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Your Prostitution Defense Lawyers

Prostitution charges can be an unexpected and unwelcome

What is Prostitution?

Penal Code §647(b) defines “Prostitution” as anyone “[w]ho solicits or who agrees to engage in an act of prostitution is guilty of this crime.”

What must the prosecution prove to convict someone of Prostitution?

In order to be found guilty of Prostitution, the prosecution must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant:

1. Willfully solicited, engaged, or agreed to engage, in sexual intercourse or other lewd act with someone else in exchange for money or other form of compensation.

2. Exhibited an “overt act” in furtherance of the agreement to engage in an act of prostitution.

Definitions
A “Lewd” act means touching the genitals, buttocks or female breast of either the prostitute or customer with some part of the other person’s body for the purpose of gratifying the other person’s sexual desires.
A person does an act “willfully” when he or she does it intentionally.
What are the Two Prostitution Crimes?

Solicitation Soliciting another to engage in an act of prostitution. In Type One Prostitution, someone asks another person to engage in an act of prostitution for money or other type of compensation. For example, a man or woman walks up to another person and proposes to perform a sexual act with the other person for some amount of money. In this example, a prostitute could be “working their territory” and approach some individual with a proposal to engage in some kind of sexual activity for a certain sum of money.
Agreeing to Engage in an act of Prostitution Let’s continue with the example above. A prostitute working her territory approaches a potential customer with a proposal to engage in some kind of sexual activity for a certain sum of money. The customer considers the prostitute’s proposal and agrees to accept it. The only other proof needed to be found guilty of prostitution is some “overt act” which shows that both the prostitute and her customer are going to engage in the proposed act of prostitution. For example, the prostitute offers to use her hotel room as a place to engage in the act of prostitution. The prostitute and her customer then walk to the hotel and enter the prostitute’s room. This is the “overt act” which is necessary to prove that the parties intended to carry out their agreement to engage in an act of prostitution.
Defenses to Prostitution Charges

Being accused of prostitution can have very serious consequences for the accused person. Although this type of sex crime does not require sex offense registration, a conviction of prostitution could disqualify a person from getting a job, getting admitted to college, graduate or vocational school, or deny a person’s application to join the armed forces.

Because this sex crime can have these potentially serious consequences, you must find an experienced and skillful criminal defense attorney to successfully defend you against a charge of prostitution. A very common defense is the defense of entrapment.

Defense of Entrapment

Entrapment may be a successful defense to the charge of Prostitution. We see the defense of entrapment quite often in prostitution cases. The police are lawfully empowered to conduct large scale prostitution “sting” operations in an effort to deter prostitution in a given area within the police department’s jurisdiction. To successfully establish the defense of entrapment, the person accused of prostitution must show that it is more likely than not that the actions of the police officer who was posing as a prostitute would have caused a normally law abiding person to commit an act of prostitution.

In my 27 years of criminal defense practice, we have found that the entrapment defense will usually succeed in cases where the police “prostitute” acted overly aggressively in attempting to seduce a person to commit an act of prostitution. It’s not enough that the police officer propositions a person to commit prostitution. The officer must be abnormally aggressive when soliciting an act of prostitution. For example, in one of my cases, our client told the undercover officer that he didn’t want to agree to the proposed prostitution. The officer followed our client to his car and grabbed my client’s steering wheel, begging and cajoling the client to agree to have sex at a steep discount of the usual rates. The jury found that the officer’s failure to accept our client’s initial rejection of the offer of prostitution was overly aggressive and that our client was “entrapped” by the officer. A not guilty verdict resulted.

False Accusations of Prostitution

There may be a possibility that you are being falsely accused of prostitution. Perhaps the undercover officer lied about our client agreeing to engage in sex with her. In our preparation for trial, we will want to examine the recorded conversation between the undercover officer and the client to see if there was a true agreement and acceptance of an act of prostitution. If the officer did not wear a recording device, the defense attorney must aggressively cross examine the officer as to why he or she didn’t wear a recording device when one was routinely and easily available in the prostitution sting operation. We have found in several trials that the officer deliberately destroyed the recording so that she could testify “from memory” of the details of the prostitution agreement. We have persuaded juries to reject the officer’s explanation of how the recording device was damaged when we were able to show that the device worked perfectly in other investigations that same evening.

My Criminal Defense Uses Aggressive Pre-Arraignment Defense Strategies to Convince the District Attorney to Reject Your Case

In prostitution stings, there are a lot of innocent men who are entrapped to commit prostitution. We hire a professional investigator and put ads in the READER and Craigslist to find other falsely accused persons. We then have our investigator contact willing victims of entrapment and obtain sworn statements of how they were entrapped under circumstances very similar to those of our client’s. We then to persuade the prosecution to dismiss prostitution charges against our client based on interviews with two of the other entrapment victims. It just take a little extra time and effort and a willingness to think outside the box to prepare creative pre-arraignment defenses like the one above to help your client avoid having to defend a case of prostitution.

The My Criminal Defense legal team has successfully defended thousands of clients who have been falsely accused of prostituion crimes by conducting a thorough investigation of the facts of each of our clients’ cases. Our criminal defense attorneys have extensive experience handling such cases and, with our defense team of investigators and experts, our attorneys can help defend your legal rights and protect you against a wrongful and unjust prosecution.

With more than 27 years of experience serving as a legal defense team in Southern California, we pride ourselves in our ability to create successful strategies that will protect your life and freedom. TAKE IMMEDIATE STEPS TODAY to protect your life and freedom. Call Us Today to set up a FREE confidential consultation with the MyCriminalDefense legal team.

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