By Lori Pilger
Lincoln Journal Star, Neb.
LINCOLN, Neb. — A Lincoln judge has denied a man’s petition seeking to change his name legally to his inmate number, 66747.
Fred McSwine, who also is known as Frederick Johnson, paid the $87 fee to file a petition for a name change in Lancaster County District Court in May and $100 for a legal notice required by the court.
At a 5-minute hearing by video last month, Lancaster County District Judge Andrew Jacobsen asked McSwine to briefly tell him why he wanted the name change to 66747.
McSwine said that in his experience “the entirety of incarceration is meant to dehumanize. It’s a subhuman existence, and after realizing that I can’t beat it, conformity was the most logical decision.”
He said it’s not a decision he came to lightly, but this is his reality.
McSwine has been incarcerated for 18 years and said he maintains his innocence.
McSwine, 37, is serving a 56- to 101-year sentence at the Reception and Treatment Center in Lincoln for a brutal kidnapping at knife-point and sexual assault of a Waverly woman in 2012.
At trial, he claimed that the woman willingly had sex with him, then got angry when she learned he didn’t want a relationship.
The woman testified that the man she’d seen before at work came to her house, forced her from her home, the blade of a pocket knife to her back, and forced sex on her in wooded rural areas during the hours that followed.
At the end of the trial, the Lancaster County jury found him guilty, and the Nebraska Supreme Court later affirmed his conviction.
In a decision this week on McSwine’s request for a name change, Jacobsen said that while the petitioner argues that his confinement has reduced him to little more than a number, that isn’t sufficient or reasonable cause for the changing of his name.
“Furthermore, the Sex Offender Act is designed to protect unwary members of the public from convicted sex offenders. To allow sex offenders to change their names from that of which they were called at the time of the crime would undermine the very purpose of the act,” the judge wrote.
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