A Navy Petty Officer Second Class was arrested after being involved in two different NCIS “To Catch a Predator” sting operations. One operation involved an NCIS Agent assuming the persona of a mother looking for a military service member to have sexual contact with her (fictitious) 6-year-old daughter. The other, more common, sting operation involved an NCIS agent who portrayed herself online as a 14- or 15-year-old girl looking for sex. In this case, the Navy service member was chatting with NCIS Agents in both operations.
This Sailor quickly ended conversations with the “mother” while continuing the conversation with the NCIS agent pretending to be a 15-year-old girl. When the Sailor arrived at the bait house, he was arrested and taken into custody. He immediately retained Tim Bilecki, a noted Article 120 UCMJ sexual assault lawyer in Japan, to fight for his interests in the upcoming court struggle.
Mr. Bilecki took the case to a jury trial and put on a defense of entrapment and mistake of fact as to the age. Our client was acquitted of the Article 134 charges related to his texts with the agent taking on the persona of a mother but convicted of the charges related to the other sting operation.
At sentencing, the jury sentenced him to the mandatory minimum dishonorable discharge but only sentenced him to time served, which was substantially lower than the pre-trial agreement offered by the government. While this case did not result in a full acquittal, our client was in a substantially better position for trying the case than he would have been if he had simply accepted the first pre-trial agreement the government offered him.
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