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Internet Stings Lawyers, West Los Angeles, The “Crime de Jour” of the 90′s
Criminal Allegations on the Internet
How is it possible to sit at your own computer exercising your 1st amendment rights and be the subject of a police Internet Sex Stings operation? Actually your vulnerability becomes quite apparent once you understand the internet crime laws.
Attempted Child Molestation (Penal Code § 664/288(a)
If police want to create a sting operation to catch a person who fences (buys and resells) stolen property, the police pretend to be burglars who have “stolen property” to sell. The property is not actually stolen but the police pretend that it is. The “fence” buys the allegedly stolen property from the police. In this scenario it is factually impossible for the “fence” to buy stolen property from the police since the property is not stolen. However, if a person attempts to commit a crime that is factually impossible to commit he is still guilty of “attempt”. The “fence” would therefore be guilty of “attempted receipt of stolen property”.
Now, changing venues, if the police want to create a sting operation to catch a molester operating on the Internet, police officers can go online and pretend to be thirteen years old. They can advertise an “on-line profile” that he is a minor looking for sex with an adult. The police officer becomes a “cyber minor” who goes into a sex chat room using a phony under-age profile to chat with others in the sex room. The suspected molester engages in sexual chat with the police officer (cyber minor), and eventually a real-life meeting is arranged. The suspected molester is told by the cyber minor to bring lubricants and condoms so that “they” can have a good time. The suspect arrives at a hotel as requested by the cyber minor with condoms and lubricant in his possession. At the hotel the suspect is arrested for “attempted child molestation“. It is an attempt because it is factually impossible to be accused of child molestation with a forty-year-old police officer pretending to be a minor.
“Attempted” child molestation is a felony and carries a 4-year or more prison term.
How serious is this? In the State of West Los Angeles all “attempt” crimes carry a sentence that is one half of the actual crime. Lewd acts with a minor under the age of fourteen years (Penal Code § 288(a)) carries eight years in prison; attempted lewd acts with a minor under the age of fourteen carries four years in the state prison. If the defendant is convicted even of an attempted act, he must also register as a sex offender every time he moves and on his birthday for the remainder of his life.
If you have been a subject of an internet sting, you need to speak with an attorney who is experienced in this field. Contact the Innocence Legal Team now.
Harmful Matter (Penal Code § 288.2): More Pretenses Lead to More Charges
The police have developed scripted dialogues for alleged suspects using the Internet that will add more felony charges to a case. For example, during an “Internet Sex Sting chat”, the police officer (again a “cyber minor”) will ask the suspected molester to send pictures of himself. If the suspect sends a picture of himself in clothes, the cyber minor will ask for “special pictures”, meaning nude photographs.
Should the suspect send nude photos as requested the officer, he will be charged with attempting to send “harmful matter to a minor with the intent to arouse, appeal to or gratify the lusts or passions or sexual desires of the adult with a minor. The punishment for an attempt is three years in the state prison, and if there is more than one photograph, each may be charged as a separate offense. Four photos can be turned into a 12-year prison sentence in addition to a sentence for the original charge.
How does the law treat an adult if he has engaged in “cyber sex” with a “cyber minor”? The courts have no definitive answer. The suspect could be charged with sending harmful matter (the conversations) to a minor, even though oral conversations are not considered “matter”. The prosecution’s theory is that the electronic transfer becomes “matter” as it is sent from one computer to another. There is currently no case law which rules whether a “chat” on the Internet is “matter” as defined in Penal Code § 288.2 or whether it is protected by the 1st Amendment.
If this sounds familiar and you have been a victim of an Internet sting, call the Innocence Legal Team now.
Child Pornography or Sexual Exploitation of a Child (Penal Code § 311.3): Amping Up the Crime and Punishment
In another script, “cyber minor” may ask the suspect to send him more interesting pictures, and this time the pictures might depict a minor engaged in a sex act or simulated sex act. The suspect is then charged with the attempt of the Sexual Exploitation of a Minor. This offense carries one year in the county jail on a first offense and three years in state prison if the suspect has a prior offense.
However, if the suspect does not send any child pornography to “cyber minor”, that is not the end of the investigation. When the suspect is arrested for either the attempt of child molestation or sending harmful matter to a minor, the police get a search warrant for the suspect’s computer. They find that, mixed in with adult with adult sexual matter on the hard drive, there are several pictures depicting minors engaged in sexual conduct. The suspect is then charged with child pornography or Sexual Exploitation of a Child.
