Mike Tyson registered as a sex offender at the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Phoenix on Friday morning, May 7, 2004. Lieutenant J.J. Tuttle confirmed it to wire services that weekend. Arizona law required it because he had a 1992 Indiana felony conviction for rape. He had been living in the state for several months. He was 37. A July fight with Kevin McBride was already on the calendar. The registration was not a new trial. It was the paperwork a conviction carries when you change addresses.

In February 1992 an Indianapolis jury convicted him of rape and criminal deviate conduct against Desiree Washington, a contestant in the Miss Black America pageant. He was sentenced to six years. He served three at the Indiana Youth Center and was released in March 1995. Those are the court facts that followed him to Arizona. Sex-offender registries exist so that a rape conviction is not only a prison term. When he established residency, the state put his name on the list. That is how the statute is written.

What registration is and is not

It is a legal consequence of a felony sex offense, not a documentary about his later interviews, conversions, or boxing afterlife. It does not retry Desiree Washington’s testimony. It does not erase it. Public memory likes to treat Tyson as a redeemed spectacle. The registry treats him as a man the state still classifies because of what a jury found. Both versions of him have existed in the same career. Only one of them is why Maricopa took his information that Friday.

Washington has had to live as the woman in the citation line for three decades. Naming her is not a gossip choice. She is the person the conviction is about. Graphic retelling of the night does not belong here. The verdict does.

2004 in one paragraph

He signed the form. The sheriff’s office said so. Wire desks ran four sentences and went back to the McBride booking. That is how a registry day looks when the registrant is famous. The form is the same size as anyone else’s. The difference is that the Associated Press is in the lobby.

Tyson’s later life — film, podcasts, a boutique persona — does not commute the 1992 judgment. Fans who want only the ear and the pigeon can skip this file. The file is still there. May 7, 2004, Phoenix, sex-offender registration, rape conviction, three years served of six. Desiree Washington’s name stays in the sentence. The rest is a heavyweight who had to tell Arizona what Indiana already knew.