Mission Viejo's Judson Gillard Lee, 33, met “T.M.” at a Fourth of July block party and, though the girl was 12 years old and in the 6th grade, it didn't take long for a romance to bud.
Within months, the two were hugging and kissing passionately in public as well as discussing sex.
According to court files, Lee thought he'd found a clever way to legalize an intimate relationship:
]
If she emailed him a photograph of her breasts, masturbated herself in
front of him, sucked his penis and viewed pornographic
websites, their affair would be sanctioned by the state of California
because “he was not touching her.”
(Note to kids: Lee's legal analysis was laughably, dead wrong.)
In March
2008, Lee's adult girlfriend came home to a shock. She found the pair lying on
his bed. He was drunk, touching her breasts and asking to “eat her
out,” according to court records.
Unamused, the woman informed T.M's father, a social worker got involved and then a sheriff's investigator began probing.
At
the request of the sheriff's department, the girl's mother called Lee
and secretly recorded the call. He admitted that he'd kissed her when he
was drunk but explained that T.M's flirting “just never stopped . . .
she just kept, you know, pushing and pushing.”
When T.M's mother
asked Lee if he'd encouraged her daughter to masturbate for him, he
said, “[It's] like, you know, you wanna do something? Fine, go ahead and
do it.”
Police arrested Lee and in July 2010 a jury convicted
him on two felony counts of lewd and lascivious conduct with a minor.
Superior Court Judge Patrick Donahue sentenced him to five years of
formal probation while wearing a GPS device plus 270 days in the Orange County Jail. The judge also
prohibited him from possessing photographic equipment, toys, video games
or similar items designed for the entertainment of children.
Lee
appealed his conviction and punishment by claiming his constitutional
rights had been trampled. He said his request for a photo of the minor's
breasts was not evidence of sexual contact; that the girl's accounts of
events had been demonstrably deceitful; and the girl had turned 14
years old by the time of the last encounter.
(California law goes easier
on sexual relations been an adult and a minor who has had a 14th
birthday.)
Lee also argued that the conditions of his probation–wearing the GPS device and the banning of photographic equipment and toys–is overly burdensome.
This month, a California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana considered Lee's complaints and issued a 26-page ruling. A three-justice panel concluded that Lee's conviction and punishments were righteous, but struck the ban on his possession of toys and video games as “unconstitutionally vague and thus invalid.”
They also specifically determined that the government had a compelling interest in forcing him to wear a GPS device.
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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.