Appeals Court temporarily stays placement of sex offender in Wheatland; house red-tagged for lack of permits

/Kenosha County Sheriff's Department photo

/Kenosha County Sheriff’s Department photo

The Wisconsin Court of Appeals has temporarily stayed placement of a Racine County sex offender in a Wheatland home.

The order from the Court of Appeals was issued Tuesday by Judge Mark D. Gundrum.

Also, the home at 32200 Highway 50 (Geneva Road) was red tagged as unfit for use by Wheatland building inspector Tim Popanda. The tag specifies that the home is deemed unfit for use, lacks permits for work done to the home and requires inspections.

The case relates to the state’s placement of Michael McGee of Racine County in the Wheatland house. McGee is part of the state Department of Health Services Supervised Release program for sex offenders. The state had not been able to find a residence for McGee in Racine County and was ordered by Judge Allan Torhorst to look in Kenosha County. The state contacted the landlord of the Highway 50 home because they had used it for sex offenders before and found it was available. But local government and law enforcement officials mobilized to block the placement, in part because a one year old lives next door to the subject property.

After a hearing in which Kenosha County officials argued against the placement, Judge Torhorst ordered the placement to move forward within 10 days. In his decision, Torhorst said he did not find merit in any of Kenosha County’s arguments presented Tuesday, including that the court was not previously made aware by the state of the presence of a 1-year-old child next door.

The Court of Appeals order is here.

196 Shares

5 Comments

  1. Sad Situation says:

    How ironic…the state passed a law DENYING towns, vilages, cities their right to enforce their own sexual predator laws in their respective communities. You know, that old “leaner, smaller government” that the Madison Knows Best keeps ramming down our throats. Fortunately for us in Wheatland, our town chairman and building inspector were sharp enough to figure out a way to keep us safe for the time being. Looks like August, Kerkman, Wannagard, et al will have to go back to the drawing board, take away our zoning laws as well. A tip of the hat to Wheatland for putting our safety above politics. Well done.

  2. Sad Situation says:

    Let’s put this in perspective folks….a local community governing board can tell you when to cut your lawn, keep your dog on a leash, where you can park your vehicle on the street, etc, but the state MANDATES where sexual predators can live in a community, with virtually NO local input. Yeah…”leaner, smaller governement…it’s working”? Sad. Sit back and watch the “spin” our legislators put on this fiasco.

  3. It is unfortunate says:

    It is unfortunate that three people are taking the heat when BOTH HOUSES approved of this change.. that includes Wirch and Barca and their followers as well. IT does not fall on three, regardless of how certain people wish to make that spin.
    It is unfortunate that with each day, more predators are being sentenced and if a law does get changed to make those sentences longer, these people will be grandfathered in to shorter, less safe (for us) sentences. The whole concept of registering and the state being involved in placement etc is all because the legislators ALL OF THEM, have made a choice to do nothing. Build the prisons and house them in real prisons, not in neighborhoods. If they arent ‘changed’ – can that ever happen? – then keep them in the lockup and dont give them any more than our poorest of the poor receive – even with their hard work.

    My mindset is that you officials get two tours in the office. After that move UP or move OUT….. and let me help with the door.

  4. Yes, let’s put this into perspective folks. The laws that mandate an offender is to return to the county in which the crime was committed was created and passed into law for all offenders, not just sex offenders. The design was to make sure that an offender couldn’t run from their problems or tried to hide from their past. Which is part of the rehabilitation process. This applies to ALL offenders, sex offenders included.

    When the local municipal governments started to implement residency restrictions, which have been proven by several states not to work, this makes the job of finding living accommodations as required by law virtually impossible. Turning DOC employees into real estate agents, which allow for the nefarious actions of the attorney that is the subject of this article.

    Offenders of all kinds are returned to the communities where they committed their crimes. Burglary, Assault and batterers, child beaters, drunk drivers, heroin dealers, etc, are released back into everyone’s local communities EVERY TUESDAY. Why isn’t everyone up in arms when a heroin dealer is released and living in an apartment complex full of kids? What about the drunk driver that moves into your neighborhood, on the street that your children play in, isn’t anyone worried that while driving home drunk from the bar, (since drunk drivers have a 40% recidivism rate) that they will run your children down by ‘accident’?

    Sex offenders have a less than 5% recidivism rate, that means that very few, even of those ‘violent offenders’ who are deemed that mainly by the type and number of convictions that they were prosecuted under state law, are going to harm to anyone else. Yet as a society we seem OK with someone getting out of prison and living next door to us if they were convicted of child neglect or abuse or drunk driving, both with high recidivism rates, those crimes are OK to have around.

    What is with the double standard? We are a country of second chances, even third chances, yet we think this is the right way to treat another human being. We’ll give a murderer a second chance, we’ll give drug dealers second chances, we give wife and child beaters second chances, yet when it comes to sex offences there are no second chances. When I think back to my youth, how many sex offences did I commit? Now we are putting teenagers on the god forsaken list for their entire life that hasn’t even started yet.

    This all has to stop, people are going to get out of prison, they are going to need a place to live and a job to provide the means to pay for that place to live. That is the bottomline. Instability for any offender can cause them to reoffend, which isn’t the goal here.

    It costs $110,000 per year per inmate at the Sand Ridge facility and about $30,000/year/inmate in all the other institutions in WI. If all of you in Kenosha County and Racine county are willing to foot the bill on your own for all those that you wish to reject from your communities, then so be it, but it must come out of your resident taxpayer’s pockets, cause the rest of us in this state are willing to help rehabilitate the offenders that return so they may become productive members of the community and provide to the tax base to make our communities even better than they already are.

  5. Pete says:

    WisconsinRSOL talk to the county that dumped him in Kenosha, not us.

  • Follow us on

  • Archives