MI- Owosso man's Internet case spawns charge from attorney general's office, legal debate over online meetings

5-31-2008 Michigan:

OWOSSO, Michigan -- It's a familiar script.

Man chats up 13-year-old girl online, makes a date for sex and ends up in handcuffs when he shows up for his interlude to find a cop waiting to arrest him.

An Owosso man, however, has found himself in the middle of a plot twist.

While Timothy Arthur never showed up for a tryst that police say he made with an underage girl on the Internet, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox took the rare step of sending police to arrest the 21-year-old at home.

Cox claims his office is the first to bring charges against suspected child predators who arrange sex with minors online but never follow through on the meeting.

One Oakland County defense attorney believes Cox has gone too far.

"Where do you draw the line between policing thought and conversation?" said Gail Benson, who specializes in defending sex-related crimes.

Arthur was recently arrested as part of state-sponsored Internet sting involving the group "Perverted Justice," a controversial online organization that has risen to fame through the Dateline NBC show "To Catch A Predator."

Using the screen name "tim_arthur2001," investigators allege Arthur began chatting online Jan. 21 with a Perverted Justice decoy posing as a 13-year-old girl.

The chats -- five in all -- continued until March 7 when Arthur allegedly agreed to meet the girl at a home in Wayne County.

While nearly 30 men braved bad weather in March and went to a decoy house in Wayne County to meet his "date," prosecutors said Arthur was among 11 others who stayed away.

So Cox had traced the men through their Internet service providers and had them arrested at home.

Arthur now faces two 10-year felony charges of communicating via the Internet to commit a crime -- accosting & soliciting a minor for immoral purpose, as well as a 4-year felony of using the Internet to disseminate sexually explicit material to a minor.

His attorney, Charles E. Quick of Owosso, said he is still reviewing the case and hopes it will be resolved "favorably for everyone."

Arthur is currently free on $5,000 bond.

A spokesman for Cox said there is a certain amount of irony and justice to the cases involving Arthur and the other men.

"Internet predators disguise who they are to gain trust by lying through their teeth," said Rusty Hills.

"In this case, they find out it's a special agent reading the material. The worm has turned."

Although the recent sting was the attorney general's first involving Perverted Justice, Hills said the state always intended to pursue men who didn't show up for meetings with the decoy.

"I don't know why other agencies don't go after non-travelers," said Hills.

While the decision to pursue such cases may be rare in Michigan, a Perverted Justice official said other states pursue individuals who don't show.

"Being arrested while not showing is not unique. However, what is unique (in the recent Michigan operation) is how many they arrested that did not show," said Xavier Vom Erck, director of operations for the California-based Perverted Justice.

The Michigan sting ended up with the fourth-highest arrest tally the group has been involved with, trailing only three stings in California.

Von Erck noted the group was able to snare men despite so much national exposure of similar operations in other states.

"You see some people are more paranoid ... but we've had individuals who have already been arrested for this crime once and are awaiting trial ... hit us up again," said Von Erck, in an e-mailed response to The Flint Journal.

Lauded in some circles for its work, Von Erck's group also has been the target of harsh criticism from others who have labeled members cyber vigilantes.

Two years ago, the group was involved in a sting operation involving a Texas prosecutor who killed himself when police tried to arrest him at his home for soliciting sex with a decoy posing as a 13-year-old boy.

Flint defense attorney Michael P. Manley said it used to be harder for prosecutors to prove cases in which suspects didn't actually show up for their "dates," but the laws have been increasingly modified to the point where someone is guilty of planning sex with a minor.

"It's almost as if you think about it, you're guilty," said Manley.

Manley believes changes need to be made to differentiate hardcore pedophiles from Web surfers who have what he calls "morbid curiousity."

But it does not appear that many groups are lining up to lead that charge.

An ACLU spokesperson said the group had no comment on the case, while a group that has dealt with Internet freedom issues also declined to address it.

"Nobody wants to get behind a pedophile," said Benson.

Ultimately, Benson believes police are creating crime by using decoys to pose as victims.

"It's not just sex. ... I don't know where it ends," she said.

Police operations using online decoys to snare child predators are still relatively rare in Genesee County because few departments have the resources to do them, but county Prosecutor David S. Leyton lauds Cox's aggressive approach.

Leyton said there may be concerns taking such cases to trial when no physical meeting with police takes place, but believes it's worth taking that chance in order to send a strong message.

"We need to discourage people from thinking they can patrol the Internet for young people," said Leyton.

Although the attorney general's office hasn't decided if it will partner with Perverted Justice again, it promises more stings are on the way.

"We will still go after predators," said Hills. ..News Source.. by Bryn Mickle