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Sex Offender Applies for School as a Boy

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  • Sex Offender Applies for School as a Boy

    Sex Offender Applies for School as a Boy
    By BOB CHRISTIE
    AP
    PHOENIX (Jan. 20) - A charter school alerted authorities to a 29-year-old sex offender who tried to enroll there, pretending he was just 12, in what sheriff's officials said Friday may have been an attempt to lure children into sexual abuse.


    'Weirdest Case I've Seen'
    It was unclear whether Rodreick had actually attended any schools, but police spokeswoman Susan Quayle said, "I think what we're looking at is that he's being used to troll for other kids."

    Talk About It: Post Thoughts

    The Yavapai County sheriff's office also said Neil Havens Rodreick II conned two men he was living with and having sex with into believing he was a young boy. One of them, 61-year-old Lonnie Stiffler, called himself Rodreick's grandfather when he tried to enroll him at Mingus Springs Charter School as "Casey Price."

    "This is the weirdest case I've seen in 18 years," sheriff's spokeswoman Susan Quayle said. "If it wasn't so sad it would be funny."

    A total of four men were in custody in the case Friday on various charges, including fraud, forgery, identity theft, and failure to register as a sex offender.

    Officials at the charter school in Chino Valley, about 90 miles northwest of Phoenix, told deputies that papers the "grandfather" presented appeared to be fake and that "boy" looked much older than 12.

    Stiffler and Robert James Snow, 43, "were very upset when the detectives told them they had been having a sexual relationship with a 29-year-old man and not a pre-teen boy," Quayle said.

    Detectives have evidence that Stiffler and Snow enrolled Rodreick in other Arizona schools, and have notified law enforcement in those jurisdictions, Quayle said.

    It was unclear whether Rodreick had actually attended any schools, but Quayle said, "I think what we're looking at is that he's being used to troll for other kids."

    She said detectives learned in interviews with the men that Rodreick convinced Stiffler and Snow that he was a boy after meeting him two years ago over the Internet. Rodreick apparently shaved his body hair and used makeup to keep up the guise.

    Deputies who served a search warrant at a Chino Valley home Thursday found Stiffler, Snow, Rodreick and Brian J. Nellis, 34. Quayle said Nellis was apparently Rodreick's cell mate in an Oklahoma prison, where both served time for sex offenses.

    Stiffler was booked on counts of forgery and hindering prosecution and was being held on $100,000 bond. Each of the three others was being held on $50,000 bond on a charge of failing to register as a sex offender. Prosecutors said decisions on any additional charges would be made by Monday.

    All four men made initial court appearances Thursday and were assigned public defenders. County Public Defender Janet Lincoln said her office had not seen any reports or met with the men by Friday afternoon and would have no comment.
    To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

  • #2
    If anyone deserves to be tied to a lonely fence post in Montana and beaten to a bloody pulp it would be these sick bastards. They should be looking at life in prison with out the possibility of parole. I will never understand why society is so tolerant of those who prey on our children.
    Removing a single turd from the cesspool doesn't make any difference.

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    • #3
      Supreme Court just whacked four years off this guy's sentence, and there's bound to be more reduced times ahead as all the defense attorney's line up for appeals.

      Court Rules Against Sentencing Rules in Calif.
      By DAVID STOUT

      WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 -- The Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 today that California’s system of sentencing criminals is unconstitutional because it gives judges some authority that really belongs to jurors and thus deprives a defendant of a fair trial.

      In a decision that could affect thousands of California prisoners, the justices said the 16-year sentence imposed on John Cunningham, who was convicted in Contra Costa County of sexually abusing his young son, was improper. The decision effectively cuts four years off Mr. Cunningham’s sentence.

      The problem, according to the justices in the majority, was that the trial judge, acting under California’s determinate-sentencing law, had increased Mr. Cunningham’s sentence from the 12-year “middle” range specified in the law to the 16-year “upper” range. The judge did so after finding several aggravating or unfavorable facts about the case, including the age and vulnerability of the victim, and a single mitigating factor, that the defendant had no prior record.

      The system under which the trial judge acted was also flawed, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority. “Fact-finding to elevate a sentence from 12 to 16 years,” she wrote, “falls within the province of the jury employing a beyond-a-reasonable doubt standard, not the bailiwick of a judge determining where the preponderance of the evidence lies.”

      Today’s ruling, which had been eagerly anticipated by defense lawyers and by corrections officials in several other states, was the latest in a series of decisions in recent years in which the high court has held that juries, not judges, must find additional facts that justify higher sentences.

      The difference between the “beyond-a-reasonable doubt” standard, which a jury is supposed to follow in finding that a defendant is, in fact, guilty and the “preponderance of evidence” standard is crucial.

      The first means “fully satisfied, entirely convinced, satisfied to a moral certainty,” while the second and lesser standard means “evidence which is of greater weight or more convincing” than evidence offered against it, according to Black’s Law Dictionary.

      When the case was argued before the justices on Oct. 11, Mr. Cunningham’s lawyer, Peter Gold of San Francisco, argued that the four years tacked on to his client’s sentence violated his Sixth Amendment right to trial and his Fourteenth Amendment right to due process.

      Lawyers for the state argued, unsuccessfully, that the judge was authorized to choose from a lower, middle or higher range of sentence — six, 12 or 16 years — based on the jury verdict.

      Joining Justice Ginsburg’s majority decision today were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, David H. Souter and Clarence Thomas Dissenting were Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Stephen G. Breyer and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

      “Judges and legislators must have the capacity to develop consistent standards, standards that individual juries empaneled for only a short time cannot elaborate in any permanent way,” Justice Kennedy wrote.

      Justice Kennedy, who was joined by Justice Alito, said today’s majority ruling continued the unfortunate trend outlined by the earlier opinions restricting judges’ discretion. “Judges and sentencing officials have a broad view and long-term commitment to correctional systems,” he wrote. “Juries do not.”

      Justice Alito, in a separate dissent joined by Justices Kennedy and Breyer, wrote that, contrary to the majority’s findings, the California system “is not meaningfully different” from a federal sentencing procedure upheld by the high court in an earlier case.

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