Court grants sex offender request to lift registration

A man convicted of multiple sexual assaults against underaged girls in the 1980s and 1990s will no longer have to be registered as a sexual offender, the district court ordered recently.

James Lear, convicted in 1993 of sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl in northern Jefferson County, was sentenced then to “register as a sexual offender in any state he shall reside for the remainder of his natural life.”

He had also been previously convicted of sexually assaulting two girls in Alaska in the early 1980s, one age nine and one 14.