Missouri man sentenced to 150 years for not updating his info on sex offender registry
A 65-year-old Missouri man will likely spend the rest of his life in prison for failing to update his personal information in the sex offender registry, a common requirement for people convicted of sex crimes.
Michael Moll was given 150 years in the Missouri Department of Corrections.
“It’s outrageous,” Ashley Nellis, co-director of research at The Sentencing Project, said of Moll’s sentence. “It is not at all what we in the general public think life imprisonment is reserved for.”
The state keeps track of people’s whereabouts and other identifying information through the registry. In the years following Moll’s 2017 release from prison, he failed to register as a sex offender in a timely manner, failed to register a new phone number and vehicle, and failed to register several addresses, according to the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, which prosecuted the case.
Advocates like Nellis argue that sex offender registries don’t prevent crimes. Instead they make it harder for people who have served their time to successfully reintegrate into the community, including finding employment or housing.
Violations of the requirements can send someone back to prison for years.
Moll’s de facto life sentence was lauded by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.
“As a former prosecutor and now as your Attorney General, I look for every opportunity to protect Missourians, especially from sexually violent predators who seek to harm our most vulnerable,” Bailey said in a news release. “My office will continue to use every legal tool at our disposal to enforce the law and obtain justice for victims.”
In April 1986, Moll was convicted in a 1982 rape in St. Louis County. He served the full sentence and was released in April 2017, according to Karen Pojmann, a spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Corrections.
He was convicted of failing to register as a sex offender in Illinois in 2018 and again in 2021.
In April 2022, he was charged with five counts of registration violations in Missouri.
Because of his previous cases, he was charged as a “persistent offender.”
The maximum penalty on each charge is 30 years. Moll was convicted on all five counts. He was sentenced to 150 years, to run consecutively, by Warren County Circuit Judge Jason Lamb.
Lamb did not respond to an email or voicemails left with his office.
Moll was sent to Fulton Reception and Diagnostic Center in central Missouri on June 6.
During a June 27 call from the prison, Moll said after spending decades behind bars on the rape conviction, he had a difficult time readjusting to life when he was released in 2017 and was “just trying to survive out there.”
It was hard to keep up with the requirements of registering and updating his information, he said. According to Moll, he had three days to submit any changes with his address, employment or vehicle. At least once, he could not get off work in time to get to the sheriff’s office before it closed.
Moll said his case was a “travesty of justice” and that he believes “the judge went just a little bit overboard.”
“It’s a death sentence for me,” he said.
Moll believes registration violations should be technical violations, not law violations.
Moll, who represented himself in court, said he plans to appeal his case.
It costs about $37,000 per year to incarcerate a person in Missouri, Pojmann said.
