Convicted of Sex Crimes, but With No Victims

[nytimes.com –  8/26/20]

Jace Hambrick worked as an apprentice laborer during the week, renovating homes around Vancouver, Wash., and at a neighborhood gas station on weekends. Much of the rest of his life was online. He was hard-core, amassing a collection of more than 200 games. People told him it wasn’t smart to be so cut off from reality, but his internet life felt rich. As a dungeon master in Dungeons & Dragons, he controlled other players’ destinies. As a video warrior, he was known online by his nom de guerre and was constantly messaging fellow gamers, particularly his best friend, Simon. Though the two had never met in person, over the last few years they paired up as teammates playing Rainbow Six Siege and Rocket League and grew close.

At 20, Hambrick was still living at home with his mother to save money for college, where he hoped to study game design. He was a voracious reader who could knock off a 1,000-page fantasy novel in two days. People liked him; he made them laugh. When he and his mother lived in places that had board-game clubs, he was a regular. And his kindness could be surprising. He would spend a morning handing out sandwiches to the hungry.

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She told him she was 13 twice. This didn’t sound like some of the other stings where the LE is hounding the person despite them saying “no”.

I was in an online adult chat room after life threw me a curveball thinking I was talking with over 18 year olds; however it turned out I was a cop. After awhile she told me that she was 15 and I thought why would a 15 year be in an adult chat room. Every time I tried to end the conversation the cop kept calling me a chicken. These stings should never occur the cop gets a promotion and I get a price club membership; while thinking this country IS the worst.

It doesn’t matter if there was an actual biological immediate victim or not. The result was another life ruined by the registry. The courts always side with LEOs on these stings claiming the subject satisfied “means, motive and opportunity for a POTENTIAL victim” through willful knowledge and follow-up.

This article will garner little – if any – empathy and outrage from NYT readers.

Instead, the media should attack the unfairness and misguided intent of the registry, not cherry-picking people for interviews who think they should not be on it.

Registries aside, I have personally have a difficult time with these stings. On one hand nobody should be trying to hook up with underaged girls and as soon as they have that information should be terminating the conversation and refusing to re-engage. So from that standpoint anyone so engaging after knowing that age should have some sort of consequence. Where I have trouble with it is how there is no actual person who exists that is that age. In this case you are saying that someone is intending to do an act which is impossible in the presented circumstances. With most other kinds of stings except these sex ones – which many I don’t agree with either different reasons – the act was at the very least possible to carry out.

Where is the best place to find info on where we are at woth oit all the BS? I just want the facts of the current climate and decisions (if any) i have one 4th degree high court mis and one 3rd degree ellony . was incarcerated in i think 2005 for 8 yrs…then parole where i managed to escape Michigans impossible atipulations by hording a second phone and finding a wife in another state. Married 5 yrs and in the Texas area but on a regestry here that has red letters posted in two places on my feicking ID! I was in my 20s upon conviction…now late 40s and folks dont sew that, they see registrants as if they commited the alleged offence this year… Now 46 its no longer cute and Im becoming to the public eye no less than a creepy older dude who needs to be shunned and shut down at every possibility of succeeding! This S#!$ is so frustrating! I just want to mive on! Ironicly now, im divorced and have been serious with a woman who is a lawyer working for the Norigan government and who practiced family law for 10 yrs. She said her country would NEVER do a registration and is appalled by its effect(s)… Now the truth comes out 3 months ago…my girlfriend is mow backing out on over 2 years of very serious and (what i thought) real relational plans for our lives to merge do to the fear factor that she is afraid will affect her career! Now what??? Is a person with 1 fellony and one high cort misdemeanor a lifer? If so ill pull the trigger i cant keep living between these freaking cracks Im to old and to smart to be stuck im a menial life just “gettin by!”

Im not happy and my life keeps stopping do to this ridiculous false security ploy… I guess the state has some staying on some coming off do to convict date? Ok…im confused as to the cut off point. Im im prison as of 2005 so can someone help me untangle this maze of laws and more laws… Im so tired of this and a lot of you are to sounds like! Jesus man… Bullies in the capitol need to have a reality check and statistics course ran past them prior to running for office. Whats best for all defenately IS NOT to scare the sheeple into paying for a broken “solution.’

