APPLETON — For four days, Appleton police officers
monitored the bust house on E. Fremont Street.
Behind the scenes, volunteers for the Perverted Justice
Foundation Inc. — made famous by Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator" — posed as
children, chatting online with Wisconsinites.
The volunteers, who initiated the 2010 sex sting, gave
police profiles of 72 people they thought likely to turn up and have sexual
contact with a minor. Four showed.
Their cases went to court — the last wrapped up March
12 — but one man's jury trial punched a hole in Perverted Justice's claim, still
maintained on its website, "Hundreds upon hundreds of convictions... zero
successful entrapment defenses. Zero."
Entrapment occurs when police lure people into
committing a crime they otherwise wouldn't have done.
"Anyone who knows the law will never make the
entrapment argument towards these crimes, because people who know the law
understand that these people are predisposed to commit these crimes. It's why
they hit us up to begin with," says the Perverted Justice website.
Wyn Adkins, 29, of Menasha, was not predisposed to
having sexual contact with a child, his attorney, Kevin Musolf, maintained in
arguing his client was entrapped. The jury agreed.
Jurors found Adkins not guilty of a felony charge of
using a computer to facilitate a child sex crime.
"(Sexual contact) was something they put in his head,"
Musolf said.
Adkins, 29, was depressed, with anxiety and self-esteem
issues, Musolf said.
Denise Moss — who was posing as 15-year-old "Cami" —
told him he was nice, cute and had a nice smile. When the two discussed meeting,
Moss baited him by asking: what's on your mind; what if we get bored; what
should I wear?, Musolf said.
"She keeps throwing the hook out to him and eventually
he bit," Musolf said. "What they did to this particular person is just that they
took it too far. … I think in this case they were just frustrated that out of 72
people, only four showed up."
Protocol followed
Perverted Justice tries to prevent entrapment claims by
never messaging anyone first.
"Rather we sit, wait, and allow them to knock upon our
online 'door,'" its website states.
Moss followed protocol but the jury assumed she was
"out to catch people," said Outagamie County Assistant Dist. Atty. Andrew Maier,
who prosecuted all four cases.
"(Adkins) just made a very sympathetic defendant. At
the end of the day, he got up there and looked very neat and very mild … and
they bought it," Moss said. "In my eyes, and in the eyes of the prosecution … he
had to drive to the house, he had to get dressed, get his keys, drive down the
road — there were many places he could have turned around. It wasn't like I was
saying, 'Come here, come here, you can do it.' That's not entrapment; that's
just not entrapment."
Moss, 39, who lives near Olympia, Wash., has
volunteered for Perverted Justice for about six years. She joined the
organization to protect her kids and others. Although she's not paid for her
work, she says it's her full-time job.
"It's all for the greater good. … At the end of the day
we make a difference, and you can't get any better than that," Moss said.
Despite the Wyn Adkins outcome, Moss said the sting
turned out pretty well and had a good impact on the Fox Valley.
She remains adamant that she didn't coerce Adkins'
actions and the defense was not successful.
"She's wrong," said Neenah attorney Robert Bellin, who
represented another man charged in the sting. "It goes to show. Look at what
they say on their website to what the actual practices are — I think you'll find
a lot of contrasts there."
Adkins was the only man caught in the sting who pleaded
not guilty. The others — two from the Fox Valley, one from Racine — pleaded no
contest to their charges, including Neil Frank, who Bellin represented.
Frank was sentenced last Monday to three months in jail
with work release privileges and five years of probation with a stayed jail
sentence of nine months. If he errs during his jail time or probation he'll
return to jail for nine more months.
Frank, 27, of Kimberly, was convicted of felony
possession of child pornography and resisting or obstructing an officer. The two
other men — Michael L. Krezinski, 28, of Racine, and Ryan J. Gidlof, 23, of
Neenah — were each convicted of child enticement-sexual contact.
Frank's wife is pregnant and he didn't want to risk a
jury trial — but if had, he would have won, Bellin said.
Costs for police
The Adkins trial didn't diminish the reputation of
Perverted Justice, Maier said, but it did expose pitfalls in the large
stings.
The organization has become a victim of its own
success, he said, adding that jurors think cases will be like an episode of "To
Catch a Predator" — but the crimes are rarely that simple.
Instead, cases are logistically complicated by the
distance between the two people chatting online, Maier said.
Moss, based in Washington, might not be familiar with
the state laws of Wisconsin, he said.
"Sometimes they're stretched too far with volunteers
who are three time zones away from a person here," Maier said.
Before the October 2010 sting, Appleton police worked
with Perverted Justice on individual cases. A volunteer from the organization
chatted with people and if she determined someone was a potential sex offender,
she called police and asked how to proceed, Maier said.
"Now they're doing whatever they want and police are
sitting in the background waiting for results," Musolf said.
The goal of Perverted Justice is good, but decoys need
to be better trained and police need to be more involved, he said.
Bellin has handled similar cases outside of Outagamie
County where the stings were run by police detectives, not Perverted
Justice.
"The cases handled by detectives seemed to do a better
job at identifying potential offenders instead of trapping someone who may just
be curious or stupid," Bellin said.
Soon, the Fox Valley might have resources to run its
own online stings, Maier said. When Perverted Justice began nearly a decade ago,
it was taking on computer crime that most police jurisdictions didn't have the
ability to tackle.
The organization allows police to be proactive in
hunting for sex offenders without being a financial burden on an agency, Moss
said.
"If we chat for 40 hours and there's an arrest, there's
40 hours the police weren't billed for," she said.
Nonetheless, stings cost local law enforcement.
The 2010 sting lasted from a Thursday to Sunday. At any
given time, there were four to seven officers working the case, Appleton police
Capt. Todd Freeman said. Because police didn't know how many people would show
up at the bust house, officers were constantly on patrol.
Appleton formed a task force of 12 officers and two
supervisors for the Perverted Justice sting, and a total of about 20 police
worked on it, Freeman said.
While most of the monitoring was done during officers'
normal shifts, it did require some overtime and the department spent $6,450 in
overtime pay on the investigation, he said.
The department likely would not run another large-scale
bust with the foundation but would continue to work with Perverted Justice on
smaller-scale investigations, he said.
There was a lot of discussion about whether all the
time and manpower was worth catching four people, Sgt. Chad Allaback said.
"But, you know, it's four that — had this been an
actual contact with a child — would have committed significant felonies and
significant sexual assaults," he said.
The sting also raised awareness of online predators in
the Fox Valley, Allaback said.
"For better or worse, Perverted Justice has developed a
reputation of being a little vigilante at times and a little over-aggressive,"
Maier said. "I think that they do fairly difficult work and step in the places
where law enforcement can't — or just haven't — stepped yet."
