Given increasing potency of the Internet in everyday lives, alleged criminal activity isn't what it used to be in your grandfather's era.
Just ask Laguna Niguel's Matthew Ryan Mitchell.
In September 2013, Jack'd–a popular iPhone app created to enhance same sex dating connections–innocently brought together 26-year-old Mitchell and an equally horny Dana Point teenage boy who'd just turned 17.
What happened next is now a criminal issue in Superior Court Judge David A. Hoffer's ninth floor Santa Ana courtroom.
For those of you have been vacationing on Mars, sexual intercourse between adults and non-adults in California is against the law even when consensual.
Deputies at the Orange County Sheriff's Department (OCSD) claim the teenager contacted Mitchell through his online Jack'd personal ad, won access to the adult's private penis photo and the two eventually met for an intense, consensual sexual rendezvous.
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In Monday testimony, a public defender asked the mother of the teenager if she'd reacted angrily upon learning of her son's homosexuality.
The visibly anguished woman responded through a Spanish interpreter that she loves her son unconditionally.
Jurors looked pained at the situation and will have to determine: Did Mitchell know his sex partner was underage or not? Deputies say he did. The defendant, who is free on bail, insists he's not guilty of sodomy and oral copulation charges.
With testimony resuming today and Hoffer denying a defense request for a mistrial based on alleged trial case, an Orange County jury will render a verdict in coming days.
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Email: rs**********@oc******.com. Twitter: @RScottMoxley.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.