Texas
State Supreme Court asked to hear sex offender law challenge
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - The Texas Supreme Court has been asked to consider a challenge to the state's retroactive sex offender laws that some say unfairly stack new punishments on those convicted in plea deals.
More than 2,800 sex offenders remain on the Texas registry despite being no longer required to register under terms of their probation, according to an Austin-American Statesman analysis of the list.
Every qualifying sex offender was ordered onto the registry in 2005 after Texas expanded its sex offense laws. But that included some defendants who were promised in deals with prosecutors that they wouldn't have to be on the list after a certain amount of time.
Donnie Miller struck a deal with Travis County prosecutors after he was charged with sexual assault against a woman outside an Austin gentleman's club in 1993. A jury couldn't agree on a verdict at his trial, forcing Miller to face a second trial and more than $20,000 in legal fees.
He made a deal with prosecutors to plead guilty and, in exchange, his record would be cleaned if he stayed out of trouble for 10 years. But Miller received a call a year after successfully completing his probation telling him that Texas had changed the rules and that he'd be on the sex offender registry for life, contrary to the terms of his plea deal.
"If I'd known, why would I have taken a plea deal?" said Miller, 48. "I would have borrowed the money for the retrial."
In a lawsuit before the Texas Supreme Court regarding another similar case, San Antonio attorney Angela Moore argues that undoing plea bargains makes the agreements worthless. About 94 percent of criminal convictions are disposed of with pleas, she said.
Texas Department of Public Safety attorneys warn that the lawsuit could relieve many "other sex offenders of their duty to register."
Texas was among several states to expand state law to include offenders from old cases. The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 2003 that Alaska's law retroactively requiring old sex offenders with completed sentences to register was legal because the registry wasn't intended to be punitive.
But recent studies show that public lists can have severe consequences, such as public shaming and limiting job opportunities. Since the Alaska decision, new research has emerged that disproves what policymakers previously thought to be true about sex offenders and the effectiveness of such laws.
The updated findings are appearing in court cases across the country. Rulings in Maryland, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Alaska eliminated their retroactive sex offender clauses.
Florida
French drug dealer in U.S. beard contest gets 20 years
MIAMI (AP) - A Frenchman who was arrested when he arrived in the U.S. for a world beard-growing championship was sentenced Tuesday to 20 years in prison for online drug trafficking using the alias "OxyMonster."
The sentence was imposed by U.S. District Judge Robert Scola on 36-year-old Gal Vallerius. He pleaded guilty in June to drug conspiracy and money laundering convictions.
Vallerius admitted in his guilty plea that he sold drugs himself and orchestrated other sales on an online platform for virtual currencies such as bitcoin called the Dream Market. The drugs included including cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, oxycodone and fentanyl.
Investigators say Dream Market is one of the largest criminal sites for anonymous buyers and sellers to do illicit transactions. Three days before Vallerius was arrested in August 2017 arrest, authorities say there were more than 47,000 illegal drug listings on Dream Market.
"This is a very serious offense involving a huge amount of drugs," Scola said at a hearing.
Vallerius, who sports a long brownish-red beard, was already under investigation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration when he was detained at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport while en route from Paris to the World Beard and Mustache Championships in Austin, Texas. He had entered the full-beard category.
Vallerius, who is from the Brittany region of France, did not speak at the hearing. His lawyer, Anthony Natale, said Vallerius is cooperating with authorities in a continuing investigation into illicit online drug transactions. That could eventually lead to a lower prison sentence, although prosecutor Juan Gonzalez said he hadn't provided enough information yet to merit such a reduction.
"He has pled guilty. He has accepted responsibility," Natale said.
Yasmin Vallerius, who is Vallerius' wife, pleaded in a letter to the judge that he show mercy on her husband. The 20-year sentence is half the maximum Vallerius could have received.
"Gal is a very caring person, very loving, and friendly with everybody," Yasmin Vallerius wrote. "He is also a very fragile and sensitive man, who is now in a foreign country far away from any family members. His arrest has broken him mentally. He has lost everything."
Undercover DEA agents made numerous purchases through Dream Market of drugs such as crystal methamphetamine, LSD and hydrocodone, according to court documents. The drugs were shipped via mail to various addresses in the Miami area.
DEA also discovered that Vallerius had Instagram and Twitter accounts. They compared the writing style of "OxyMonster" on the Dream Market forum to the writing style of Vallerius on his social media accounts.
"Agents discovered many similarities in the use of words and punctuation, including: the word "cheers," double exclamation marks, frequent use of quotation marks, and intermittent French posts," court documents say.
Agents were later able to link Vallerius to Dream Market through searches of his laptop computer and other electronic devices seized at the Atlanta airport.
Vallerius may serve some of his sentence in Great Britain, France or Israel - he is a citizen of all three nations - under an international prisoner transfer program, according to his attorney.
Georgia
Police called on black man babysitting white kids
MARIETTA, Ga. (AP) - A white woman who spotted a black man babysitting two white children called police and then followed them home in Georgia.
WGCL-TV reported Tuesday that the woman stopped Corey Lewis outside a Cobb County Walmart and asked to speak to the kids. He refused, so she called police and followed them to his home.
An officer arrived and questioned the children, ages 6 and 10, and called their parents, David Parker and Dana Mango. The couple says Lewis is a family friend and their son attends his youth program.
Mango says the officer told her Lewis was questioned because he's a black man driving around with two white children.
Parker said he guesses "B-W-B is the new thing, babysitting while black."
Published: Wed, Oct 10, 2018
