Easy lie stymied sex crime registry

Tracking of offenders faulted

Four months ago, convicted sex offender Antonio Davon Chance gave his father's Garner address to the local sheriff's office when he moved from Chapel Hill -- except his father said he never lived there.

Advocates say Chance's lie illustrates a common flaw with sex offender registries across the country -- their reliance on convicted criminals to participate and to tell the truth.

Chance, 29, is charged with the Aug. 22 kidnapping of Cynthia Moreland of Wendell. Police say Moreland, 48, was abducted from the Progress Energy parking deck in downtown Raleigh on Aug. 22. Her car was found several hours later in Southeast Raleigh, and her body was found Friday in Harnett County.

About 24 percent of the nation's sex offenders fail to comply with registration requirements, according to Parents for Megan's Law, a nonprofit group aimed at preventing and treating childhood sexual abuse. Shortly after federal lawmakers enacted Megan's law, which led to registries being created in many states, advocates realized defendants could not be trusted to provide information, said Marc Klaas, the father of Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old who was abducted and murdered in California in 1993.

"We were asking people who were inherently unlikely to voluntarily comply to voluntarily comply," said Klaas, adding that light penalties for failing to register or update addresses also contribute to the problem. "You have these guys who led a life of crime, and the penalties for noncompliance were usually minimal at best."

In North Carolina, an offender who fails to register can be found guilty of a low-level felony and face from probation to more than five years in prison.

Chance's previous sex offense was in the 1994 beating and sexual assault of a 32-year-old man. Chance was 16 and attended Garner Senior High School at the time, according to police.

As a convicted sex offender, Chance is required to register his most current address with law enforcement officials and it is made available to the public via the registry.

The situation surrounding Chance's registry profile was further complicated by the fact that when he lied to deputies about living at his father's house, he was at the wrong office.

The law requires offenders to notify the sheriff's office in the county where they last lived. In Chance's case, that was Orange County.

But Chance went to the Wake County sheriff's office in May to report the address change, and deputies told him he had to go to to Orange County, said Donnie Harrison, Wake County sheriff.

Chance did not do that, Orange officials say. Therefore, the registry the public relies on to find out about sex offenders in their neighborhoods continued to list Chance as living in an apartment on Smithlevel Road in Chapel Hill, instead of at Chance's father house, a few doors down from North Garner Magnet Middle School.

State law does not require deputies to check that all offenders are living at their last known addresses. Deputies verify offenders' addresses only if they fail to return an address verification form mailed to them by state officials. Deputies are also required to verify every three months the addresses of repeat offenders, those convicted of aggravated crimes and offenders classified as sexually violent. Chance was none of those.

A new state law that goes into effect Dec. 1 will allow deputies to more easily verify the addresses of sexually violent predators, who will be monitored by GPS technology. The new law will also require all offenders to register twice a year in person at the sheriff's office. But the law does not require deputies to do anything more to verify those addresses.

Even though Chance's address on the registry wasn't correct for the past several months, it is now: His new address is listed as the Wake County jail.