A convicted murderer and child molester has been found not guilty of failure to register as a sex offender. The Northwest Indiana Times says Richard Dobeski was cleared of the charges last week by Starke Circuit Court Judge Kim Hall following a bench trial. The case had been moved out of LaPorte County.
Dobeski was convicted of murdering two neighbor children in 1964. He was released from prison in 2003, but ended up back in custody after he was charged with fondling a seven-year-old Westville boy in 2007.
After he was released again, he was charged in both LaPorte and Marion counties in July of 2015 with the Level 6 felony of failure to register as a sex offender. But the Times says Dobeski’s defense attorney argued that he hadn’t secured a place to live yet, so he was only required to report, which his attorney said he did.
In any case, Dobeski would not have had to serve any more jail time. He had been convicted of the Marion County charges, but that was later overturned by the Indiana Court of Appeals. His credit for the time he’d already spent in jail would have exceeded the maximum possible sentence for the LaPorte County charges.
