Bill would make teen sexting a misdemeanor

Sexting legislation

Sources: State Rep. Connie Pillich and the Ohio Revised Codes.

LEBANON — To a 15-year-old girl in the Internet Age, it just seemed like anonymous flirting, prosecutors say.

The girl would send boys she’d met and liked on the Internet nude photos of herself, and they would send her nude photos of themselves in return.

But under Ohio law, the girl’s activity fell under the same statutes that apply to adults who traffick in child pornography — a felony offense that would follow her the rest of her life, possibly as a registered sex offender.

To avoid those long-term consequences, prosecutors persuaded the girl to plead guilty three weeks ago to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

“That didn’t fit the crime perfectly, but it was the best course given the current laws,” said Matt Nolan, a spokesman for the Warren County Prosecutor’s office.

Like many law enforcement officials in Ohio, the Warren County Prosecutor’s office would like to see a new statute carved out of the sex offender laws to deal appropriately with the growing number of teenagers who are guilty mostly of immaturity and bad judgment when sending out sexually explicit photos of themselves.

“These are not people with a sickness in their head,” Nolan said. “These are children who are doing something that is stupid and wrong.”

And increasingly popular, according to an Associated Press-MTV poll released late last year. More than a quarter of all teens surveyed said they had engaged in sexting — the practice of sending out nude or semi-nude photos of themselves to another person via cell phone or computer.

Nolan said the typical pattern is for dating teens to exchange explicit photos and, when they break up, one or both parties forward the photos to other friends, either maliciously or thoughtlessly. The photos then rapidly spread among schoolmates and out to the cyber world.

The ensuing embarrassment and bullying can lead to suicide, as it did for Jessica Logan of Cincinnati. The 18-year-old hanged herself in 2008 after enduring weeks of ridicule at school because her ex-boyfriend forwarded a nude picture she had sent him to other girls.

Closer to home, 10 Alter High School students were suspended April 30 for forwarding sexually explicit photos of an Alter freshman girl to other students via cell phone. Kettering police have made no arrests in the case.

The all-or-nothing nature of the Ohio law is a big reason police are reluctant to bring cases of teen sexting to the attention of prosecutors, Nolan said.

Nolan’s office worked closely with State Rep. Ron Maag, R-Lebanon, to introduce the state’s first teen sexting bill last year. The bill would allow prosecutors to press lesser misdemeanor charges against sexting teens and to excuse them from sex offender registries.

More recently, State Rep. Connie Pillich, D-Cincinnati, introduced a similar, but more detailed, bill scheduled for a hearing Thursday, May 13, before the House Public Safety Committee. Ohio is one of at least 15 states this year that have introduced or are considering sexting bills for minors, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The resolutions generally aim to educate young people about the risks of sexting and to deter the practice by applying appropriate penalties.

Pillich, a Cincinnati lawyer, said she spent eight months researching the sexting bill with the help of law enforcement officials and constitutional law experts. House Bill 473 has the backing of the Ohio Judicial Conference, Ohio Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and American Civil Liberties Union, she said.

The bill is designed to “make sure (teens) walk the straight and narrow” without marring them for life, she said. The law would apply to all forms of telecommunication, not just cell phones.

But John Murphy of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association — one of the few professional organizations opposed to changing the law — said prosecutors have never pressed adult felony charges against teens for sexting anyway. Instead, most counties, including Montgomery, now have diversion programs that educate youths to the dangers of sexting and allow them to avoid a permanent criminal record.

“The handling of these cases has been appropriate in every instance I can think of,” Murphy said.

Murphy said his fear is that, by carving out a less severe statute for minors, pornographers will recruit youths to circulate explicit material “because they know juveniles aren’t going to get anything” for doing it.

Nolan said all the prosecutors he’s talked with want a separate law for charging minors guilty only of sexting. He said prosecutors would still have the option of pressing felony charges against minors who were involved in the more serious crime of disseminating pornography.

Under the current law, he said, defense attorneys could possibly block or appeal convictions of sexting teens prosecuted on lesser charges, such as contributing to the delinquency of a minor, if their offense did not correctly fit the statute.

Doing an end-run around Ohio’s sex offender law in dealing with minors “could lead to a lot of things happening that we don’t want to find out,” he said.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2437 or jdebrosse@DaytonDailyNews.com.