A New England woman inspired by a television show posed as a 13-year-old girl in an Internet chat room. She was soon sexually solicited by an Oceanside man who later was jailed for the lewd electronic chats.
Lawrence Katz
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Stacey Deluca's individual efforts as a cyber sleuth made her part of a burgeoning movement of ordinary citizens posing as children online to gather evidence and report pedophiles to the police.
One organized group, Perverted Justice, says its work has led to the arrest of more than a dozen San Diego County men accused of attempting to contact children through the Internet to molest them or send them pornographic material. The group, run by an Oregon man, takes partial credit for hundreds of arrests nationwide.
Experts debate the value of these citizen sleuths: whether they are concerned citizens assisting the justice system or vigilantes subverting people's constitutional rights.
No appellate court has ruled whether their tactics are legal, the experts say, because most defendants plead guilty without a trial. There have been at least three lawsuits filed in federal court against Internet detectives; one has been dismissed.
Perverted Justice's work is not without controversy: A Texas prosecutor committed suicide last month when police went to arrest him based on evidence produced during an Internet sting in which the group was involved.
Law enforcement long has worked undercover to detect pedophiles before they can act on their sexual desires for children. Officers have placed personal ads in magazines that promoted alternative sexual lifestyles. After gathering evidence, detectives set up a meeting and make an arrest.
California's courts have ruled that authorities legally can pose as children to catch and prosecute predators, even if no children have been victimized. The courts focused on the intent of the behavior, not on whether the criminal was successful.
Inspired by TV
Soon after entering an electronic chat room from the comfort of her Massachusetts home, Deluca was contacted by “Paul Robinson,” who said he was from the Los Angeles area. Robinson was actually Lawrence Katz, 50, a casino worker from Oceanside.
The chat quickly turned sexual, with Katz writing that he loved the “innocence and sexiness” of young girls. He claimed to have had sex with three girls ages 11 and 12, according to court records.
He later sent photographs of himself performing a sex act and promised he would “spend a lot of time snuggling and stuff,” according to the records.
Deluca, 21, contacted authorities, who arrested Katz on Feb. 28 at his home.
Faced with overwhelming evidence after detectives found the explicit chats on his computer, Katz pleaded guilty in July to attempting to send lewd images to a minor. He was sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to register as a sex offender.
“My behavior on the Internet has caused a chain of events that I will forever regret,” Katz told a judge before being led away in handcuffs.
Deluca's electronic sleuthing grew out of watching “Dateline NBC,” a news magazine show that regularly features stories on Internet predators. She declined to be interviewed for this article.
The evidence Deluca provided would have been enough to withstand the scrutiny of a trial, said Deputy District Attorney Per Hellstrom, who prosecuted Katz.
“When I first looked at the case, it was shocking,” Hellstrom said in an interview. “Factually, there are no significant issues in dispute with the case.”
Perverted Justice
Xavier von Erck founded a group targeting Internet predators after seeing men boldly solicit sex from minors without fear of being caught.
That led von Erck, 27, a computer technician from Portland, Ore., to pose as an underage girl and make a record of his sexually explicit chats with men. Once he learned their identities, von Erck said, he forwarded a log of the explicit exchanges to the friends, family members and co-workers of the men, hoping to shame them.
From that sprouted Perverted Justice, a nonprofit group of volunteers that patrols Internet chat rooms for pedophiles. Since June 2004, the group said, its work has led to 94 convictions in dozens of states, with 53 convictions this year.
In its first year, the group said, it assisted in seven convictions.
“When we started, nobody was talking about Internet predators,” von Erck said. “Law enforcement is now seeing this crime as a very serious issue.”
In September, Perverted Justice worked with Long Beach police on an Internet predator sting that led to the arrests of 38 men – including seven from San Diego County – on charges of attempting a lewd act on a child under the age of 14, said Long Beach police Sgt. Lee DeBrabander.
The men ranged from computer programmers to truck drivers.
