Sex Crimes Attorney in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Sexual Assault Against Children

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Yes, there are, and it’s really – you can’t just say, for child molesting cases or for cases involving sexual assault – accusations of sexual assault against children, here is the strategy: each case involves its own unique strategy, but for instance, it is very common in accusations of rape to be able to look for the evidence that shows the motive for the adult victim to have intentionally falsely accused the defendant. That doesn’t work so well with children, especially the younger and the younger they are. We oftentimes have cases involving children as young as four years old. It is very common to have children as young as five or six years old, and most juries, for pretty good reason, believe that children of that age are incapable of having the malice and the deceit to intentionally falsely accuse somebody of this.

So the strategy for cases involving young children is generally to find the motive for some adult to have persuaded them that – to make the accusation – a custodial parent, a custodial grandparent, a teacher, a police officer. There were famous cases 25 years ago, at the beginning of my – almost 30 years ago, at the beginning of my career. I was prosecuting in Ramsey County, the Scott County cases. There was – it wasn’t that these small children had intentionally made false accusations against their parents or their uncles or whoever the accusations were made; it’s that they were interviewed in such a way that eventually, that false accusation was planted. They were essentially brainwashed, and that’s the strategy with small children.

Now, somewhere between four- and five-year-old children and adult victims, there comes an age where it is easy for juries to understand that a child, perhaps a young teenager, would make the false accusation because they’re angry at the coach or the teacher or the uncle or whoever the subject is.

And so this is – there’s no clear lines drawn in the sand in this area. Somewhere between very young children and teenagers, there is an area where that strategy changes, and I have had cases where – with young victims, you know, eight or nine years old – where the only defense was that this young victim had intentionally made the accusation, and the evidence tended to support that. So you have to evaluate each case on its own evidence and be very careful not to get too drawn into generalizations about trial strategies for children as opposed to adults.

Minneapolis criminal defense attorney Kevin Short discusses sex crimes involving children.

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