Sep 24, 2008 - 04:05:28 CDT
The state Supreme Court has unanimously upheld the gross sexual imposition conviction of a registered sex offender.Matthew Crabtree was charged with the Class AA felony in September 2006 after his probation officer learned he had a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl in March 2006. He appealed the conviction to the state's high court, which affirmed the conviction in a decision handed down Tuesday.
According to the North Dakota attorney general's sex offender Web site, Crabtree was required to register as a sex offender for a corruption or solicitation of a minor conviction from 2001. Court documents said Crabtree wanted permission to live with his wife after she gave birth to his child. His probation conditions prohibited him from having contact with juveniles.
As part of the process to get permission to live with his child, Crabtree had to fill out a questionnaire about his sexual habits and undergo a polygraph test, documents said. He wrote that since his last conviction, he had sexual contact with a girlfriend, his current wife, and had "protected sex with an acquaintance."
According to court documents, authorities learned who the acquaintance was and determined she was a 14-year-old girl in March 2006. Crabtree claimed he thought the girl was 19, but the girl and another witness said Crabtree knew she was a juvenile.
A disclaimer on the questionnaire said people filling it out are not required to give identifying information about victims, but any information given will be reported to child protective services as required by state law.
Crabtree had filed a motion to suppress the information from the questionnaire, the polygraph and subsequent questioning, according to court documents. Documents said he felt his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination was violated because he had to give the information in order to gain permission to live with his family. Without the information, authorities would not have found out about the girl, Crabtree and his attorney, Tom Tuntland, argued.
South Central DistrictJudge Sonna Anderson denied the motion in April 2007, saying Crabtree did not have to answer the questions into his sexual history and could have chosen to accept the consequences of not living with his expected child.
Crabtree entered a conditional guilty plea to the charge in April 2007 and reserved his right to appeal the denied suppression motion.
Anderson sentenced Crabtree in September 2007 to 10 years in prison, with all but two years suspended. Anderson also recommended that Crabtree be on house arrest or an electronic monitoring program during his first two years of release, at the discretion of his probation officer.
Crabtree appealed Anderson's decision on the motion to suppress to the Supreme Court. Had they chosen to overturn the denied motion, the case could have gone to trial.
The five justices agreed with Anderson that Crabtree had the choice of giving information about his sexual history.
"Based upon our review of the record, Crabtree was not compelled or coerced to answer the questionnaire and submit to a polygraph examination, but instead voluntarily provided the incriminating information," Justice Mary Maring wrote in the opinion. "We cannot say that Crabtree was placed in such a position that had he asserted the privilege, he would have been penalized so as to foreclose a free choice to remain silent and compel incriminating testimony."
(Reach reporter Jenny Michael at 250-8225 or jenny.michael@;bismarcktribune.com.)
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