Panel restores ex-Gator linebacker's rights

State officials today restored the civil rights of a former University of Florida football team captain who had a drug conviction and also pardoned a man who was labeled as a sex offender after being targeted in an extortion scheme.

William Owen Bartuff, a linebacker for the Gators in the mid-1980s, told The Florida Board of Executive Clemency headed by Gov. Charlie Crist that he couldn't seek a state license to practice as a chiropractor until his rights were restored.

He served two years in federal prison for a conviction in a marijuana-growing conspiracy shortly after he graduated from Florida and was released by the Pittsburgh Steelers.

"My involvement was minimal at most, but it boils down to this, when you're wrong you're wrong and I was wrong," said Bartuff, who now lives in Sarasota.

Bartuff has been helping his wife with her massage therapy business and doing odd jobs while awaiting his rights restoration. He's also been an organizer and participant in the Tour de Spine, a bicycle trek from Alaska to Miami to raise money for the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis.

Crist's vote and those of two of the three Cabinet members are required to grant clemency.
The panel was unanimous in restoring Bartuff's rights.

It also voted unanimously to pardon Richard D. Porter Jr., who had moved to Panama, where his wife is from, to avoid Florida's sex offender registration requirement.

Porter, now 52, pleaded no contest 10 years ago to a single count of having consensual sex with an underage girl in Orange County. The judge withheld judgment, which ordinarily would give him a clean record, but he's still considered a sex offender under state law, said his lawyer, Kelly Overstreet Johnson.

She told the panel the girl lied about her age and used a fake ID to go to bars with Porter. Her father, a convicted felon, encouraged her to have sex with Porter and other men to extort money from them, Johnson said.

When Porter refused to pay $50,000, she reported him to police. Porter asked for and passed a lie detector test but it's still a crime for an adult to have sex - even if consensual - with a minor, Johnson said.

She said Porter moved to Panama because his son, now 19, was harassed at school and attempted suicide after fliers depicting the father as a sex offender were circulated in their neighborhood.

The son now has a brain tumor and Porter sought the pardon so he could bring him back to the United States for treatment without being branded as a sex offender.

"He could come but he would have to register and that would start the whole issue all over again," Johnson said. "Plus, he would be limited where he could live, whether he could go to the hospital if the hospital was near a school or a park or all of the other restrictions that are in effect."