FDLE Sex-offender registry adds key details

Posted: Tue Jul 25, 2006 6:36 pm

Sex-offender registry adds key details
By Stephanie Slater

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Almost a year after The Palm Beach Post reported that the state's online sex-offender registry lacked key information to help the public discern between a child molester and a man who groped a woman at a clothing-optional music festival, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has changed its Web site.

Parents worried about a sex offender living down the street now will be able to read a description of his crime by clicking on a link that pulls up the state law for that particular offense.

Offenders' profiles also now provide court case numbers, date and city of conviction, links to the state Department of Corrections and contact information for the clerks of courts offices, as well as car and boat information, including the color, make, model and license plate number. (The site's address is: http://offender.fdle.state.fl.us/offender/homepage.do)

FDLE spokesman Tom Berlinger confirmed the site's changes Monday, but would not elaborate, citing a 10 a.m. news conference today in Tallahassee. Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher, a Republican candidate for governor, is expected to speak about initiating the updates, Berlinger said.

The revisions. however, are too late for Dan Persichini, who moved from suburban Boca Raton to Idaho a few weeks ago to escape the ridicule of neighbors who assumed he was a pedophile.

Despite notifying the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office of his move, Persichini still appears on the registry as living on Willow Tree Road west of Boca Raton.

The Post first reported Persichini's frustration with the site last summer. Someone printed his photograph off the registry and mailed an "ALERT" to every house in his neighborhood, leading many â€” including parents of his son's friends â€” to believe his crime involved a minor.

The truth was that Persichini, 44, hugged and kissed a 29-year-old woman at a concert in Michigan more than a decade ago. He pleaded no contest to a fourth-degree misdemeanor to avoid a trial, was given two years' probation and ended up on the registry when he moved to Florida in 1997.

"It's completely ruined my life," Persichini recently wrote The Post in an e-mail. "So I packed my bags and walked out leaving all my possessions behind. It has truly saddened me as I've had to dismantle my business, leave my wonderful girlfriend, my home, family, friends. But I needed to go somewhere and try to regain my sanity."

Persichini said he chose Idaho because the state does not consider a nonviolent misdemeanor sex offense criteria for sex offender registration.

FDLE Assistant Commissioner Electra Bustle said last summer that the FDLE planned to update offender profiles, but was first looking at how other states present the information.

North Dakota, for example, provides a detailed and graphic account of an offender's crime. Nevada gives locations an offender is known to frequent. Delaware offenders are assigned a risk level, from low to high, based on the likelihood to commit another sex crime. And New York provides a victim's age and gender, though users have to identify themselves before searching.

Florida's registry has earned an A-plus grade the past two years from Parents for Megan's Law, a national watchdog group named for 7-year-old Megan Kanka. The New Jersey girl was raped and murdered in 1994 by a convicted sex offender who lived across the street.

In 1997, Florida became the first state to post its offenders on a Web site.

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/pbcnorth/content/local_news/epaper/2006/07/25/s1b_sexoffender_0725.html?cxtype=rss&cxsvc=7&cxcat=17