A 28-year-old Lawrence man charged with molesting three children earlier this year has a controversial sex-crime sentence in his past.

When the man was convicted in 1995 of groping women on the street, a judge let him out of jail so he could receive therapy at Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center. Once out of jail, the man violated probation repeatedly by failing to complete the therapy program on time, but each time a judge extended his probation instead of sending him back to jail, according to court records.

Also, the man said officials at Bert Nash allowed him to finish treatment prematurely.

“The teacher in there, she let me graduate, but I didn’t think I was ready to go,” he said in a videotape shown recently during a court hearing.

Patricia Stucky, director of adult services for Bert Nash, said the agency’s sex-offender treatment program ended in the mid- to late-1990s when officials there realized they might be offering a program that duplicated one offered by another local agency, DCCCA.

However, she said her agency never rushed offenders out the door.

“If somebody was in treatment as a sex offender, they didn’t just stop the program and make people go away. That did not happen,” she said. “The program ended over time, and they stopped taking new people into the program.”

Prosecutors charged the man in January 1995 with four counts of misdemeanor sexual battery for allegedly grabbing women’s genitals and buttocks at random throughout Lawrence. He told police after his arrest that he would drive around town looking for a female to touch or grab, and he also said he’d been molested as a child, according to a court affidavit.

He later pleaded no contest to two of the counts, and prosecutors dropped two counts as part of a plea agreement. He received a two-year sentence in the Douglas County Jail, but he only served about nine months of that.

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In January 1996, after a motion from the man’s attorney to change the sentence, Judge Ralph King Jr. found it would be in “the best interests of the defendant and society” to let the man out of jail in favor of a one-year probation period.

However, when that time frame expired, the man hadn’t yet satisfied all the conditions of probation. He received a one-year extension, two subsequent one-year extensions and then a four-month extension, until his probation apparently ended in mid-2000.

Judge Robert Fairchild, who granted some of the probation extensions after King retired, said he couldn’t discuss details of the case. However, he said that in general, courts tried to emphasize community-based treatment for offenders with substance-abuse or sexual problems — especially in misdemeanor cases.

Extending probation — instead of revoking it and sending people to jail — allows courts to monitor offenders for longer periods of time and to give them treatment as they fulfill their sentence, he said. The Douglas County Jail has no sex-offender program for inmates, he said.

“The amount of time we’re going to keep them off the street in a misdemeanor case is so short that it doesn’t provide much protection for the community,” he said. “What we have to do is weigh how we’re going to best protect the community. Is a short period of incarceration going to protect the community, or is trying to get them in some sort of treatment program– which may change their behavior — going to do it?”

The man faces a jury trial beginning Nov. 24 for the child-molesting charges. All victims in the case, ages 2, 4 and 6, are acquaintances.

The Journal-World generally does not identify suspects in sex crimes unless they are convicted.