Woman appeals prostitution case, sex offender label

This story is one reason why I like to refer to the Buckeye state as "D'Oh!-high-O." And to think, people actually believe everyone on the registry rapes and/or molests people.

http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/crime-law/woman-appeals-prostitution-conviction-sex-offender/nmq4P/

Posted: 6:05 p.m. Thursday, July 2, 2015
Woman appeals prostitution case, sex offender label

By Mark Gokavi
Staff Writer

DAYTON — A Kettering woman convicted of promoting prostitution and labeled a sex offender after she drove a friend to what turned out to be a prostitution sting was granted judicial release after serving about seven months of an 18-month sentence.

But Aimee Hart, 42, is continuing with an appeal of her fourth-degree felony conviction because she doesn’t believe she should have to register as a sex offender, which she did after she was released last month. Hart was found guilty during a December 2014 trial.

She said Thursday she’s grateful that Montgomery County Common Pleas Court Judge Gregory Singer let her out of prison and enabled her to spend the remainder of her sentence on probation.

“I personally feel that they perverted the intention of the law to fit my circumstances,” Hart said in an exclusive interview. “I think it was a miscarriage of justice the way I got convicted and what they’ve done to me in connection to it.

“As somebody who lived through serious sexual abuse as a child, it makes me sick to my stomach. … The sex offender thing is overkill and irrelevant to what I did. It puts me in the category with people who are predators and prey on other people and take advantage of them either for their own good or to make money off them.”

Efforts to reach prosecutors for comment were unsuccessful Thursday.

Tiffany Isaacs, the woman Hart drove and who asked Hart for a condom once she got to the sting location in January 2014, was sentenced for a misdemeanor solicitation charge and later arrested for another prostitution-related offense. Isaacs is not a registered sex offender.

“She got a misdemeanor and did 60 days and I got a felony 4 and was sentenced to 18 months, which I served seven and then I have to register as a sex offender for the next 15 years of my life … because I gave my friend a ride,” Hart said. “I’m not at all saying that there shouldn’t have been some consequence. I would have gladly done 60 days on some sort of misdemeanor just the way she did.”

Hart was charged under a recently revised Ohio law that stripped the language about transportation for sex-for-hire needing to be across state or county lines. The promoting prostitution statute states a person must knowingly transport another to facilitate sexual activity for hire.

“(Isaacs) got a misdemeanor and she was the one who would have been performing a sex act,” said public defender Susan Souther, who represented Hart at trial and at the judicial release hearing. “I just find that a crazy statute.”