In Defense of the Defenders: Our Overlooked Attorneys in the Anti-Registry Movement Derek W. Logue

“—Didn’t do it, lawyer f**ked me.” – Heywood, “The Shawshank Redemption

Know any good lawyer jokes? Do you also feel your lawyer also screwed you like they screwed Heywood in The Shawshank Redemption? Do you feel like all lawyers go the 4th circle of hell, where they spend eternity rolling two giant boulders around hells circle until they clang together and reverse direction?  You’re probably not alone.

I believe if there is one job as thankless as being an advocate for the rights of Persons Forced to Register, it is being an attorney for a Person Forced to Register, especially when that client cannot afford to pay. The client has to wait months or years awaiting his or her fate as courts drag their feet with delays after delays. Meanwhile, prosecuting attorneys do everything in their power to get a win. Society and the Constitution may claim “innocent until proven guilty,” but clients and their advocates must put forth a lot of effort to prove their innocence, especially if the client is accused or previously convicted of a sexual offense.

Lawyers are expensive because law schools are expensive. It takes a lot of work to get into a law school. You need a Bachelor’s Degree and a decent score on the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) to get into a decent program. (There are practice LSAT tests online, try them out sometime, they are quite challenging.) Next, it is three years of law school at an average cost of about $47,300 per year, according to US News & World Report. Once in law school, there are many types of law to choose from, and criminal law is the least lucrative among them. Legal Aid and Public Defender attorneys are the least paid attorneys, so few choose this as a career path. With so many cases dumped into the lap of public defenders, they are often overworked and thus cannot provide the level of service a paid-for criminal defense attorney, and are mocked as “public pretenders.”

Over the years, a number of attorneys have worked behind the scenes to help clients who are Persons Forced to Register, as well as those involved in anti-registry activism. I have greatly benefited from services I could never have afforded on my own. Honestly, I do not know the names of most of them since many attorneys and advocates work behind the scenes. Some may be compensated and some may not, but they take on these cases because of a sincere desire to benefit others.

For the past five years, I’ve had to battle a number of attacks stemming from Florida State Senator Lauren Book and her lobbyist father, Ron Book. I endured both a SLAPP suit to prevent me from protesting the Books in person (or officially, a “Restraining Order”) and a false theft charge that I strongly believe is the result of the Book family’s efforts to silence my activism. Left to fend for myself against the State of Florida and two of their most powerful representatives, I would probably be sitting in a Florida prison right now or a civil commitment center. I felt like David taking on Goliath without even the benefit of a sling and a stone.

Plenty of people worked behind the scenes. Jamie Benjamin and Gary Edinger of the Law Offices of Benjamin, Aaronson, Edinger & Patanzo (in Ft Lauderdale, FL) has worked tirelessly since 2017 to prevent the Book family from silencing my anti-registry activism. Mounting a defense with a poor client presents a challenge. When the Circuit Court judge in the Restraining Order case inexplicably ruled against me, offering no reasons for doing so, I wanted to give up, but Benjamin and Edinger did not. One challenge was raising roughly $4500 for the court transcripts for the appeal, and I only raised about $250 of the money myself. Others who worked behind the scenes helped resolve that issue. The end result of the appeal was a resounding victory in the appeals court on First Amendment grounds. (See Logue v. Book, 297 So. 3d 605 (Fla. Ct. App. 2020)).

But my ordeal was far from over. The day Senator Book won her initial restraining order, the Books sent out fliers to local law enforcement agencies in Broward and surrounding counties. Mysteriously I was quickly accused of a random theft of auto manuals from a car lot and in 2019, following a fire at my apartment, I was arrested and stood charged with theft across the country from where I was at the time of that theft. I was detained for 24 days including six days on the road through private extradition services.

Because I was an out-of-state defendant with no assets, finding a bail bondsman willing to bond out a Registered Person from another state was a challenge. Ron Kleiner of the Law Office of Ron M. Kleiner arranged for my release on bond and I was free. And, now that my false theft case was dismissed, Ron Kleiner is working on getting my name removed from the Florida registry, a state that is fighting to keep me on their public pillory.

This was no small feat, either. Being falsely accused of stalking a state senator and grand theft while carrying the stigma of the “s*x offender” label seems like a feather in the cap of an ambitious prosecutor’s cap. As a welfare recipient, I do not have the resources to pay for an attorney, but these attorneys, as well as those who helped recruit them, believed I was worth the investment. In turn, efforts to silence my activism (and by proxy, the voices of all Florida activists) were overturned, defeating a Florida State Senator and arguably Florida’s most powerful lobbyist in the process.

I was indeed fortunate and count my blessings that I’m still able to continue the fight thanks to the tireless efforts of Jamie Benjamin, Gary Edinger, Ron Kleiner, and the activists who worked behind the scenes to build my defense. Of the thousands who have contacted OnceFallen over the years, requests for legal assistance (something I cannot offer) ranks among the top five requested needs. There is only so much we can do. This is a noble fight, and with so few resources and so few warriors, we must accept the fact we can only fight so many battles.

We still have a daunting fight ahead of us. In the movie Rocky IV, Rocky is taking on the seemingly invincible opponent in the Russian fighter, Ivan Drago. For the first couple of rounds, Rocky is getting pummeled and it appeared that Drago would pick up the easy win, until Rocky finally lands a strike that cuts open the seemingly invincible Drago. There are still plenty of rounds to go, but suddenly our opponent does not seem quite so invincible. Each blow we land brings us closer to knocking down this seemingly invincible registry once and for all.