A sting this year by Perverted Justice and Laguna Beach police led to the arrest of Steven Robert Deck, 51, a former California Highway Patrol lieutenant from Carlsbad. Deck, who retired from the CHP shortly after the February arrest, has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
Long Beach police said they realized the wide use of the Internet also would lead to more cyber crime. They decided a sting was one way to get ahead of the criminals.
DeBrabander said he was initially skeptical about working with citizens but came to see the group as an important investigative tool. DeBrabander said he would work with Perverted Justice again.
“All we needed them to do was the Internet chat and the phone call. They were merely role-playing,” DeBrabander said. “All the investigation fell to the detectives.”
In perhaps its most notorious case, Perverted Justice teamed up with “Dateline NBC” and police in Murphy, Texas, in a sting that lured potential pedophiles to a home in the Dallas suburb, where they were filmed and arrested.
During the operation, Louis Conradt Jr., an assistant district attorney in nearby Rockwall County, had a sexually explicit chat with a Perverted Justice member posing as a 13-year-old boy, police said.
Conradt didn't go to the home, but when police surrounded his house Nov. 5 to arrest him, Conradt fatally shot himself. NBC aired video of the raid.
Perverted Justice and “Dateline” came under a storm of criticism for their tactics and what happened at Conradt's home. Conradt's sister, Patricia, said detectives could have confronted him privately instead of staging a dramatic raid whose only purpose, she said, was to boost the show's viewership.
The sister said she is considering suing Perverted Justice and NBC.
“What they were doing was questioning his integrity,” Patricia Conradt said. “His career was over even if they came back and said it was a mistake two months later.”
Perverted Justice's leader dismisses the critiques as “silly” and “ridiculous.”
“Conradt didn't even know we were involved in the case,” von Erck said. “It was law enforcement serving an arrest warrant to someone who didn't wish to go to jail.”
Two current federal suits filed against Perverted Justice claim the group ruined the lives of two men who said they were falsely accused of being pedophiles by group members, according to court records.
“Perverted Justice is acting as judge, jury and executioner in a perpetual fashion,” said Eric Dixon, the attorney for a New Mexico college professor suing the group.
The suit claims the professor lost his job after the group sent thousands of e-mails to his campus calling him “a wannabe pedophile,” Dixon said.
A Perverted Justice spokesman said the group has not seen the suits and could not comment.
'Vigilantes'
“Vigilantes” is how San Diego criminal defense lawyer Gerald Blank describes the self-styled Internet cops. Blank is concerned that as more people join the “lynch mob,” the odds of a miscarriage of justice increase and lives and reputations can be ruined.
In many cases, the adults posing as children make suggestive comments to lure men to initiate conversations, Blank said. In one case, a woman posing as a teenager photocopied her breasts and posted them on the Internet, he said.
It is those cases that concern Blank. He said volunteers are setting up situations that snare men who have shown no prior interest in children. He calls it “moral entrapment.”
“These people employ all kinds of come-ons that are not honest and are designed to get men to express an interest where they wouldn't express an interest otherwise,” Blank said.
“You're entrapping people who otherwise wouldn't have committed a crime.”
The legal defense of entrapment cannot be argued in such cases because it applies only to the police, Blank said.
UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh disagrees, arguing that “citizen detectives” offer men who are predisposed to pedophilia a forum where their criminal desires become public.
Once a potential crime is viewed through a chat room, it should be reported to the police just as if witnessing a burglary, Volokh said.
“If you are capable of being seduced by someone who is posing as an 11-year-old, then you are too dangerous to be running around in our society,” Volokh said. “Somebody who provides an occasion for someone to show their true colors is not a vigilante.”
The civilians also help police with limited resources gather evidence against potential pedophiles and make communities safer, Volokh said.
He acknowledges that an untrained citizen could jump to the erroneous conclusion that someone in cyberspace is a child molester or fabricate evidence to support a false accusation.
This could happen in the real world, Volokh said, and it is up to law enforcement to sort out which citizen accusations are legitimate.
In terms of the chances of being sued by those they accuse, Volokh said: “If you're telling the truth, you're immune from litigation. . . . Whatever modest risk there might be to them, it's worth it.”
Jose Jimenez: (760) 737-7568; jose.jimenez@uniontrib.com
