Court Case Story

The article that I read was about a Waukesha man named Joshua Wade, 23, that was accused of befriending children, molesting some of them repeatedly in his apartment and secretly videotaping more than 30 of them in the bathroom. The court charged him with four counts of child enticements, four counts of repeated sexual assault of a child and a count of capturing an image of nudity.

Information was released last week to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about how Wade had been repeating some of his old ways. A juvenile proceeding sent Wade to a treatment center for indecently touching a 9-year-old girl when he was 15. While in treatment, according to police, he had admitted that they had not even known about 16 other victims of his.

At the age of 18, Wade was released from treatment as a registered sex offender but since he was a juvenile offender, the public never knew about any of it because of the secrecy of juvenile court cases. An Assembly committee approved something they're calling "Amie's Law," which was named after AmieLee Zyla, one of Wade's victims back in 1997 who came forward to testify against him.

I felt like this was a really good example of an interesting court case because it talked about something that no one ever reads about everyday. Juvenile sex offenders are not in everyday newspapers. It is definitely front page material.