Live Feed Masturbation In Child’s View Draws Indeterminate Suspension

An attorney who pleaded guilty to third degree child endangerment and fourth degree sexual contact with a child has been suspended for an indeterminate period by the New Jersey Supreme Court.

The Disciplinary Review Board, which had split evenly between that sanction and disbarment, described the offense

During his plea allocution, respondent admitted that, on or about April 13, 2022, while using the website Omegle – which provides a live video feed from the user to other individuals on the site – he masturbated in view of a fourteen-year-old child. Respondent further admitted that, on April 13, 2022, he had saved – on a laptop computer found at his residence – eighty-three images depicting sexual exploitation or abuse of a minor, meaning images that depicted children engaging in sexual acts such as vaginal penetration and fellatio.

On April 13, 2023, respondent took part in a psychosexual evaluation at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center, in Avenel, New Jersey.  During the evaluation, he stated that he had started using the website Omegle sporadically, starting five or six months before his April 2022 arrest, accessing it once or twice monthly. Although he acknowledged that he accessed the site to find women who would watch him masturbate, he claimed that he never intended to seek out minors and that he believed that, because the site advertised as an adult site, it never occurred to him that minors might be using it. However, he informed the evaluator that “[a]pparently, some of the girls were underage. They didn’t look underage to me but apparently they were[.]”

Regarding the child pornography on his computer, respondent stated that he had begun visiting “teen pornography” websites a couple times a month, starting in 2020 or 2021. However, he asserted that he had visited these websites to view images of women ages eighteen and older and denied specifically searching for or saving child pornography.

Sanction

Here, respondent was convicted of two distinct (in both their timing and their nature) child sexual offenses: child endangerment, based on his possession of multiple items depicting child sexual abuse; and sexual contact with a minor, based on his masturbating within view of a fourteen-year-old using Omegle’s one-to-one video chat service.

However, we are equally divided on whether respondent’s misconduct warrants a permanent bar on his ability to hold a license to practice law in New Jersey.

One view was that the misconduct was “deplorable” but not disbarable

First, as indicated above, the evidence of record is that respondent could not “choose,” rather his online partners were randomly assigned from a pool of what was advertised to be adults. The a teenage girl who went onto an adult site without any prompting or inducement by respondent. Secondly, the psychological evaluation that formed the basis of the sentencing judge’s recommendation specifically addressed the question of whether respondent had an attraction to minors and found that “there was no definitive evidence Mr. Rave has an attraction to minors, felt driven or compelled to view child pornography or have teenage girls watch him masturbate. Based on all the available information, Mr. Rave’s offending behavior was due to poor judgment.”

Based upon that finding, respondent was not sentenced as an offender under the purview of the New Jersey Sex Offender Act and received a sentence more lenient than most of the attorneys in the reported cases discussed in this decision.

Those who favored disbarment

In the view of these Members, given the current and ever-evolving state of technology, the fact that respondent satisfied his sexual urges by masturbating in view of minors using a live, online video feed, as opposed to doing so within a child’s physical line of site, does not make disbarment any less appropriate.

…respondent’s two distinct modes of child sexual exploitation merit nothing less than disbarment. As set forth most recently in Shapiro, these Members remain resolute that when an attorney behaves in a matter such “as to destroy totally any vestige of confidence that the individual could ever again practice in conformity with the standards of the profession,” the attorney should be disbarred. Templeton, 99 N.J. at 376.

(Mike Frisch)