Friday, August 12, 2022

People v. Gregor (Cal. Ct. App. - Aug. 12, 2022)

This is all a bit harsh, I think, and surprisingly so.

Andrew Gregor is hanging out online in 2011 or so and having a fun, sexy conversation with someone young. You can already tell where this is going, right?

It's actually an internet sting operation, so Mr. Gregor gets busted for contacting a (fake) minor with the intent to commit a sexual offense. He pleads guilty, completes a sexual integrity program (I didn't know those existed), and gets sentenced to three years of informal probation. That (incredibly light) sentence is fairly indicative of how the judge probably viewed the equities of this particular situation.

Mr. Gregor is an American citizen, so he doesn't have to worry about being deported or anything like that. (He also appears to be a veteran, since a comment in the final footnote suggests that he's trying to get to veteran's court in a different proceeding. Irrelevant here, but perhaps that's part of the underlying equities.) Nonetheless, he wasn't always a citizen; he's originally from Australia, and is naturalized. When he signs his plea deal, he initials a box that says: "“If I am not a citizen of the United States, my plea could result in my being deported from, or excluded from admission to the United States, or denied citizenship." But, to reiterate, he's a citizen, so this doesn't apply to him.

Several years later, he applies to bring his non-citizen wife over to the United States. (It's unclear whether he was married during the whole internet sting thing, but he's definitely married now.) Because, well, he'd like to like in the same country as his spouse, please. But -- and this was the part I didn't know before today -- even if you're a citizen, if you're convicted of various offenses against a minor, while you can't be deported, you are barred from sponsoring anyone to come to the U.S.

Which might well make sense for sponsoring, say, a minor to come here. But I'm not exactly sure why we want to stop people from letting their spouses come here. Do we want the people to instead elect to marry someone who's already inside the U.S. who's not their true love? That's the way to stop future sex offenses? Or is our goal to make 'em go to a different country and live there? Countries that might well have less stringent sex offender statutes, or less supervision (e.g., no sex offender registration rules)?

Nonetheless, that's the law.

So Mr. Gregor files a motion to withdraw his plea, pursuant to a new California statute that says you're allowed to do so (under certain circumstances) if you didn't understand the immigration consequences of what you were doing. Which Mr. Gregor says -- quite credibly -- totally applies to him, because no one told him that, even as a citizen, he'd be prevented from sponsoring a spouse once he took the deal.

But the trial court denies relief, and the Court of Appeal affirms. The statute applies to non-citizens whose immigration consequences were potentially getting deported or not being able to come back to the United States, but not to citizens whose immigration consequences were not being able to sponsor a spouse. Sorry about that.

Justice Duarte appears somewhat sympathetic to Mr. Gregor's plight, and drops a footnote at the end of the opinion that says: "We recognize that defendant’s appeal is part of a broader effort to have his plea vacated, his criminal charges reinstated, and his case referred to and resolved in veteran’s court (see § 1170.9), based in large part on his quest to be released from the requirement that he submit to lifetime sex offender registration (see §§ 288.4, subd. (b); 290, subd. (d)(3)(C)(xii)). We observe that our opinion resolves only a narrow issue of statutory interpretation related to immigration and is not intended to opine on any other issue related to defendant’s plea or his status as a registered sex offender, including the questionable wisdom of imposing a lifetime registration requirement on an offender whose adjudication was resolved by his successful completion of probation pursuant to section 1203.4." But, still, no dice.

The opinion comes out of the Third Appellate District, and Shasta County in particular. So I assumed at the outset that Mr. Gregor was hiding out in rural Northern California while this whole thing plays out.

But since he's on a lifetime sex offender list, I was able to look the guy up. Nope. He's in San Diego. He just got busted up in Shasta, where the sting was (he apparently lived in Arizona at the time). Around 10 miles down the street from me. (Though that "street" is Interstate 8.)

P.S. - Oh, I literally forgot one final thing. Mr. Gregor also asks on appeal that the opinion only use his initials, since (not surprisingly) he doesn't exactly want the whole "attempted sex with a minor" thing hanging out in a potentially published opinion, particularly given his new spouse and all. Denied. The panel says he's a criminal defendant, so the usual rule is we use actual names. No dice there, either.