Registration as a sex offender for life under the Sex Offenders Registration Act (SORA); MCL 28.722(a)(iii)(B); MCL 28.725(13); Whether retroactive application of SORA is an unconstitutional ex post facto punishment; People v Betts; People v Lymon (Lymon I & II); People v Kiczenski

The court held that the trial court did not abuse its discretion by finding that defendant was not entitled to removal from the SORA registry. He pled no contest to CSC I and II for sexually assaulting the victims, who were 13 and 15 years old at the time. The trial court sentenced him to 15 to 30 years for CSC I and 3 to 15 for CSC II and required him to register as a sex offender for life under the SORA. The court denied his 2012 and 2014 applications for leave to appeal, and in 2023 the trial court denied his third successive motion for relief from judgment. In the present appeal, the court rejected his argument that he was entitled to immediate removal from the sex offender registry because it is an unconstitutional ex post facto punishment to require him to register under the 2021 SORA. The “trial court’s opinion and order denying defendant’s removal from the SORA was issued before the Michigan Supreme Court’s decision in Lymon II was released and before this Court published its decision in Kiczenski.” Although it “did not have the opportunity to apply the facts of the present case to those cases, we ‘will affirm a lower court’s ruling when the court reaches the right result, albeit for the wrong reason.’” Defendant, who was convicted of CSC I and II, “is a sexual offender. Pursuant to Kiczenski, the 2021 SORA does not constitute punishment as applied to defendant and there is no ex post facto violation in the retroactive application of the 2021 SORA as to defendant.” Affirmed.