Appropriate for this Person, think twice, see earlier story HERE5-4-2012 New York:
Rochester, N.Y. --- On Friday Monroe County Court Judge Victoria Argento sentenced Richard "Ricky" Kretovic, now 20 of Greece, to six months in jail. The sentence is in accordance to a plea deal Kretovic agreed to in March and it also includes ten years of probation and registration as a sex offender in New York State.
13WHAM News was first to tell you that Kretovic suffers from Asperger’s a mild form of Autism that affects a person’s social and emotional development.
"Chronologically he's 19, academically he is way beyond his years, but socially and emotionally he's about ten, eleven years old," Kretovic’s mother Karen said in an exclusive interview with 13WHAM News in April.
Kretovic pled guilty to the crime of Criminal Sexual Act.
The conditions of the plea deal were agreed upon with the consent of the victim's family.
Greece Police investigated the crime after receiving information from the parents of the 12-year-old victim. The investigation led police to determine that Kretovic had met the boy while playing Xbox Live online and that he then initiated face-to-face meetings with the boy at Kretovic’s home. Greece Police initially determined that sexual encounters occurred in the basement of that home on multiple occasions.
Kretovic’s case drew statewide and national headlines as it was one of the first few cases that highlighted the potential dangers of online access through video gaming systems. Following Kretovic’s guilty plea in March New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman pointed specifically to this case as a motivating factor in a first-of-it’s-kind agreement with manufacturers of these online gaming systems.
"Operation: Game Over in fact took on an added urgency after a recent event in Greece, New York…" A.G. Schneiderman said at a press conference in New York City last month. The agreement involved the removal of all registered sex offenders in the State of New York from the online databases of these gaming systems.
A spokeswoman for A.G. Schneiderman’s Office refused to comment when asked if the office was aware of Kretovic’s Asperger’s.
Kretovic’s diagnosis has his mother, and even a licensed social worker who has worked with him in recent months, publicly pleading for a sentence that would not include jail time.
"Rick broke the law, knowingly or unknowingly he broke the law, I'm not saying that he should not be punished for his crime," Karen Kretovic said of her son. "But not as severely as this."
"That is the piece that I'm most disturbed about because it truly is like putting an innocent ten or eleven year-old in with adults who are street smart; it is absolutely not an appropriate punishment," Kitty Moran Wolfsong said in an interview with 13WHAM News last month. "Ricky will be destroyed in jail, it terrifies me what jail is going to do to him. Best case scenario he'll come out damaged and need years of therapy to deal with it, worst case scenario he will be turned into a predator…It is not going to correct anything." ..Source.. by Sean Carroll
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