Bill Kirby Jr.: Judge to Joan Dayton: "Our children'' a public trust

By Bill Kirby Jr.
Fayetteville Observer
September 01, 2015

http://www.fayobserver.com/news/crime_courts/judge-to-dayton-our-children-a-public-trust/article_10f910ba-9dd4-5f77-bdd5-4bf1ef4c2deb.html

Joan Dayton let two assistant principals know, and in no uncertain terms.

"This is my school," the principal and co-founder of Freedom Christian Academy was telling Lin Wheeler and Hall Powers, according to an affidavit, who were concerned in 2012 about why she allowed a registered sex offender to perform odds jobs at the school. "I'm in charge here, and I can do whatever I want."

Paul Conner, 50, the registered sex offender, was arrested May 28 and charged with violating the Sex Offender Registration Act.

On Tuesday, Dayton stood before Cumberland County Superior Court Judge Jim Ammons and entered a plea of responsibility to aiding and abetting and conspiring with Conner's breach of the Sex Offender Registration Act on multiple occasions dating to 2010 at the private school.

"I am agreeing to what I did," Dayton, 64, told the judge. "I did know he was a past sex offender. It's a heavy price."

But Dayton, her lawyer said, was little more than a good-hearted woman trying to help someone along life's way.

"It was out of a sense of trying to do the Christian thing," Michael Boose told Ammons as he pleaded for a just and merciful sentence. "Trying to help someone put his past in the past. She was trying to encourage him."

Boose agreed with Billy West, the district attorney, that Dayton's act was "a lapse in judgment," no less a felony, but still worthy of a judge's mercy.

This was judgment day.

Dayton arrived with her husband shortly before the 2 p.m. proceeding, where she was met outside the courtroom by supporters and well-wishers.

All later would listen as West laid out details of what led to this investigation of the school on Gillespie Street.

"Conner's wife was hired as a teacher in 2010, and Mrs. Conner informed Mrs. Dayton," the prosecutor said, that her husband was a convicted sex offender, dating back to 2001, for abuse with a minor. "Mrs. Dayton did in fact know Mr. Conner was a sex offender. Nevertheless, she did not comply with state statutes and notify the sheriff he was there."

Dayton hired him to do odd jobs, the prosecutor said, from moving school furnishings to building shelves for the school bookstore to assessing a plumbing issue, when "Mr. Conner said he notified Mrs. Dayton he should not be on campus."

Still, Dayton turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to his past, and the law.

When a teacher's class lesson demonstrating how students could identify registered sex offenders in the community revealed Paul Conner's sex offender registration, the prosecutor said Dayton "didn't want students to learn how to use the website" because it might expose his campus presence.

And her complicity.

Now, she stood before the judge, where this was his courtroom and where this judge was in charge.

"This man was a convicted sex offender," Ammons told Dayton before handing out a sentence of 11 months of supervised probation, 50 hours of community service, banishment from the school for the duration of the sentence and admonishment that laws are laws for a reason and that Dayton violated the law and a public trust for the safety of children.

"You knew it and invited him to the school. Ma'am, you know, as well as anybody, how precious our children are."