emergency, put in place in March, has been extended multiple times and is now in place until at least Oct. 1.

New legislation proposed in May would ease restrictions and change reporting requirements for people affected by the portions ruled unlawful. That legislation hasn’t gone beyond being assigned to a committee, however.

A case scheduled for argument before the Michigan Supreme Court on Oct. 7 may help clear up matters for local courts debating how to handle cases like Stoneham’s.

At issue in the Supreme Court case is whether the bad parts of the registry can be cut out like bruises from an apple, or whether the whole of the law must be chucked and new legislation created from scratch.

In the meantime, registration is still required, but not enforced. Michigan State Police have paused enforcement of SORA violations until state courts decide what happens next with the registry.

Most sex offenders in Alpena are still coming in for their updates, according to the Alpena Police Department. Registration traffic from sex offenders living outside the city has been normal, according to the Alpena County Sheriff’s Office, although the Michigan State Police-Alpena Post reported a noticeable drop in people stopping by to update the registry in recent months.

Nobody locally has raised a legal challenge to being kept on a registry that’s been declared unjust, according to Alpena County Prosecutor Cynthia Muszynski.

Two SORA-related cases came into her office for authorization this year — before the Michigan Supreme Court forbade prosecution of registration violations. That compares to five registry-related cases in 2019 and 11 in 2018.

It is unclear how many of those cases led to a conviction.

Meanwhile, Stoneham’s case is on hold.

Courts have to decide whether to forge ahead with cases like Stoneham’s, following existing law and making decisions that may later be reversed, or to keep such cases in abeyance indefinitely or even dismiss them altogether, said Judge Aaron Gauthier in the 53rd Circuit Court in Rogers City on Monday.

Stoneham’s Monday hearing was adjourned until October, with hope by the court that, by then, some direction might be in sight.

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693, jriddle@thealpenanews.com or on Twitter @jriddleX.