When Do You Need a Sex Crime Lawyer?

Sex crime charges are very serious, even if you know that they are not true or are exaggerated. Whatever the situation is, when you are facing a potential sex crime on your record, you will want to get the help of an attorney to try and clear things up. But when do you need an attorney, and what can they do?

Understanding Sex Crime Charges

Most sex crime cases have extremely harsh sentences, often more than a criminal would get for specific types of murder. This could even be a life sentence, depending on the actual crimes you are being charged with, and many have a minimum punishment of one full year in prison.

Of course, the worst element is the permanent stain that it can put on your record. Not only does this carry a stigma that can make interactions with others very hard – especially sex crime victims – but it can also make it impossible to get employed at a huge list of different jobs.

If you have got a sex crime charge, then it is usually in your best interests to fight it. But you can’t fight anything without an attorney, especially one experienced in sex crime and criminal law.

False Allegations

False sex crime allegations are quite a common problem. While many sex crime allegations are true, a lot are also meant to paint a person as a criminal. Sometimes this person had a sexual encounter with the accuser, and sometimes they have hardly even interacted before.

Whatever the case, this is one situation where a criminal attorney is incredibly useful. False allegations are heavily based on evidence and are often made to gain benefit through the lack of the defendant’s ability to disprove the allegation.

If you are being hit with a sex crime charge from false allegations or from someone who you have consensually had sex with and then they decided to revoke their consent later and consider it a sex crime, then getting a good lawyer is the first step on gathering the evidence you need to try and prevent the slander.

Sex Crime and Children

Children are incredibly suggestible, and this can sometimes mean that children will be told that something happened when it did not. In other cases, they may simply decide to say certain things or not really understand a situation and cause miscommunication.

This has, unfortunately, led to false criminal cases where a child had either been told to accuse somebody else or decided to create a story in their head that sounded vaguely like a sexual encounter with an adult. Of course, in many instances, these accusations can also be true.

This makes these situations very complex, and a good attorney is vital if you have been arrested as a criminal under a child sex crime charge. Evidence is extremely important, and actually understanding what a child is trying to communicate can also matter if they are too young to be clear.

Digital Child Pornography

Child pornography, and other types of illegal pornography, can appear almost anywhere on the internet and be hard to get rid of. Not only do browsers download a lot of images at random into temporary folders, but some content is mislabelled or recorded in ways that it should not have been.

For example, if a user accidentally stumbled across a pornography site, some of the images from that site might be downloaded into temporary folders related to their browser. If one of those images happens to be of a child, the user technically possesses child pornography on their system.

This is not just pornography sites, either. Many sites host a wide range of content, and some can be full of viruses or unwanted files. Even downloading some code for a personal project or installing a third-party tool on your computer could bring residual traces of this content with it.

There are countless ways that you could end up being accused of a sex crime, some more believable than others. If you have been arrested on false or exaggerated charges, then getting an attorney to fight it is an important step that you really should take.

Look into attorney groups like DM Cantor if you want a good place to start your attorney search or somewhere to get advice on what a sex crime charge actually means and how it can be fought.