Exploitation of a Child (Penal Code § 311.3)
How such photos (depicting sexual acts between an adult and a minor) come into the computer is an important consideration. What if the suspect receives an unsolicited e-mail with a photo of child pornography attached? According to Penal Code §311.3(f), if the suspect receives unsolicited child pornography over the Internet, there is no violation of the law so long as the suspect does not make copies or send copies to others. The law, however, does not say whether or not the suspect must destroy these files.
Our attorneys recommend that anyone who receives any unsolicited child pornography should destroy it immediately. You cannot afford to be found with such photos on your computer, nor try to prove that they were unsolicited.
Internet Sting Defense Attorney Specialist
Internet law is extremely complex and an Internet Sting Defense Lawyer must be highly familiar the law, as well as the ways people use to participate and communicate on the internet, such as news groups, peer to peer sharing systems, and email systems. An attorney must understand the methods by which computers store and retrieve data, forensic examinations of computers, and much more.
When you step into the court room, preparation means everything. The Innocence Legal Team has been handling internet cases for the defense since the Internet first came into existence. Our firm knows how handle these cases. Preparing every case for trial, our team will help you face the legal challenges ahead. Contact us today for more information.
FOR THOSE THAT WISH TO KNOW MORE
A BRIED HISTORY OF THE INTERNET
The concepts that lead to the development of the Internet can be traced back almost 40 years to academic papers written in the early 1960s on “packet-switching” networks. In 1969 these ideas matured into a working proto-network called the ARPANET. Although this network had only four “nodes” or computers connected together, it was the forerunner of today’s Internet.
By 1971, 15 universities and research institutions were connected together, and the system was upgraded to handle a seemingly large 64-node network. In 1973 the first European computers were connected in England and Norway.
Meanwhile the key technologies of Ethernet, telnet, ftp, and Unix were being invented in the early 1970s. Ethernet (invented by Bob Metcalf, who later founded 3Com) would later become the standard for local area networks. Telnet allowed remote interactive access to other computers. FTP (File Transfer Protocol) enabled the transfer of large data files over the network. Unix, invented appropriately enough by the “phone company” (Bell Labs) and enhanced at UC Berkeley, became the software backbone of the Internet. Later Sun Microsystems commercialized Unix.
The dominant use of the Internet in the 1970s was email. In 1979 Usenet was invented to carry discussion forums, a primitive form of today’s chat rooms. This was the beginning of the more public side of the Internet, as contrasted to private email and telnet sessions. Usenet would later grow to its present volume of more 10,000 separate topic areas and more than 10 gigabytes of data – that’s the equivalent information of a small public library – that is accessed every day. Sexual topics quickly became the largest volume single area of Usenet. Communication and discussion of human sexuality has continued to be an important use of the Internet to this day.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the Internet grew exponentially: the number of hosts in 1984 was 1000, in 1987 10,000, in 1989 100,000, and in 1992 the number of hosts, or computers with permanent IP addresses, surpassed the one million mark – and this doesn’t even count the millions of people who dial in to the Internet daily via modems.
In 1993, Mosaic, the precursor to the Netscape browser, took the world by storm and gave birth to what is now known as the World Wide Web. And the rest, as they say, is history. Today the Internet links more than 170 countries worldwide, with over 1.5 million domain names, and over 40 million hosts. Underscoring the new central role of the Internet in American life–and indeed the entire world, a three-judge Federal panel in Philadelphia in June of 1996 called the Internet “the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country – and indeed the world — has yet seen.” (“A Very Brief History of the Internet” was written courtesy of Dr. Jim Herriot)
Internet Phobia and How It Creates False Allegations
The Internet’s participatory nature and society’s interest in sexual topics is used by law enforcement to escalate the public’s unfounded fear that the Internet is a vast playground for predatory adults looking for children to molest. While thousands of actual acts of child molestation occur daily within families across the nation, one perceived Internet “molestation” becomes a media circus that ends up terrorizing parents.
These alleged “predators” defy all logic: despite all the electronic safeguards and precautions in place, supposedly they still can enter homes through the modem to lure children into sexual acts. The parents are more afraid of a nameless, faceless phantom than they are of real live family members who statistically pose a greater threat to their children.
This phobia is even more irrational when it involves the fear of homosexual “recruiters”. Parents think that a homosexual is able to kidnap their child and recruit him/her into the homosexual lifestyle through their children’s computer monitors. This form of homophobia is at the heart of a parent’s fear of the Internet–and the hysteria that endangers everyone’s constitutional rights. It is also at the heart of this section.