Should Nicki Minaj’s husband still be registered?
Last year, when rapper Nicki Minaj married Kenneth Petty, the big news was not the nuptials, but the fact that he is on the registry. The world questioned her judgment – as if it is outrageous to marry somebody on the registry. This past week, Petty was arrested for failure to register in California. Again, headlines and more judgment and shaming of Minaj.
Perhaps I’m more sensitive to the issue than most because I’m involved in an organization that advocates for registry reform and on a daily basis, multiple times per day actually, I hear from spouses, parents and children of registrants whose lives are impacted by the registry and whose judgment is continuously put in question as if they too were a suspect in a never-ending investigation.
If you consider what Kenneth Petty was accused of, it’s unquestionably a terrible crime… attempted rape of a 16 year old. But if you dig deeper, you will learn that the crime took place in 1994 – more than 25 years ago! Dig a bit deeper and you’ll learn that he was also only 16 at the time! Dig even deeper and you’ll learn that when his accuser tried to write a letter to the judge to recant her story, she was told that she would go to jail for 90 days if she recanted!
Not to call out Petty, but he happens to have another crime in his history… manslaughter. Completely unrelated to his sex offense and later in life, he was convicted of shooting and killing someone. I’m not judging, but you’d think that killing someone might be more alarming, but that tidbit of information never made the headlines.
While we can’t go back in time, we can certainly live in the present. Today, twenty-five years have passed since the alleged sexual offense and Petty is facing 10 years in prison for failure to register. That’s a lot of time – especially considering it’s more than 3 times as long as his sentence for the underlying offense in 1994. He’s recently married to a successful woman and they had planned to start a family. Plans that could be derailed if Petty is sentenced to prison.
Now I know the research… the risk of serious and persistent sexual crime decreases substantially the longer someone has been sex-offense free in the community. This pattern was particularly evident for high risk sexual offenders, whose yearly recidivism rates declined from approximately 7% during the first calendar year, to less than 1% per year when they have been offense-free for 10 years or more.(1) I also know that the recidivism rates of juveniles is very low, adolescent brains are not as developed as adults and youth who have committed a sex offense are no more likely to commit a future sex offense than other delinquent youth. (2)
So that begs the question; it’s been 25 years, should Petty still be registered?
(1) Hanson, R. K., Harris, J. R., Helmus, L., & Thornton, D. High risk offenders may not be high risk forever. Journal of Interpersonal Violence.2013
(2) https://www.atsa.com/pdfs/Conf2015/T-27.pdf
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Of course he should be registered. As a convicted killer, like he is.
What’s that? Killers don’t have to register? Shocking! If registration increases public safety, why don’t they? What sense does that make? Is our government simply not interested in protecting me and my family / children from getting killed? Confused….
There are a number of celebrities on the public registry, like Mike Tyson or Paul Reuben (PeeWee Herman), or people accused of sex offenses. Yet, none of these celebrities have reached out to this movement or offered their support. This movement is largely kept afloat by those who aren’t famous and live paycheck to paycheck.
Someone as famous and rich as Minaj could blow this whole registry nonsense out of the water with their money and influence, much like Kim Kardashian is doing, but that’s just a pipe dream.
I was going to say 1000 people from each states registry should get together and chain themselves to the state capitol building in protest until someone listens.
After thinking that through, that would just give them an excuse to arrest us and really keeping us from ever having a chance. They really do hope we mess up. They hated it when the ruling came down that there needed to be a way off the registry.
That is why they made it so long, 20 or 25 years AFTER you have completed your sentence. And unfortunately we all wait like sheep for that day to come not really remembering, it is not automatic, a judge can still deny you stating the crimes of our past will haunt us forever.
We can throw all the money on Earth at lawyers but unless someone in the courts is willing to take the heat for us, I am bracing for being on this crap for the long haul. I have made my peace and given it to God that He would guide me on whatever path and plan He has for me concerning the time I have left on this Earth.
@Derek Logue
Well the Civil Rights movement began with a Dream too!
The drummer for the Leonard Skinner band was also convicted of a sexual offense and was arrested in Jacksonville Florida for failure to register.
Hell no he shouldn’t still
be registered. It’s just used to control people they can’t keep down.
All I got to say about the news media is listen to the song ” dirty laundry ” by don henley. It says it all
Tim, you nailed it. So true!
Law enforcement is becoming desperate to get more people on the registry and therefore more money from the government.
https://qvoicenews.com/author/phillip/
Sting operations like these are a sign that their budget’s already too big and they have to come up with things to do.
I don’t think it’s an attack on the LGBT community so much as it’s an attack on what adults choose to do in a place that is public yet at the same time “private” since people who go to Romantix know what happens there. I say it’s not an attack on LGBT because many police depts do the same thing with heterosexual strip clubs.
This isn’t an attack on anyone’s sexual orientation, it’s an attack on the natural flow of sex. Period.
I have dated a few strippers in my days by going to stop clubs. It’s certainly not easy since damn near every guy in a strip club wants to get with the stripper but with the right conversations the next thing you know you’re at a dinner having coffee and making plans for your next date. But the way things are now, that would probably be seen as “human trafficking”, and you’d be arrested before you even finished the conversation inside the strip club.
There is a war on sex in this country. I wonder if attorneys for these types of cases ever mention in their court arguments that such actions are no threat to the safety of the public and these issues are not what brought about Megan’s Law.
I agree. This is NOT an attack by law enforcement on the LGBT community. They do not care whom they coerce into committing a “crime” — they can be straight or otherwise. They just want an arrest — justified or not.