Little known fact that in most states (if not all), LE is specifically precluded from using minors in undercover operations. Accordingly, every LE officer that takes part in these stings should be prosecuted for using minors in their operation, elevated for those that led and ordered them. That there was no actual minor shouldn’t be any more a defense to them than for the target of the operation.

A side note, I see don’t see the reasoning of how a legitimate child predator would be trolling adult sites and chat rooms on the off chance of meeting a minor. I would think they would be far more likely to be trolling sites and chat rooms geared toward children. Wouldn’t it make more sense to try these stings from there? Just sayin’…

It’s funny how this article tried to paint him as a good guy who was misled by LE but come on man this dude set himself up the picture the cop sent looked like a old ass lady cop.
It’s obvious this guy has autism or something but I’m not buying this por guy BS he knew what he was doing he had a long time to think about it while driving over there did he follow his gut feeling and stop the car and turn around no he stop to buy condoms this dude deserves to suffer hell on earth with the rest of the people forced to register.
I dont support these stings I think its enticement while interacting online and entrapment once the defendant shows up.
Just because there was no real minor involved during the sting dont mean your charges should be lesser then someone who’s case does involved a minor.
Dont get me wrong their both sick individuals I’m not justifying their actions I’m just saying
The difference between someone arested for trying to meet a 13 year old online and the guy who actually had sexual contact with a minor is the premeditation and the Great Lengths the online defendant gose through while attempting to commit these crimes .
If a guy comes home from work and finds his wife having an affair in his bed flips out grabs his gun and shoots the guy dead in court this calld a crime of passion but if he finds his wife cheating gets in his car drives 2hours to his parents house steals his dad’s gun drives 2hours back stops to buy ammunition on the way then finds the guy and kills him that’s premeditated murder in the first degree it’s not that one crime is greater then the other it’s just the premeditation and preparation the defendants go threw while committing their crimes.
Also its almost impossible to defend someone when you can read their true intentions word for word thrue back and forth text messages.

Good luck

The people running these stings never report a single case where any guy calls the cops alerting them that a teen girl is in danger of sexual assault. Isn’t that amazing? The BEST you can hope for is “as soon as I found out she was 13 I blocked her.” What chivalry! Truly, we live in an age of heroes valiantly defending the honor of young maidens! Tens of thousands
of stings, hundreds of thousands of interactions between internet users and “vulnerable teen” catfish and not a single notable case where anyone took 5 minutes to alert the authorities there was a girl on the verge of being raped? It’s almost as if NO ONE CARES about these “teens” and it’s simply an excuse to hate people because that’s fun! Which is why America will go on hating all of us, as sex offenders, and frankly we deserve it because we’re horrible hypocrites.

As I see sting operations, they are assuming a lot of stuff that never gets proven.

Maybe the adult is trying to stop the juvenile by talking to them

Maybe the adult is going to get a face to face and report the juvenile to the authorities

There are a lot of scenarios that they seem to ignore in order to say they caught a predator.

I speak from experience, because I had proof that I had actually reported the person that had included CP in a file I downloaded. It didn’t seem to make a difference in my conviction though. My attorney said that the D.A. felt I had done that to “cover my ass”. Even though the CP was obtained by police from a call by computer repair service during a file cleaning 3 yrs after originally trashed. Again, assuming the worst about someone and ignoring the facts and possibilities in order to obtain a simple conviction. And people wonder why I’m so bitter and depressed all the time.

I can imagine how this guy feels.

I have never dealt with these types of situations, so I am probably not the best person to comment. I have a hypothetical question, however. It looks like these dating sites can be accessed by anyone, and nobody really monitors or confirms the person’s age, despite the fact that it is supposed to be for adults only? So, let’s say the cops do a sting on a person who answers to an underage person (who again is not really supposed to use this site). They then lure the person to come and meet the person they are interested in to arrest them when they show up. What if the person who responds to the ad is also an underage person and gets a ride to meet the person on the other end? The cops open the door and see the 13 year old (or whatever age). Wouldn’t the cops have to be held accountable that they lured an underage person to have sex with them? Just wondering, or will there be the typical double standard that they did not know the person was under age, or didn’t care to really confirm this?

