ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — Defense attorney’s call it entrapment. Prosecutors call it a valuable tool. In the last decade online sex stings have become a staple of enforcement for many sheriff’s offices with highly publicized results when the arrests are made.

But a review of three sex stings from Volusia, Orange and Seminole counties by Eyewitness News reveals one-third of the men arrested in the stings are never convicted of crime that requires sex offender registration.

“The conviction rate for these types of operations is very high, but they don’t always meet the guidelines for being registered as a sex offender,” said Lt. Paul Kammerer of the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office.  “Each case has different variables.”

In the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office’s 2012 Operation Broadband, 23 men ages 18-66 were arrested by officers following an online chat.

Deputies said the men all chatted online with what they thought was a 14-year-old girl; eventually arriving at a home to meet with the girl. The cases were turned over to the Office of State Attorney R.J. Larizza and the 7th Judicial Circuit.

Two years after the arrests, one case is still pending and 15 men were convicted of a sex crime, but seven either had their charges dropped or were convicted of lesser, non-sex crimes.

“They’re the ones tending to drive the conversation and drag out of the individual what they are looking for from the minor,” said attorney Blair Jackson, who represented five men in Orange County’s 2012 cyber-sting Operation Spider Web.

In the OCSO operation, 31 men were arrested: six men still have cases pending, 16 were convicted of a sex crime, and nine either had their charges dropped or were convicted of lesser charges that did not carry the sex offender registry.

“I don’t think they are targeting the right individuals at all,” said Jackson. “It comes close to entrapment.”

Jackson said the chat logs from the online stings are the foundation of the case and in some of the cases he handled he said the logs show law enforcement pushing suspects in a specific direction.

Prosecutors deny the implication of entrapment.

“The goal of the operation is to target individuals that were inclined to travel to meet and have sex with a child,” said Assistant State Attorney Gino Feliciani.

Feliciani handled the 50 cases generated by the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office in its 2013 sting Operation Cardea.

In the SCSO operation 50 men were arrested, at the time only one was a registered sex offender.
In the months since the arrests a quarter of the men arrested have been convicted, but not on charges that carry the sex offender registry.

“We made a determination using the law and common sense,” said Feliciani.

In the cases resulting from Operation Cardea, prosecutors took into account the nature of the online chat, prior convictions and the results of a psychosexual evaluation. Staff within the State Attorney’s Office also looked at the age of the suspect in relation to the age of the fictitious victim.

“It’s a high priority for law enforcement to undertake these investigations,” says Kammerer, who pointed out that while not every suspect was convicted of a sex crime, almost every suspect was convicted of something as a result of the sting.