Judge to reconsider banishing sexual offender from town
ANCHORAGE - The wife of a convicted child abuser believes her husband should come home to Kivalina. This week the Alaska Court of Appeals gave her reason to hope.
The court has ordered a judge to reconsider his sentence that banished 44-year-old James Rodney Booth for three years from the northwest coastal village, as punishment for sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl from the village.
Booth had pleaded no contest to third-degree sexual abuse of a minor for fondling the breast of the girl, who still lives in the village.
He was sentenced to six months in prison and ordered to get treatment for alcohol abuse and attend a sex offender program in Kotzebue, about 80 miles away by air.
Superior Court Judge Richard Erlich also said as a condition of probation Booth could not live in the same community as the girl, as long as the village had fewer than 1,000 people. Kivalina has several hundred residents.
In addition, Erlich ordered that Booth not have any contact with the victim - or any child under the age of 16 including his own children - unless he had written permission from his probation officer and the visits were supervised by an adult. Booth's children are ages 15, 14 and 12.
The court said Erlich imposed the residence restriction because Kivalina has no in-village police officer and without an officer there was no way to protect the girl from Booth.
But the court found that the probation conditions infringed on Booth's rights of property, travel and association.
"Judge Erlich did not explain how the presence of a resident police officer was likely to affect the situation. Kivalina is home to 377 people, and a single police officer would not be able to supervise Booth's activities on a minute-to-minute or even an hour-to-hour basis," the court said.
It also pointed out that the restriction applies to all communities with fewer than 1,000 people, even those with resident police officers.
The court gave Erlich 90 days to either justify the probation conditions or vacate them.
Booth's wife, Marilyn Booth, said men who did far worse than her husband have been allowed to return to Kivalina. Her husband spent four months in the Anvil Mountain Correctional Center in Nome and now lives in an apartment in Kotzebue, she said.
"There are worse offenders being released and they can come home and he can't. Where is the justice in that?" she asked.
Every other weekend Marilyn Booth flies to Kotzebue to visit her husband.
Erlich would not comment on the case while it is under review. However, Assistant District Attorney John R. Vacek said Erlich was being sensitive to a difficult situation in Kivalina. The young woman had reported to Alaska State Troopers in 2000, when she was 15, that she had had sexual contact with five men in the village. She decided to report the incidents because her 35-year-old boyfriend was convicted of sexually abusing her and sentenced to four years in prison. The girl didn't think it was fair that her boyfriend was incarcerated when the others were not prosecuted.
Vacek said the judge thought he was helping protect the girl by removing at least one of the men.
"She had been victimized by a number of adult men in the community," Vacek said. "She was highly subject to continued abuse if these guys were roaming around in the village."