Trumbull prosecutor happy with supreme court ruling on sex-offender registry

Staff report

WARREN

Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins is praising a decision by the Ohio Supreme Court that reversed a ruling by a lower court allowing a sex offender from Masury to have his name removed from a statewide sex-offender registry.

The prosecutor’s office appealed the 2015 ruling by the Warren-based 11th District Court of Appeals partly out of concern it would lead sex offenders to move to Trumbull County and four other counties within the jurisdiction of the appeals court.

“I had no desire to see Trumbull County and other Northeast Ohio counties known nationwide as the residential destination for Megan’s Law sex offenders, so I authorized this appeal,” Watkins said. “My goal is to protect Trumbull County residents from sex offenders, not to give more offenders an incentive to relocate here.”

The case involved Aaron K. Von, a convicted child sex offender from Colorado who was ordered, under Megan’s Law, to register as a sex offender for life. He relocated to Masury in 2011 and asked the county’s common pleas court to delete his name from the registry.

Judge Ronald Rice refused because Von was a lifetime Megan’s Law registrant, Watkins said. Von appealed, and the appellate court sent it back to Judge Rice to clarify Von’s status. Von has since moved out of Trumbull, but the appeals court’s decision would still have affected other Megan’s Law offenders in Trumbull, Ashtabula, Lake, Portage and Geauga counties if not challenged, Watkins said.

The grounds for Von’s request to avoid the registry was that he was convicted under the 1996 Megan’s Law. But Ohio’s law was changed in 2007 under the federal Adam Walsh Act, and Von hoped he could no longer be order to register under the old law.