In a recent case charging SAM 2 (That’s when an older guy has sex with a girl under 16) the defendant filed, through his public defender, notice of a legal defense. This motion laid out a pretty reasonable defense for a situation such as this defendant created for himself. Namely, that he met this nice young woman at a local bar. He therefore made a rational assumption that she must be over the age of 21, right?

Well, a DA is going to run a check of a defendant’s criminal history every time. This is important for a variety of reasons; sentencing arguments, crimes of dishonesty, or similar bad acts – to name a few. Certain criminal offenses can be used against a person at a later trial, but the vast majority of the time a DA cannot do so. It would be easy to just wave a person’s shocking criminal history in front of a jury and hope that they might convict just based on him being ‘a bad person.’

It just so happened that the DA in this case discovered that the defendant had a prior conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. And it just so happens that the minor he was furnishing alcohol to, was the very same girl he claimed to have just met at the bar that night. The prior case also informed the DA as to how the two had initially met…he drove her school bus. Her MIDDLE SCHOOL bus.

This defendant should probably just have told his attorney the truth and not had him file the bogus defense, which would actually hurt his case by allowing the State to introduce the fact that he’s an even bigger scumbag than they thought.