Thirty-two years ago, when John Fehrman was 19, he was convicted of three sex offenses involving a child younger than 13. He served a little over a year in prison and was designated a sex offender for life. He’s lived in Georgia and, as of last Christmas, was living at a house on Lumberjack Trail in northwest Palm Coast.
“I just wanted to see the ocean before I died,” he said in an echo of the misunderstood miscreant Anoine Doinel in “The 400 Blows.” He’s never violated the terms of his release, registering biannually wherever he went. Until last May.
Fehrman, now 51, decided to move to Georgia and not tell authorities. That cost him three years in prison back in Florida. Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols sentenced him earlier this week after he tried to reduce the punishment to mere probation. He said that’s how they’d do it in Georgia.
“This is Florida,” the judge told him.
Late last May, the landlord of Lumberjack Trail called the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office to report that Fehrman had left three weeks earlier. The landlord wasn’t concerned about Fehrman. He just wanted his property to be taken off the state’s sex offender registry database so it wouldn’t interfere with potential tenants. Fehrman had told the landlord he was moving to north Georgia.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Sex Offender Registry Division showed no record of Fehrman’s registration. In August, the State Attorney’s Office filed a third-degree felony charge of failure to register. He was booked at the Flagler County jail on $30,000 bond on Oct. 19, after being held several months in a Georgia jail.
He faced up to five and a half years in prison. Assistant State Attorney Tara Libby initially wanted him sentenced to four years in prison. When Fehrman appeared before Judge Nichols on Wednesday, she offered three years, but the offer was good only that day. Otherwise she’d go back to four.
Prosecutors juggle carrots and sticks before a defendant to clear their docket. Fehrman countered with just one year in prison. (If a sentence is 364 days, the defendant gets to serve it out at the county jail.)
“Oh, yeah, that’s not realistic,” the judge told him and his attorney, Assistant Public Defender Melissa MacNicol.
“Well, it’s just, your honor, that I’ve been on the registry for 31 years,” Fehrman said. “I’ve never been charged, I’ve never had probation. And so I was kind of hoping that, well, that I could get probation on this. That’s what Georgia did.” He was apparently referring to the disposition of the charge he faced in Georgia for not registering there, where he got 10 years on probation.
The judge told him she could not go below the guidelines. If he went to trial, she told him, “it’s kind of like, what is it, shooting fish in a barrel?”
“Pretty much,” he said, agreeing. “I’m not saying that I’m not guilty because I moved and I didn’t register in time. And I’m guilty of that.” But his sentence, he said, would be “longer than I did on my original sentence. I did 15 months on my original crime in 1993 and I’m 51. It breaks my heart.” But he didn’t want to go to trial, he said. He wanted the case resolved.
He accepted the three-year sentence. He would be out in two-and-a-half years, since he’s served 138 days at the county jail already. There will be no probation. He’ll be heading back to Georgia after his sentence is over. He thanked the judge and was fingerprinted ahead of his transfer to the state prison system.
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