Yesterday, a jury in Clayton County, Georgia returned “not guilty” verdicts on all seven counts of an indictment charging our client with child molestation, rape, aggravated sexual battery and other charges. Our client, a local businessman, had been falsely accused by a teenager of serious sex crimes. We thoroughly investigated the case and found that the allegations were not true. The trial took two days, and the jury returned its verdict yesterday morning.
We are pleased to have been able to help our client win this trial, and we hope that law enforcement and prosecutors will spend more time investigating these cases before they are brought to trial. Even though we were able to convince the jury that the allegations in our case were false, the experience was devastating for our client. It cost him a lot of money and time, and it created negative publicity that may never entirely go away.
Although there are certainly child predators in our society, it seems that law enforcement has gone too far in the other direction recently, acting on any claim of abuse, regardless of whether the allegation is corroborated or even makes sense.
Being arrested on a false allegation of child molestation is one of the worst things that could ever happen to someone. Our many years of experience in trying these cases has helped us develop an approach to defending allegations of child molestation and other sex crimes that seems to work extraordinarily well. Child molestation cases are not like other criminal cases, they require specialized knowledge of the subject area and law enforcement procedures to adequately defend. While our firm never intended to handle as many of these cases as we do, our past success has brought us many clients who have had the unfortunate experience of being falsely accused of these crimes.
