Larry Nassar, the serial predator who abused hundreds of young athletes while institutions looked the other way, has been removed from Michigan's sex offender registry after a state supreme court ruling — and roughly 20,000 other offenders were scrubbed along with him.
The Michigan Supreme Court ruled that 2021 amendments to the Sex Offenders Registration Act cannot be applied retroactively to crimes committed before July 1, 2011. Because Nassar's abuse — though not his conviction — predates that cutoff, his name is legally required to come off the list. A search for him now returns nothing.
This is the same system, recall, that shielded Nassar for decades. USA Gymnastics kept him on staff from 1996 to 2014. Michigan State University employed him until 2016. Reports of abuse were ignored, minimized, and buried. Now the legal system has finished the job: not only did institutions fail to stop him while he was preying on girls, they've now memory-holed his crimes from the public record.
Nassar is still serving prison sentences that will likely keep him behind bars for life, as Breitbart noted. But the ruling's reach extends far beyond one man. Twenty thousand convicted sex offenders in Michigan no longer appear on the state's registry. Michiganders who check the database to see whether someone living near them was ever listed as an abuser will find nothing.
The Eaton County Prosecutor's Office said the Michigan Supreme Court could have interpreted the law differently and allowed certain offenders to remain on the list. "While the effectiveness of such lists can be debated, that should occur in the legislature, not by decision of the court," the office stated, according to CBS News.
Prosecutor Doug Lloyd, the Republican nominee for Michigan Attorney General, blasted the ruling in a September 27 statement. "My office, the Eaton County Prosecuting Attorney's Office, and the Eaton County Courts have successfully secured justice by prosecuting many sexual predators," Lloyd wrote. "Now the actions by the Supreme Court will allow several of those individuals to be removed from the Sex Offender Registry once they are released."
Lloyd didn't confine his criticism to the bench. "Michigan's county prosecutors strive to protect their communities," he wrote. "Time and time again the Actions of the Michigan Supreme Court, and the legislature, limit what they are able to do. That is completely unacceptable and the people of Michigan must demand change."
The Daily Caller framed the story around the shock of Nassar's specific removal; Breitbart emphasized the broader disappearance of 20,000 names from the database. Both are the story. One man became the face of institutional complicity in sexual abuse. The same institutions — courts, legislatures, universities — have now decided that legal technicality trumps the public's right to know who lives among them.
The court ruled on retroactivity. The legislature failed to write the law correctly in the first place. And 20,000 sex offenders just became invisible. Who, exactly, is the system designed to protect?
