Prosecutors said she was a victim. She still had to register as a sex offender in Tennessee.

Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of abuse and sexual violence. If you or someone you know needs assistance, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673.

As things stand, she’ll be considered a violent sexual offender the rest of her life.

She’s had to say this hundreds of times, and she knows how people tend to react. But she hopes you’ll give her a chance to explain this time.

A newspaper headline about the circumstances that led to her arrest, guilty plea and eventual placement on Tennessee’s sex offender registry described her as a "sex slave."

Court documents show that a drug dealer physically coerced her and forced her by threat of her young son’s death to join him as he kidnapped his child. Federal prosecutors recognized the woman — whom The Tennessean is not identifying — as his victim.

She took a plea deal on federal charges of aiding and abetting kidnapping. Prosecutors wrote that they didn’t believe she should have to register as a sex offender under federal or state law.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation decided differently, and it now classifies her as one for life.

That means that when the son the drug dealer threatened graduates from high school, she won’t see him walk across the stage. She’s missed his football games. She can’t go back to school, and she can’t hold down a job.

It’s been a nightmare.

A costly flaw: Tennessee's legal struggles with its sex offender registry could cost taxpayers

“That's exactly what it has been, and still is,” she said, sitting in her attorney’s office in Nashville, gently rocking her younger son on her shoulder.

She is suing Gov. Bill Lee and TBI Director David Rausch in their official capacities, challenging her placement on Tennessee’s sex offender registry. The lawsuit, filed on Sept. 8 under a pseudonym, makes the same challenge for others like her — those convicted of out-of-state crimes or federal crimes — who also ended up on the registry without a chance to plead their cases. She’s represented by Nashville attorney Davis Griffin and the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee.

The Tennessee Attorney General's Office, which represents the state in lawsuits, declined to comment.

This lawsuit comes at a time when dozens of suits are being filed against Tennessee’s sex offender registry. Courts have ruled for several plaintiffs that the system violated the ex-post facto clause of the U.S. Constitution, which protects against laws that punish retroactively.

Griffin described his client's case as “an outrageous miscarriage of justice” that exemplifies another potential crack in the registry system. Unlike for Tennessee offenses, TBI must perform a legal analysis of an offender's case for an out-of-state conviction. Griffin said offenders are entitled to participate in that analysis but have no opportunity to.

Tennessee’s sex offender registry law

The law creating Tennessee’s first sex offender registry went into effect in 1995. At that point, it was a confidential database for law enforcement to use for tracking and information gathering.

In 2004, a new system was created, one that over the years has turned into a “far-reaching structure for regulating the conduct and lifestyles of registered sexual offenders after their punishments were complete and, in many cases, for the rest of their lives,” according to U.S. District Judge Aleta A. Trauger.

Registrants must follow residence, work and travel restrictions, including a prohibition against living or working within 1,000 feet of schools, day cares or public parks. In 2014, the General Assembly passed a provision that placed offenders against children on the registry for the rest of their lives.

A troubled policy

What’s caused particular trouble is that the registry requirements apply retroactively.

The U.S. Constitution protects people from being punished by laws that went into effect after they committed their offense. The state has been able to impose registry requirements retroactively because courts held that registration as a sex offender wasn’t a form of punishment, just a regulatory measure.

That position suffered a blow in February 2021, when U.S. District Judge Eli Richardson found the evidence was strong enough to suggest the law was punitive in effect, which a federal judge had found a few years earlier regarding Michigan’s sex offender law. Trauger has said Michigan’s law is “strikingly similar” to Tennessee’s. Richardson ordered the plaintiff in the 2021 decision be removed from the registry given his offense occurred before the creation of the state’s registry.

Since then, several challenges by those whose offenses occurred before 2004 have been successful.

“In fact, it is difficult to imagine a policy that this court has been forced to find unconstitutional (or likely so) as many times as this one,” Trauger wrote in March of this year.

‘Haunting me for the rest of my life’

Griffin's client was born and raised in a small town in East Tennessee. At 19, she had her first son.

In 2010, when she was 21, she encountered a local drug dealer through a friend who had been in Florida with the man but abandoned him there and left with his rental car.

The drug dealer tracked the women down. He pulled out his phone and showed them pictures of their children.

“‘You'll either get in the car with me or I'll take your heart,’” the plaintiff remembered him saying.

Over the next several weeks, according to federal prosecutors, the drug dealer required the women to sell drugs and provide sexual services to him or as he directed.

One day, the mother of the man's infant arrived to pick up the child. According to court records, he dragged her out of the car and beat her before driving off in her car. He told the other women to take the rental car and meet him at the interstate with his child.

The plaintiff said he then forced the group to accompany him on trips to Florida picking up drugs and bringing them to Tennessee to be sold, while his abuse against the women continued.

"(He) perpetrated his offenses on three adults (...) and his infant child, placing all four of the victims in his car at high risk of serious bodily harm," prosecutors wrote in court documents.

