The ruling allows the prolific pervert and roughly 20,000 other convicted sex offenders' names to be scrubbed from the state police database.
Page B1From§Eachthe early evening edition — 2 October 2026
Michigan's top court erases Larry Nassar and 20,000 other sex offenders from the same registry
As it ran on the front
Michigan's sex offender registry died this week at the state supreme court, survived by the law it enforced for a number of years this record does not state — there is no birth date given for it anywhere in the wire, which is worth sitting with for a public list whose whole business was keeping an accurate account. The court found a problem in how the law could be applied, a legal technicality in the paper's own phrase, and struck down the whole registration scheme rather than one name on it. Michigan State Police began removing offenders from the database. Roughly twenty thousand people came off the list. Larry Nassar was one of them.
Walk the years backward from that fact, because the order is the whole obituary. On September 15, 2021, Simone Biles and three other U.S. gymnasts testified before Congress that USA Gymnastics and the FBI had let their team doctor keep working for years after the first report of his abuse reached a federal desk in 2015 — six years before anyone in Washington said so under oath. Nassar was already convicted by then.…
…(cont) The registry did not die because a judge decided Larry Nassar belonged off that list. It died because the law that put him there, and nineteen thousand-some others beside him, could not survive being asked to apply the same way to all of them. That is not malarkey — that is the actual shit sitting under this headline: a registry wide enough to need no judgment calls turned out to be too wide to survive a single judgment call.
Survived by: the underlying convictions, which the ruling does not touch. Preceded in death by nothing stated in the record — no earlier Michigan registry is named in these receipts, no amendment history given; this obituary runs on what the wire provided, not what a fuller search might someday turn up.
In lieu of flowers, Lansing could write the registry it actually meant to build — one narrow enough to survive a courtroom — before the next name comes off the list the same way this one did.
“They sold that registry as the list that worked, and the first time a court read the law closely, the whole thing came apart and took the worst name on it down with the rest. That is not a loophole, that is bad engineering — build a dragnet wide enough to catch the whole population at once and it cannot survive one challenge. Twenty thousand names came off in a single ruling, and Lansing does not have a next version drafted yet.”
“Look, I am not here to defend Larry Nassar, nobody is — I am defending the process that is supposed to apply the same rule to Larry Nassar and the guy three cells down. If a court finds the statute too broad to survive review, that is the Constitution working exactly the way it is designed to, not some administration going soft. Did I just call voiding a sex-offender registry a win for law and order? That does not sound like me.”
Earlier in this story
- Court restores $7 billion in solar funds; agency diverts $1.4 billion more in science funding days later. By Chip · the early bird edition, 2 October 2026
- Supreme Court approves voter-purge database, judge rules its own legal foundation unconstitutional eleven days later By Lou · the noon edition, 2 October 2026
- Supreme Court strikes Trump's mail-ballot order 7-2, approves his voter-purge database eleven days later. By Sal · the coffee break edition, 2 October 2026
The receipts
Convicted offender among 20,000 people removed from list after state supreme court ruling on Sora registration law Larry Nassar , the former Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics physician convicted of sexually abusing girls and women over a period of decades while claiming to provide medical treatment, has been removed from…
· Simone Biles and three other U.S. gymnasts testify before Congress about the long-term sexual abuse of women in USA Gymnastics by team doctor Larry Nassar and the lack of investigation by the FBI afte from the morgue, 15 Sep 2021
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.