{"id":22407,"date":"2016-03-21T08:02:59","date_gmt":"2016-03-21T15:02:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/sex-offenders-appeal-is-thrown-out\/"},"modified":"2016-03-21T08:02:59","modified_gmt":"2016-03-21T15:02:59","slug":"sex-offenders-appeal-is-thrown-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/sex-offenders-appeal-is-thrown-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Sex offender&#8217;s appeal is thrown out"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A convicted sex offender\u2019s attempt to declare himself a \u201csovereign citizen\u201d immune from prosecution has been thrown out by the Alaska Court of Appeals.<\/p>\n<p>Eugene John Bourdon, the man behind the case, has an extensive history of sexual assault, including against children. In 1986, he was convicted of attempted sexual assault after trying to grab two girls walking home from a Sitka middle school.<\/p>\n<p>In 2000, Bourdon was convicted of four counts of second-degree sexual abuse of a minor. After his release from prison, he was <a href=\"http:\/\/juneauempire.com\/local\/2013-03-17\/judge-denies-appeal-man-convicted-open-lewdness\" target=\"_blank\">convicted of \u201copen lewdness\u201d<\/a> in 2011 for following two girls around Walmart, taking their pictures and masturbating in one of the store\u2019s aisles. Three years later, he was found following children around Fred Meyer and taking their pictures.<\/p>\n<p>Last year, he was <a href=\"http:\/\/juneauempire.com\/local\/2015-03-04\/sex-offender-gets-1-year-failing-register\" target=\"_blank\">sentenced to one year in prison<\/a> for failing to register as a sex offender.<\/p>\n<p>In 2013, Bourdon filed a 50-page petition saying his 2000 conviction should be overturned because he is a \u201csovereign citizen and that, absent his consent, the state of Alaska has no power to enforce its criminal laws against him.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After a superior court justice denied the appeal, Bourdon took his complaint to the appeals court, which issued its decision Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A convicted sex offender\u2019s attempt to declare himself a \u201csovereign citizen\u201d immune from prosecution has been thrown out by the Alaska Court of Appeals. Eugene John Bourdon, the man behind the case, has an extensive history of sexual assault, including against children. In 1986, he was convicted of attempted sexual assault after trying to grab [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-22407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22407\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22407"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=22407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}