High School Football or Day Care?

Adam didn't realize he did anything wrong, because he is intellectually disabled. He didn't understand what it meant when, after a trial (whatever that is), he was placed on the sex offender registry. He just knew that for some reason, he lost the job he'd loved, wiping tables. And he could no longer participate in the Special Olympics. And he couldn't scuba dive — his very favorite activity — because the club practiced in a high school pool, and now he was not allowed in.

Just recently, back in court again, he didn't understand why his mom was smiling brighter than the sun: He'd just received a full pardon from the Illinois governor, J.B. Pritzker. And his record will be expunged.

"My husband and I were elated," Carol Nesteikis, Adam's mom, told me in a phone call. But to her son, it was just another day.

Which is one reason it was so crazy to put him on the registry at all.

Adam and his parents live outside Chicago. He grew up happy and social, with serious developmental limitations. He stopped wetting his bed at 16. He always had to be reminded to brush his teeth and, later, to shave. And he was friends with a neighbor just a little younger than him, who, it turned out, had been molesting him.

It was that young man who told Adam to expose himself.

In 2013 he (and that neighbor) was placed on the registry and Adam's life changed.

Because registrants are not allowed in any forest preserve or public park, he stopped walking the dog on the trail and started walking around the apartment, following the Roomba.

And because registrants cannot be around anyone under age 18, Adam stopped going out to dinner or the movies with other special needs young adults, and stayed home, talking to Alexa.

Losing his table-cleaning job meant he stopped having co-workers, a schedule and responsibility. Losing the scuba club meant he was no longer good at anything. In his isolation, Adam started acting younger.

Now, says his mom, "He can have meltdowns like a toddler. He gets frustrated enough that you can hear him in his room, banging on things and just saying things over and over." She worries he might never come back to the level of function — and happiness — he had before the conviction.

In 2021, Adam's mom petitioned Gov. Pritzker for his pardon. Their presentation to the Illinois Prison Review Board went like a dream. Carol was ecstatic.

And then she waited.

Six months.

A year.

A year and a half. But recently, two full years after the review, the pardon came through and Carol sounded giddy as a teenager.

But she isn't done. The organization she co-founded — D3: Decriminalize the Developmentally Disabled (formerly Legal Reform for the Intellectually and Developmentally Disabled) — is working on national legislation now. They hope to get laws passed that mirror the ones recently passed in Virginia, including SB133.

This law lets the courts "defer and dismiss" criminal cases where the defendant's autism or intellectual disability caused or substantially contributed to their crime.

How humane — and sane. Especially, as Carol points out, because the registry itself has been proven both draconian and ineffective.

In Adam's life, being a "registered sex offender" did not decrease the chances of a young person being molested. It decreased the life and future of a young man who was once a social and happy neighbor, with a job and hobbies, and friends other than Alexa and the Roomba.