How Is A Sex Crime Defined In Arizona?

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That is a much lighter range of options than even assault or drug charges, when discussing sex crimes. Sex crimes range from crimes against children, dangerous crimes against children, and sex assaults, rapes, and molestations. Those are hands-on type offenses, and then there are offenses like child pornography, or things of that nature. The accused may not actually have physical contact, or knowledge of who the victims are, but they are perpetuating the victimization of these people, and they are often children as well. Then you have the sex worker industry. There are crimes involving prostitution, pimping, and related violence against those individuals.

Then you have entered adult sex crimes, like rape, sexual assault, unwanted sexual touching, and you have situations where there are people that know each other that commit sexual assaults against one another. You have statutory rape while you have consenting people. The law says that by their age, or by the difference in their ages, that they are unable to legally make that decision, and so there is a wide range of crimes that fit under that general heading of sex crimes.

What Are The Common Types Of Sex Cases That You Handle?

I have practiced an overwhelming amount here in Arizona, of what we call dangerous crimes against children. Therefore, adult individuals committing crimes against much younger and often non-sexualized victims, young children, even what we would almost consider infants, or toddlers, and those seem to be many of what is prosecuted here. Then there is also a wide range of traditional rape cases where one adult is forcibly having sex with another without their consent. Many of those cases in Arizona sit on the shelf waiting DNA testing. Law enforcements ability to work through evidence old, and new, old interviews, and old physical evidence to determine if they are able to identify the assailant, or the assailants who have committed the crime before, because often, as we see in individuals that commit rape there is a pattern of behavior, and not a one-time offense.

How Is A Sex Crime Determined To Be Either A Misdemeanor Or A Felony?

Most sex crimes I have dealt with have been felonies. Almost every type of serious sex crime in Arizona is a felony. There are some options I guess, where certain types of touching may not involve penetration, or intercourse, and result in a misdemeanor resolution. Even those types of cases typically are charged as felonies. There are some sex crimes that occur in courts that are more akin to indecent exposure, maybe like urinating, or something in public where someone has exposed himself to a populous while doing that, but that intent was not sexual in nature. Those are limited classifications. Any of your assaulting, pornography, or things like that is going to be felonies. I suppose many of the prostitution counts can be, and typically are misdemeanors as well, depending on what exactly has been alleged. The large majority are going to be serious felony offenses.

What Steps Should Someone Take When Facing Sex Crime Charges?

First, even more than any other crime, a sex crime allegation is where I want my client to stop talking, and volunteering information. Tell them you want an attorney, do not try to explain yourself, it never winds up going well, even if the client is innocent. When you try to explain away, or excuse potentially horrific allegations, it is almost impossible to come out good in these allegations. While that is true in many criminal cases, I feel like in these cases, this lack of physical evidence can occur with delayed reporting or victims who fear to report. The police are going to try to build their case exclusively on how an accused responds to the allegations, what their defenses are, what their alibis are, and what their excuses are.

If you are talking about a long time ago, and about what you think you were doing three years ago or whatever, it is important to say, I think I need time to talk with someone through this, and decide what the best course of action is. You start saying things that you cannot go backward on your words. If those comments wind up being incorrect or bad, they are always going to be used against you. As your lawyer even if they were honest mistakes, once you say something that can be proven. The prosecution runs with it. You cannot be trusted about anything you say now, because you said you were here on this day and we know you were not. It may have been that you do not have the ability to remember what was going on at that time, because it was so stressful.

That is where I say, take a deep breath, ask for an attorney, have the discussion, with the attorney. Start to hammer down data before you make a decision whether you are going to talk to the police again. In those cases especially, I really urge people to call an attorney, because the case is almost entirely built on whatever you are going to wind up telling them, and how that fits in with the allegations. Therefore, it is often he-said she-said type of cases, and law enforcement is always going to error on the side of the person telling them that something bad happened.

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