Oakland Sex Crime Penalties

The penalties associated with sex crime convictions depend a lot on what the charges are. One of the problems in sex cases is that they can be charged in such a way that every single specific instance of conduct can be charged. The penalties could be stacked, so you can have many years that someone is facing based on maybe a sort of relatively short, alleged course of conduct. Let’s say within that course of conduct, they allegedly did seven different things. Each one has a certain penalty associated with it, and they can be consecutively put together so you can give a pretty heavy duty penalty. This is with the exception of murder or serious repeat violent offenses.

Repeat Offenders

Where you find this is usually with child molestation cases where there are multiple counts over some considerable period of time, the years can add up – three or more acts over a 6-month period can result in a minimum of 16 years. If you do it more than once it doubles. There are people doing really long sentences for this in state prison right now. The consequences can get pretty serious but there are ways to secure alternatives to state prison like county jail or probation. The biggest collateral consequence is being a registered sex offender – which is currently a lifetime requirement but set to become a tiered system. The legislature has adjusted it that, and I believe it’s in 2020-2021 for certain low level offenses, it’s going to go back to 10 years.

Sex Offender Registry

Within the sex offender registry, there are levels. If it was a relatively minor offense, you are going to be a Level D. As it gets more serious, you can work your way up to Level A. It’s only Levels B and A, the top two levels, that are available publicly on the internet. That’s when you hear about people that go on the Internet, and you try to figure out where the registered offenders are in their neighborhood. Those are only the ones that had something pretty serious on their record, at the top two tiers of the sex offender registration requirement. Failure to register as a sex offender is another serious offense that typically results in jail time for a failure to comply because the courts take it very seriously. Every year on your birthday, every time you change your address, it needs to be updated. We do everything we can to keep people from having to register as a sex offender because it is the type of condition that affects you for the rest of your life.