Police officer in Georgia charged with internet sex offense
A Clayton County, Georgia police officer was charged this week in another internet sex sting. The Atlanta Journal Constitution has the story of the arrest.
These cases just keep coming. Some criminal defense lawyers, including this one, think it's becoming less of a law enforcement pursuit and more like a witch-hunt. One defense attorney recently went a step further and asked a superior court judge in Northeast Georgia to issue an arrest warrant for the leader of "Perverted Justice", the group Dateline NBC uses to set up these stings. The Athens, Georgia newspaper covered the story, and the lawyer's appeal to the Georgia Court of Appeals.
These cases are generally prosecuted in Georgia state courts, not federal courts. The only time the United States Attorney's office gets involved is if the person is found to have a large amount of child pornography on his computer, or if the person traveled across state lines for the purpose of committing child molestation. And even then, the feds have usually investigated the case from the beginning using federal agents (mostly ICE and FBI). Federal prosecutors have so far stayed away from cases brought by Perverted Justice. I think they see too many problems with an operation like this being run by people who are not working for law enforcement.
We've successfully represented clients in several internet sex cases. Usually, they have been charged with sexual exploitation of a minor, attempted child molestation, and/or enticing a child for indecent purposes. Fortunately, we have been successful in defending many of these cases. I have seen a few cases where the undercover cop goes too far and actually entraps the person into doing something they would not otherwise have done. We think there is also a defense for some of our clients who did not actually believe they were emailing an underage girl. Considering the role-playing that goes on in these chat rooms, a lot of people lie about their age, their height and anything else they can think of.
But people are still getting caught up in these email exchanges and they end up being arrested. We were just retained to represent a well-respected Marine who may have been entrapped by these people. The Albany, Georgia newspaper has the story. We look forward to defending him.
In our opinion, there is a big difference between molesting a child and chatting with a 50 year old male cop who is pretending to be a sexually-active, promiscuous teenager. One is a crime, the other is just stupidity.
