CDM Sex Offender Can't Apply for Release

It's been more than 20 years since Alan Thomas Rigby, a former track coach at a school in Corona del Mar, was sentenced for sex crimes with 19 children, and despite Rigby's efforts to be released, a court has ruled he cannot yet apply for a hearing to be freed.

According to court records, in January 2010 Orange County Superior Court Judge James Marion ruled Rigby was eligible to apply for such a hearing, but an appellant court recently said the ruling surpassed the court's jurisdiction because Rigby has not yet been found by a jury to be a sexually violent predator. Instead the appellate court ruled for a probable cause hearing to be held in the case.

In 1989 Rigby was 41 years old. He pleaded guilty to 36 counts of child molestation in exchange for no more than 20 years in prison and escaped facing nearly 80 years behind bars, but during the sentencing phase he adamently denied that he had ever molested a child, according to reports in the Los Angeles Times in 1989.

Rigby, was a physical education and track coach at Harbor Day School, a private school in CDM. Some of Rigby's former students testified he formed a secret club at the school and required the students to masturbate if they wanted to be a part of it and sign an oath promising secrecy, according to The Times. Most of the victims were in the fifth and sixth grades.

Although numerous boys had complained about him to the Newport Beach police, it was two parents of two young girls who turned him in to the police after he exposed himself to their daughters at his Irvine home, the Times reported.

In 1997 the Orange County District Attorney's Office made a move to keep Rigby from being released and filed a petition to commit Rigby as a sexually violent predator, which would keep him locked up in a mental health institution with a right to petition for release. Records show that the following year a jury found Rigby met the sexually violent predator qualifications and the court ordered him committed for two years.

In 2006 following passage of a new law, the district attorney sought Rigby's indeterminate commitment at a mental health institution.