Court upholds incest conviction arising from hand-holding at a Wisconsin festival

Someone noticed Christian Bisbach holding hands with a young woman at Mushroom Fest in Muscoda in 2015.

Since he was on extended supervision for sexual assault of a child, he ended up getting questions from his probation agent and a Grant County sheriff's deputy.

Bisbach admitted the young woman was his biological sister, but he didn't really think of her that way since he'd been adopted by a different family when he was 3, years before the woman was born, and they never grew up together. 

He also admitted that after he moved back in with his birth parents in 2015, he and the woman, 18 at the time, began a sexual relationship. Bisbach was 29.

A few months later, a jury convicted Bisbach of 12 counts of incest. He was sentenced to 7½ years in prison, even though prosecutors' only evidence was testimony from his probation officer and the deputy, who also introduced recordings of sexually suggestive calls between Bisbach and the woman while he was in jail.  

Bisbach argued that the state failed to prove he and the woman were in fact siblings and couldn't rely only on his own claim to that fact, or even his claim that they'd had sex. He questioned why the state didn't get a family member to testify, find a birth certificate or do DNA tests.

On Wednesday, the Court of Appeals rejected Bisbach's argument and affirmed his convictions and sentence. It agreed with prosecutors that Bisbach's own admissions, his recorded jail calls to the woman, her statement to a deputy that she and Bisbach were "in a relationship" and the fact they were seen holding hands in public were enough to convict beyond a reasonable doubt.

The appellate decision doesn't mention that the woman was also charged with 12 counts of incest, but pleaded no contest to misdemeanor lewd and lascivious behavior and was sentenced to three years probation. One of her conditions was to have no contact with Bisbach.

In 2008, Bisbach was convicted in Grant County of second-degree sexual assault of a child. He was sentenced to 10 years probation, with a year in jail, but was allowed five days release for the birth of a child he fathered with another woman, not a relative.

In 2010, his probation was revoked and he was sentenced to four years in prison, plus four years of extended supervision.