There’s a comment on the page about how unethical these stings are and asks would it be alright to do the same thing to a homeless shelter or a rehab facility and have a plain clothes undercover drug dealer try to catch some of them. And that’s probably the best form of logic to apply to the whole sex offender agenda.

Sexofenders not aloud in the house of GOD wow how hypocritical whatever happened to love your neighbor dont judge people and treat others as you would like to be treated is that unless your a homosexual or even worse a sexofender in that case then you can phuckoff and I hope you burn in hell and your lil dog too.
First off if your going to church to be accepted by people then maybe you shouldn’t be at church in the first place the only person you should be seeking approval from is GOD not some Pastor or his church congregation.
The church is full of hippocrates remember the last time JESUS was in church he got so piss off about all the hippocrates in GOD’S house he started flipping over tables and chanceing people out of the church…

Good luck

@Joe

I’ve been to enough meetings to know that ACSOL’S ultimate goal is to abolish the Registry. What is misunderstood so often is that the Tier Registry is not the ultimate goal but a means to push for the ending of the Registry. There was just no way at that time or even now to topple SORNA. The national and political narrative at this time is that we are considered a danger to society. Look at the news…how do the media portray us?

Until the national and political narrative changes about Registrants and SORNA, we can at best make incremental changes to our justice system. The Tier Registry was only the beginning…and yeah it has some changes in it I’m not crazy about , for example I have a CP charge and that puts me in Tier 3….

Which BTW, ACSOL has been petitioning Sacramento to create an off ramp for Tier 3 a few months ago. You may have missed that one. Either way, unless you have a better and faster plan to end the Registry we have to work with what we got.

1. NYT? What role , if any, did the Times play in the Kanka Case? Hype! that resulted in Megan’s Law statutes. Clearly Hyperbole sells papers and gets clicks. Victimhood is profitable so why not advance the cause? Take a good look at everyone, including cops, embracing their own victimization. Democrats are victims of Republicans AND Republicans claim to be victims of Democrats! Spiraling down we go round and around and around again. Soon the only good guy is the indifferent.

Similar to my situation, except I actually told the “girl” that I suspected they were a cop. It didn’t matter, they came to my house and arrested me anyway. I was eventually forced into a plea because it became overwhelmingly clear I would never be able to beat the case after they withheld discovery for over two months, then when we got it, the photos were different and the chat text had been altered.

@ Laura. You know I sort of like your comment to SR. Ask a teenager WHY they were in an adult chat room. Sure Laura its the indepth thought from a persons teenage view that makes one want to understand a bit more about who’s trying to get one’s goat with much of this ordeal. One wonders today with this internet garbage who gets abused, the victim or the abuser.

Even Paul Harvey made a lot of sense in his commentary, and Laura you do also. Sure I got caught up in this. I could of went to prison, been on the registry for life. They can call me in denile if they’d like but truth comes out in the long run.

Sure I say a person on an adult site that had the screen name of 15 year old lookign to chat. It was obvious I was on a sex site but I wanted to investigate this 15 yr old see what the heck was up. First thing I did was caution the person and wanted to warn the person that they were on an adult website chat room. That didn’t faze them a bit and they were justifying themselves in an I don’t care type ruse. Didn’t sound very good the response they gave me. I ask to talk to them via telephone and they agreed. Oh yes they badgered me to come down and meet. The bible says to test the spirits amd that was my intent. Actually who know’s the thoughts and intent of another.

They were lookimg to throw the book at me. In short the officer that arrested me had the guilt complex and offered me a plea deal. He even winked at me in a cunning way. Oh yes they in their coy way ask me for pictures, condoms and things of that physical nature but one knows what they were up to if one listens well. Yes I went down to meet this suppose teen but but on the way down their was a phone call from this person asking me why it was taking me so long. Right then and their I asdked to back out but they pursuaded me mroe. Ordeals like this for any guy to go thru are confusion and a bit of devilish work.