OK- Oklahoma consent law snarls lured girl case

3-22-2009 Oklahoma:

Oklahoma statute allows teens 16 and older to agree to sex, though they are still children

With thousands of sexual predators prowling the Internet, parents of teenagers are taught to fear unspeakable dangers lurking in the cyber-shadows of chat rooms and on networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

But amid reports of teen abductions and sexual deviants caught in sting operations, parents have taken comfort in the fact that someone out there is working to keep it from happening to their children — that is, until the child turns 16.

Twice last week, police detectives in other states scrambled to find two 16-year-old girls were flying to Oklahoma to meet men they had connected with on the Internet. The men bought the girls plane tickets, and the girls ran away from home.

A girl from Hawaii was intercepted by police in Los Angeles. But the other, from Tonawanda, N.Y., was living in an apartment on Western Avenue with a man stationed at Tinker Air Force Base.

Tinker Criminal Investigations took the unidentified man into custody. Oklahoma City Police plan no further investigation because the girls were of the age of consent.

"In Oklahoma, if you are 16, you can have sex all you want,” said Gayland Gieger of the Oklahoma County district attorney’s sex crimes team.

Recording or photographing such acts would be considered child pornography, he said.

A 15-year-old is not legally able to consent to sex, Gieger said, but a 16-year-old can. Gieger said the district attorney’s office doesn’t have an official stance on whether the law is appropriate, but said that it has been on the books "a long time.” "We just do what the Legislature tells us,” he said.


New York law is same
Detective Tim Toth with the Tonawanda Police Department said he wasn’t surprised to hear about the Oklahoma law. Sixteen also is the age of consent in New York state.
The department conducted an investigation, but Toth said it appears the girl made a willing choice to leave the state.

While the Internet is one of the most useful tools available, Toth said, a mechanism that allows sexual predators to interact with high school students can be a problem.

Last month, in response to a subpoena, administrators of the social networking Web site MySpace provided two state attorneys general the names of 90,000 registered sex offenders it had banned from the site, according to The Associated Press.

But Toth said that those offenders can simply get a new account under an assumed name after they’ve been banned.

"You try to teach kids to be safe, but sometimes they still hook up with people they don’t know all that well,” Toth said.


Was U.S. law broken?
While Oklahoma’s law is clear when it comes to 16-year-olds and sex, the use of the Internet and young girls crossing state lines makes it harder to say whether a federal crime is committed during a meeting involving sex.
FBI Agent Gary Johnson said laws about transporting teenagers across state lines for the purpose of sex can be "pretty tricky.” Questions that may arise include whether the meeting was only about sex, whether the two people professed emotional feelings for each other, whether they planned to live together after the initial physical encounter and multiple other factors.

U.S. attorney’s spokesman Bob Troester said neither the FBI nor the U.S. attorney’s office talk about ongoing investigations and don’t typically discuss hypothetical situations. Therefore it is unknown whether either of the Oklahoma men who bought the plane tickets for the out-of-state teens is currently the subject of a federal investigation.

"At the federal level, with respect to ages, some statutes are simply not a particular one-size-fits-all,” Troester said. "The FBI will look at individual cases reported to them, and they may decide there is no crime, but they can look to the different statutes to decide that.”


Still deemed children
One of the biggest challenges facing the prosecution of online sexual solicitation is the lack of consistency and uniformity in age-of-consent laws, said Ernie Allen, president of The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. While 16 is "the norm,” he said, it’s 17 in Texas and 18 in California and Arizona.
"But soliciting a juvenile for sexual purposes across state lines might be a violation of other offenses,” he said.

"It’s not always quite as simple as the kid is 16 and she’s in Oklahoma, and at 16 she can consent to sex in Oklahoma.”

Regardless of the age of consent, Allen said, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children considers the New York and Hawaii girls to be children because they are under 18.

"We would work those as missing children and we would work with law enforcement across country to try to find them,” Allen said. "They may be of the age to consent to sexual activity, but they are below the age of majority and therefore deemed missing children.”

Allen said his organization would work with authorities to determine whether a person who lured girls enticed them in a way that violates any state or federal laws. ..News Source.. by JOHNNY JOHNSON