FAIRFIELD — The 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco sided Friday with a Fairfield child molester who successfully challenged his 2013 eviction from the Fairfield Housing Authority’s Section 8 housing assistance program.
Magid Mokatish, 57, had been receiving money from the program since 1998. He sent the housing authority a letter in 2013 bemoaning his inability to find a suitable home “in part due to my registration requirement.” Mokatish was referring to his sex offender registration that was the result of his committing lewd acts on two children in 2004.
The housing authority decided to terminate Mokatish’s housing voucher assistance in spite of previously recertifying his annual eligibility eight times, each with knowledge that he was a registered sex offender.
The housing authority claimed Mokatish’s felony conviction of committing lewd acts on a child of 14 or 15 years of age amounted to a violation of a regulation barring program participants from engaging in violent criminal activity. An administrative hearing officer and then Judge Michael Mattice rejected arguments from Mokatish’s lawyer that the child sexual assault crime did not add up to violent criminal activity.
Among other things, Mokatish’s lawyer pointed out that while regulations bar registered sex offenders from being admitted to the Section 8 housing program, there were no regulations requiring participants be terminated because they became a registered sex offender.
The divided Court of Appeal ruling pointed out that lewd or lascivious conduct does not necessarily involve the use or threatened use of force or automatically amounts to criminally violent abuse.
The ruling ordered Mattice to reverse his previous decision and directed the Fairfield Housing Authority to pay for all of Mokatish’s legal costs. ..Source.. by Jess Sullivan
No comments:
Post a Comment
We use the Disqus Commenting system, please wait for it to load. Also, comments are moderated, please stick to the issue of the post, as we are trying to have an intelligent, relevant discussion which develops the post. Comments deviating from topic of post will not be posted. Thanks