A Poor Case of Traveling Registration

Certain laws are so simple that a man can understand them without assistance from a lawyer, a judge, or a government pamphlet printed in twelve-point type and written by a committee. Then there are laws involving sex-offender registration, which appear to have been designed by a fellow who believed the human brain was an optional accessory.

The recent adventure of 81-year-old William Morgan, in Stagecoach, illustrates things beautifully. Morgan, according to the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office, had been living in Nevada for approximately six years while remaining subject to a lifetime California registration requirement. During those six years, he had apparently done the remarkable thing of registering himself annually in California while failing to register himself in Nevada. This is an achievement of administrative geography seldom witnessed outside government.

Morgan had moved from California to Nevada, but his paperwork had apparently remained behind, faithfully reporting for duty every year in the Golden State while its owner was residing in the Silver State. The man had accomplished what many travelers attempt with considerable difficulty: being physically somewhere else while remaining bureaucratically elsewhere.

California authorities confirmed that Morgan was still required to register there for life. Their records showed that he had personally completed his annual registration for the six years he had been living in Lyon County. One can imagine the California clerk looking at the paperwork, stamping it, filing it away, and thinking, “Excellent. Another year in which William Morgan has not disappeared.”

Meanwhile, Nevada apparently had a different opinion of his whereabouts. The Lyon County Sheriff’s Office Sex Offender Task Force received information that a Tier III offender might be living in the Stagecoach area without registering in Nevada.

The task force investigated and eventually contacted Morgan at his residence on Iroquois Trail. There, the great mystery of modern bureaucracy was solved: the man was in Nevada, his registration was in California, and the law was standing in the middle wondering why everyone had made this so complicated.

Morgan was arrested and transported to the Lyon County Jail, where he was booked on one felony count of failure to register as a sex offender. His bail was set at $5,000.

The sheriff’s office says the task force is committed to achieving 100% compliance among registered offenders who live, work, or attend school in Lyon County. It is a noble ambition, although 100% compliance is the sort of goal that causes government employees to develop ulcers. Somewhere there is always a form that has not been filled out, a signature that has wandered off, or a citizen who has moved across a state line without notifying the correct desk.

The lesson of the Stagecoach affair is plain: in America, you may move your house, your furniture, your automobile and yourself a few hundred miles, but never assume your paperwork will follow you. Paperwork has a mind of its own. It knows where you are supposed to be, and if you forget to tell it, the sheriff may eventually come looking for you.

And that, as the authorities have demonstrated, is one journey for which there is no wrong address.