Online Solicitation of a Minor

Answer:

In Texas, online solicitation of a minor is a very serious offense. If you are convicted or even placed on deferred for the offense, you’ll have to register as a sex offender for your entire life. It’s really important to try to avoid this offense and assert all defenses that may be possible. In online solicitation of a minor, the minor has to be 17 or under, and if the person that is making the solicitation is within three years higher or lower of the age of 17, that’s a potential defense. You may also have a defense in an online solicitation of a minor if there was no intent to actually solicit the person. If it’s just role-playing and you never traveled to meet the person, that’s not a defense. It’s really important that you don’t talk to the prosecution or to the detective, because it’s not uncommon for them to contact the person that was doing the solicitation to ask them to come in and talk to them. I would not do that. I would contact a lawyer and at least talk to a lawyer to find out if that’s in your own best interest.
Very often the person on the other end of that chat conversation is a detective posing as a minor. That’s not a defense either, that the person on the other end of the line was just pretending to be a minor. That’s what happens very often with these cases. They are developed by police officers sitting behind a computer, trying to get the person to make some solicitation, and very often, the person on the other end of the line, the police officer, will state that they are a minor, for example 14 years old. They’ll do that because it will increase the offense level when you’re charged. It’s very important to hire a lawyer to get on this quickly and try to minimize any damage.