Appeals court rules rapist is not required to register as sex offender

PALMER — A judge was wrong when she ruled a convicted rapist must register with the state despite being convicted prior to the creation of Alaska’s Sex Offender Registry, an appeals court ruled Friday.

Earl Norman Ray was convicted in 1995 of rape. Police at the time said that in May 1994, he followed a woman home who rebuffed him at a Valley bar. A week later he returned to the home, snuck in, went upstairs and raped the woman’s three daughters.

He pleaded no contest to rape charges and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. But, because offenders are allowed a third off of their sentences for good behavior, he was on the streets in 2007 when he ran into a fourth daughter at a bar in Anchorage.

Ray had been ordered not to contact his victims or their family. So when he talked to the woman at the bar, he violated his parole and was liable to serve some of the suspended sentence that he will have hanging over his head until his probation expires in 2017.

Over the course of multiple hearings in summer 2009, Superior Court Judge Beverly Cutler (who has since retired) heard the daughter’s story and Ray’s attorney’s claims that there was no way to prove the man in the bar was his client.

Cutler eventually sided with prosecutors, tossing Ray back in prison for another year. It was her additional ruling — that Ray had to register as a sex offender — that landed the case before the Alaska Court of Appeals.

In a decision written by Appeals Court Judge David Mannheiner, the judge notes that the night Ray raped the girls was just three weeks before the registry went into effect in 1994. Since laws can’t apply retroactively, Ray is not required by law to register, Mannheimer wrote.

“Judge Cutler acknowledged that sex offender registration was not ‘mandatory’ for Ray’s offenses, but the judge suggested that she nevertheless had the discretion to require Ray to register as a sex offender as one of the conditions of his probation,” Mannheimer wrote.

That is not the case, Mannheimer wrote, before laying out case law that has found that registration as a sex offender is tied to specific crimes, for which it is mandatory, and that judges do not have discretion to decide someone who is not otherwise required to register should have to anyway.

“Requiring a defendant to register as a sex offender as a condition of their probation fundamentally alters the nature of the probation, and that therefore a sentencing court has no power to impose such a condition of probation in the absence of express statutory authority,” Mannheimer wrote.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.