Convicted in 1986 Child Pornography Case, Mobile Man Sued to Get Off Alabama’s Sex Offender Registry. A Federal Judge Threw It Out.

MOBILE, Ala. — Robert Emile “Bobby” Peterson pleaded guilty to child pornography charges in both federal and state court in 1986. Nearly four decades later, he went to federal court to erase the consequence he says he never saw coming: Alabama’s lifetime sex offender registry.

On Nov. 30, 2023, Peterson filed a handwritten lawsuit, without a lawyer, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama. He sued the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office, the Mobile police, the Alabama Attorney General and the state Department of Public Safety. He asked a federal judge to order Alabama to remove him from “any sex offender registry database” and to grant him what he called “a pardon.”

The court refused. Peterson never filed a response to the government’s motions to dismiss. A magistrate judge recommended tossing every claim, a district judge agreed, and the case was closed with a final judgment on Oct. 29, 2024.

The 18-page complaint, a review of the full court file and the judges’ rulings show a man who pleaded guilty twice, served his sentence, lived for decades without registering and, once he was required to, described the crime to the court as involving “not a victim just three magazines.”

A 1985 raid and two guilty pleas

The case began in June 1985, when a postal inspector made what Peterson describes as a “control delivery” of an opened package to his Mobile home. Within minutes, he wrote, his house was “swarming with agents with a search warrant for child porn.”

The package had come from Europe. By Peterson’s own account, it held six pornographic magazines, three of which were said to contain child pornography. Court records show he was booked into the Mobile City Jail on July 1, 1985, and released the next day.

On Jan. 30, 1986, Peterson pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of knowingly receiving child pornography under 18 U.S.C. § 2252(a)(2). Two other counts in the indictment were dismissed on the government’s motion. He had a lawyer at the time.

On Sept. 10, 1986, a federal judge sentenced him to three years in federal prison and a $50 special assessment, according to the judgment Peterson himself attached to his lawsuit. Two days later, a Mobile County court sentenced him to five years for possession of child pornography, to run concurrently. That state case, CC1985-002426, arose from some of the same conduct, according to records the Alabama Attorney General filed with the court. Peterson did not dispute them.

Decades off the registry, then a knock at the door

Alabama’s current sex offender law, the Alabama Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification Act (ASORCNA), took effect on July 1, 2011. It applies to adult offenders “without regard to when his or her crime or crimes were committed.” Registration is for life. Registrants must report in person every quarter, and anyone who knowingly fails to register faces up to 10 years in prison.

Peterson “apparently did not register under ASORCNA until 2021,” the magistrate judge wrote. That is nearly a decade after the law took effect and roughly 35 years after his sentencing.

Peterson says the reckoning came when he got home from a trip to Texas. Two sex offender detectives were waiting for him: Mark Tunstall of the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office and Robert Lunsford of the Mobile Police Department. They handed him a paper and told him to report to their offices Monday morning. Peterson wrote that someone “had turned me in” and that he believed he knew who: a “narcissistic person” acting “out of jealousy.”

His own filings disagree on when that happened. One typed statement says Jan. 11, 2021. Another says Jan. 11, 2022. The court used 2021, which matches his statement that he registered on Jan. 14, 2021.

Within months, Peterson was in jail. He wrote that when he reported to Tunstall in May 2021, he was arrested “for not coming in some two weeks after my initial registration.” He said he was charged, jailed and facing a hearing for failure to appear before the county detective. He blamed a reporting date he said the city detective had marked on his paperwork. The filings do not say how that charge was resolved.

The lawsuit: “remove him from any sex offender registry”

Peterson paid the $402 filing fee and filed Peterson v. Attorney General of Alabama, Case No. 1:23-cv-00452, under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the federal civil rights statute. He named four defendants:

• the Alabama Attorney General
• the Alabama Department of Public Safety
• the Mobile County Sheriff’s Department
• the Mobile Police Department

His complaint argued that the registry, “as applied” to him, was unconstitutionally “over-breadth” [sic]. He claimed it denied him due process and equal protection, and that it amounted to an “ex post fact law” and a second punishment for the same crime. He wrote that his 1986 sentence “can not 38 years later be re-opened.” He also said his federal sentencing judge never ordered him to register.

He asked the court for an injunction “prohibiting Alabama from requiring [him] to register by ordering them to remove him from any sex offender registry database and restore his Civil and Constitutional Rights.” Separately, he argued he could show “by clear and convincing evidence” that he does not pose a substantial risk of committing another sex offense.