Eventually police caught up with the group in a Miami hotel and arrested the plaintiff. She thanked the officers.

“I was like, ‘Thank you Jesus. That part's over at least,’” she said.

“But I feel like me having to register is his way of haunting me for the rest of my life.”

The plaintiff pleaded guilty after six months in jail. A judge sentenced her to 72 months of imprisonment with three years of supervised release.

An assistant U.S. attorney told the plaintiff's probation officer that the woman should not have to register as a sex offender.

"Neither the plea agreements, the pre-sentence investigative reports, or the judgment and commitment orders mention the potential possibility that (plaintiff) and (her friend) might be subject to Tennessee Sex Offender Registry laws and it is clear that they have no obligation under federal law to register as sex offenders," the attorney stated.

Due to a quirk in federal law that says you can’t kidnap your own child, the drug dealer evaded prosecution on kidnapping charges, meaning he will not have to register as a sex offender when he is released from prison, which is expected to happen in 2029.

How TBI handles non-Tennessee convictions

The process by which someone winds up on the registry is simple for those found guilty of a violation of Tennessee law: Those convicted of an offense listed in the law (which includes kidnapping) must register.

But things get tricky when dealing with federal crimes or crimes committed in another state, where laws are written differently. In those cases, TBI counsel “research court records and classify individuals as if they had committed the act in Tennessee,” TBI communications director Josh Devine wrote to The Tennessean.

There’s a lot of discretion in that process, Griffin argued.

“That is legal analysis that takes place in a black box,” he said.

In cases like the plaintiff's, you wind up with “as perverse an application of that structure as one could imagine,” Griffin said.

“It is as against the stated purpose and function of the law as you could possibly imagine, where you have people who have committed sex offenses who are removed from the registry, and people who have not committed sex offenses who are required to remain for the rest of their lives,” Griffin said.

In her lawsuit, the plaintiff makes five arguments for why her placement on the registry is unconstitutional, including that making a non-sexual offense such as kidnapping a qualifying offense violates substantive due process; that the process of determining if a non-Tennessee offense qualifies for registration is unconstitutionally vague; and that that process violates her procedural due process rights.

She has asked for a preliminary injunction that would take her off the registry and relieve her from its restrictions until the case is settled.

The state has moved the court to dismiss the lawsuit and also filed a response arguing against a preliminary injunction, writing that the plaintiff is unlikely to succeed on any of her five claims.

Devine told The Tennessean that neither TBI General Counsel Jeanne Broadwell, who determined that the plaintiff must register as a sex offender, documents show, nor anyone else at TBI was available to interview about the classification of non-Tennessee offenses. Devine said TBI does not comment on active litigation.

Lawmaker says safety is top priority

Concerns over how courts may rule on different parts of the state’s sex offender registry statutes have swirled around the state Capitol for years. In 2021, legislators created an ad-hoc committee on how to tweak the system to ensure its constitutionality.

Little was done to change it, though.

State Rep. William Lamberth, R-Portland, who is a member of the House Criminal Justice Committee, said the General Assembly has considered the legal challenges the registry has faced.

“We've definitely found those lawsuits and looked at them, and there's been no need to really change our statutes in a significant way thus far,” Lamberth said of the lawsuits that have been filed in recent years. Lamberth had not seen a copy of this recent lawsuit and couldn’t speak to the plaintiff's specific challenges to the law.

Lamberth said changes to the registry system are usually proposed each year, and when they are, lawmakers make public safety their top priority.

“Our main concern, our main goal in the legislature is to keep Tennesseans safe,” he said.

However, there is a growing body of research that shows that sex offender registries are not particularly effective, if at all, at reducing sex crimes.

'I would have done big things'

The plaintiff said she used to have one of the best jobs in town at a manufacturing facility. But she was let go once managers learned of her registration status.

She can’t go back to school in Tennessee to be a hairdresser, something she hoped to do one day, because almost every school has a day care on campus, she said. She said she can’t move to a city, where finding a home more than 1,000 feet from a school, park or day care seems almost impossible.

“Had it not been for the sex offender registry … I believe I would have done big things and, you know, not be broke,” she said. “I could have actually done something with myself.”

Still, she has been clean for six years now, she says. She has a partner who has stuck with her for a few years despite all the ups and downs. And she has her two kids, one still an infant who is starting to keep her up all night, and another whose name is tattooed on her forearm.

“My oldest son had been the only reason, up until I had another son, for everything. My reason for living, my reason for doing what I'm supposed to do. He's been my reason for everything,” she said. “And now I have a new baby, too, that is my reason, and they need me. And I need them.”

Evan Mealins is the justice reporter for The Tennessean. Contact him at emealins@gannett.com or follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, @EvanMealins.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Woman called victim by prosecutors among Tennessee sex offender lawsuit