A Maryland court threw out a case in which that state appealed the acquittal of a man who drove from New Jersey to Frederick for sex with what he thought was an underage girl he met online - but turned out to be a state trooper posing as a 15-year-old in an Internet sex sting. So the U.S. Justice Department has taken the case and will prosecute Donald Taylor, Jr.
Taylor had actually been acquitted on trial in the case, and the Maryland Court of Appeals sided with the defense arguments that, legally, Taylor could not have committed the crime with an adult, the Associated Press says.
Donald Taylor Jr., 47, drove to Frederick from New Jersey in 1999, allegedly to have sex with an Internet correspondent he believed to be an underage girl. But the appeals court didn't rule on whether the sting was legal.
Prosecutors in the case and state police together pressed U.S. Attorney Thomas DiBiagio to charge Taylor with crossing state lines with intent to engage sexual activity with a minor, and with using an interstate commerce facility (the Internet) to entice a minor to engage in sexual activity, as the AP put it. Taylor could get up to 50 years in prison and $500,000 in fines if he's convicted of the charges.
Taylor's attorney, federal public defender Paul Hazelhurst, didn't comment on the Justice Department move yet, but another Maryland attorney, Bryan Levitt, did. And he has a little experience in this sort of thing - he defended a client successfully against similar charges in federal court in 2002, the AP said.
To Levitt, it is irrelevant, legally, under federal law, whether there was an actual victim in a case like this. He called the federal law in question a fundamentally "intent statute," the AP said. "If a defendant is found guilty," he told reporters, "it's based on his intent at the time of the solicitation."
The Maryland law under which Taylor was tried doesn't distinguish between real and fictitious victims, speaking only of soliciting a "minor," a point the AP suggests defense attorneys use to challenge this kind of Internet sex sting.