The complaint lists the restrictions he resents. His driver’s license is marked, which he says cost him a long-planned cruise. Flyers went to his neighbors, and his picture was posted on social media. He can no longer go to amusement parks or school functions with his grandchildren. He must request travel permission three days in advance from two detectives, and he pays $10 each time he registers with each agency.

“Not a victim, just three magazines”

Peterson’s typed statements to the court cast him as the injured party in his own crime. He wrote that he “never saw these magazines” and that a cousin had asked a friend in Europe to send them. He suggested the search turned up “things showing up that I am sure were not in my house earlier.” He said the judge had called the case “political.”

Those claims sit uneasily beside the record. Peterson pleaded guilty twice, once in federal court and once in state court, both times with a lawyer. He told the court the registry rules “should not apply to me because there was not a victim just three magazines.”

The law has said otherwise for more than 40 years. In New York v. Ferber (1982), the U.S. Supreme Court held that child pornography is inseparable from the sexual abuse of the children used to make it. Every image is a record of a real child being harmed.

Peterson called the registry a “ridiculous unjust ex post facto law” and wrote that “there was no investigation just a life sentence imposed.” He asked to be excluded from the registry and pardoned.

To show his character, he submitted a biography and letters from longtime friends. He described more than 40 years at his Baptist church, where he said he serves on the finance committee and runs audio and video. He listed leadership roles in a local aero club and several car clubs. He also said he founded Southern Repro Graphics in 2007 and sold it in August 2020; it is now under different ownership. One friend, who wrote that he had known Peterson more than 60 years, called the registry law “unethical and unjust.”

The court’s answer: dismissed on every count

The defendants moved quickly. On Dec. 22, 2023, the Attorney General and the Department of Public Safety filed a motion to dismiss, and the Mobile County Sheriff’s Department filed its own on Dec. 29. On Aug. 23, 2024, U.S. Magistrate Judge Katherine P. Nelson issued a 27-page recommendation that dismantled the suit:

• Sheriff’s Department: Under Alabama law, “a county sheriff’s department lacks the capacity to be sued.” She recommended dismissal with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled.
• State agencies: The Department of Public Safety and most claims against the Attorney General were barred by the Eleventh Amendment.
• Due process: Registration turns on “an offender’s conviction alone,” a fact Peterson already had the chance to contest when he pleaded guilty.
• Ex post facto and double jeopardy: The 11th Circuit has already held that Alabama’s registry is “civil and regulatory rather than punitive,” so it is not a second punishment.

On Sept. 12, 2024, U.S. District Judge Terry F. Moorer adopted the recommendation. He gave Peterson until Oct. 15 to file an amended complaint on one narrow remaining claim against the Attorney General. The docket shows none was filed. A final judgment closed the case on Oct. 29, 2024.

A son’s child pornography case, and a motion mailed from federal prison

Peterson’s filings never mention it, but his son has his own federal child pornography conviction from the same Mobile courthouse.

Timothy E. Peterson, now 52, pleaded guilty on Oct. 19, 2010, to receipt and distribution of child pornography under 18 U.S.C. § 2252A, in United States v. Peterson, Case No. 1:10-cr-00183. On Feb. 14, 2011, he was sentenced to 210 months, or 17½ years, in federal prison. He did not appeal.

In November 2017, he asked the court to dismiss all charges and order his immediate release. The court treated the request as a motion to vacate his sentence and threw it out on May 7, 2018, as filed more than five years too late. Federal Bureau of Prisons records show he was released on Oct. 17, 2025.

The son’s path crossed the father’s lawsuit in April 2024. A motion to delay the case arrived at the courthouse that month, signed “Robert Peterson.” It was written in neat block capitals, unlike the scrawled cursive of the original complaint. The envelope was postmarked April 25, 2024, from the Federal Medical Center in Butner, N.C. It bore the handwritten name “Tim Peterson” and the register number 11651-003, which federal prison records assign to Timothy Peterson.

That motion asked the judge to wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the Chevron doctrine. Chevron governed how courts defer to federal agencies. It had nothing to do with Alabama’s registry law, and the court found it came almost four months past his deadline and was not a proper response.

The gap between the two sentences is stark. The father received three years in 1986. The son, convicted a generation later under federal penalties that had grown far harsher, received more than five times that.