It’s absolutely not a defense. The law
doesn’t create an affirmative defense
for age. They are what’s called strict
liability offenses where if you are over
18 and you sleep with someone, have sex
with someone who’s under 16. It’s
automatically assumed to have be called
what we would used to call statutory
rape or criminal sexual conduct in the
third degree. So although it’s not a
defense, an affirmative defense to be
underage, it is something that can be
mitigated pretty well. Uh if we have
someone, a teenage girl, who’s
pretending to be older, who is uh very
adamant about being older and very
adamant about the contact with my
client, then that can mitigate the
situation with the prosecutor. It
doesn’t make things go away, but what it
does is say, “Hey, you know what? Not
not just one person played a role in
this. This was two people. So, let’s
kind of determine what we can do to
either reduce the charge, change the
sentence, uh maybe maybe do a little bit
more with the sex offender registry if
we can reduce the time on that or
eliminate that completely. So, there’s a
lot of different angles we can take, but
it’s definitely more of a mitigating
factor than it is a defense.