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He admitted talking with the girl on the Internet. With police officers sitting at a table facing him, he acknowledged telling the girl about the sex acts he wanted her to perform.
But he denied going to meet the girl, who identified herself in the chat as a juvenile. The suspect, who about an hour earlier was arrested on suspicion of enticing a minor over the Internet, claimed he had gone to the location to meet someone else.
"I know what I did was wrong," the suspect told the police officers in an interview room after his arrest. "But I swear, I swear on a Bible, you can give me a lie detector test . . . I was not going to meet her."
The suspect hadn't been talking to a girl, but rather an investigator from the Utah Internet Crimes Against Children task force who was posing as a girl. The chat, the arrest and the interview happened earlier this month, but they have played out in Utah many times before.
The Utah task force, called ICAC, has become one of America's premier units for fighting online crimes against children. ICAC is on pace this year to set a record with 90 arrests and make more busts than any similar unit in the West, even as some attorneys claim cybercops are arresting some people who are harmless and few offenders receive prison terms.
ICAC's ranks are growing. The Utah Legislature this year appropriated an extra $650,000 for ICAC, which it used to add staff and help start affiliated task forces in Cache County and in eastern Utah. There were previous affiliated task forces in Weber, Davis and Utah counties.
ICAC, which operates through the Utah Attorney General's Office, also receives federal funding and has oversight for similar statewide task forces in Idaho and Montana. In all, ICAC is operating on an annual budget of about $1 million.
ICAC mostly investigates the distribution of child pornography or the people who would lure children through the Internet. Enticement cases make up about two-thirds of ICAC arrests.
Tales from cybercops: Task force members can rattle off arrests that would disturb most parents and sexually healthy people. There was the man from St. George who, while in Salt Lake City for an LDS general conference, booked a honeymoon suite and arranged for a romantic evening with what he thought was an adolescent girl.
One man in Connecticut chatted with the task force for four months before flying to Salt Lake City for a meeting.
ICAC members say they arrested one man who, even after being booked into jail, didn't realize he had been chatting with a cop. The same day he posted bail, the man returned to his computer, found the same "girl" online, and asked for another meeting. Police arrested him again and he was charged with a second count of enticement.
Ken Wallentine, chief of investigations for the attorney general's office, gives credit to his investigators for the high number of arrests, but also says Utah has factors that attract people seeking to entice children. Utah has a high number of people connected to the Internet and lots of kids.
"I don't mean this to be smart-aleck, but it truly is a target-rich environment," Wallentine said.
The Internet and chat forums are so vast, Utah still doesn't have enough cybercops patrolling for predators, said attorney general's Lt. Rhett McQuiston. When he describes the state's current complement of cyberpatrollers, he says it's as if the entire state of Utah had only one beat cop, and that cop worked just eight hours a week.
"There are millions of [chat rooms] out there and new ones being created every day," McQuiston said.
Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff began ICAC when he took office in 2000 and has continued asking for federal and state funds to expand ICAC and educate the public about how to protect children on the Internet.
"I think it's one of the great preventative things we do," Shurtleff said. "You're taking a guy who would hurt a 13-year-old kid off the street."
In most police stings, there must be some sort of transaction. Someone must sell an undercover officer drugs or try to perpetrate a fraud. But Utah's child enticement law makes it illegal just to ask for or to arrange for sex with someone purporting to be a minor. The sex doesn't have to occur.
Child enticement over the Internet can be classified as a misdemeanor or as a second- or third-degree felony in Utah, usually depending on the age of the victim and the type of sex acts the suspect tries to entice. The vast majority of enticement cases are prosecuted as felonies.
If it quacks like a duck, is it? Shurtleff and ICAC personnel insist everyone arrested by ICAC is dangerous. But some disagree.
"The people that I've seen that are getting caught generally don't have any criminal record," said G. Fred Metos, a defense attorney who said he has represented about 10 people arrested by the task force, "and it makes me wonder sometimes whether they're actually catching predators or creating, not the crime, but the opportunity."
Metos said he hasn't seen an arrest "that's a real strong entrapment case" and task force personnel have been well-trained to avoid entrapping anyone.
While the task force has caught some dangerous people, Metos said, they also have caught some people who don't fit the definition of sexual predator. "They have the [psychological evaluation] done. They have some issues, but they don't fit the classification of pedophiles," Metos said.
"I'm kind of torn," he added, "because I don't know if the Internet is . . . allowing them to act out anonymously, or if these are people who would act out anyway."
Walter Bugden, a Salt Lake City defense attorney who said he has represented about 20 people arrested by the task force, said he thinks ICAC is arresting people who are following the nature of the Internet, where people can be anonymous as they pursue interests that would be unacceptable elsewhere.
"An unattractive, overweight balding 55-year-old can represent [himself] to be a 31-year-old Brad Pitt look-alike," Bugden said, "or the same could be true for women who portray themselves to be something they are not."
Bugden has used that argument in court, and won the only known acquittal in the history of the Utah ICAC. After a 2003 arrest, he successfully argued to a jury in 2nd District Court in Ogden that, though the chatter portrayed a 13-year-old girl, his client believed the person to whom he was chatting was an adult. The defendant said he didn't think a 13-year-old would talk so explicitly.
Bugden earlier this month agreed to represent captured polygamist leader Warren Jeffs.
"Many people get carried away with chatting, and many of the people on the Internet are socially inept," Bugden said in an interview. "Where I disagree with the prosecutors is the notion where anyone who shows up would engage in the inappropriate conduct.
"I don't believe that everyone who gets in a chat room and engages in some of this sexually explicit conversation would ever in a million years . . . follow through with the sexual activity when they meet up with someone," Bugden said. "I think the net that is being thrown is catching some people who are not pedophiles."
Where there's smoke . . . Jerry Buie, a social worker and the owner of Pride Counseling in Salt Lake City, where he has counseled sex offenders since 1992, said about one-tenth of his clients who were arrested for enticement admit in counseling to having had sex with a real juvenile they met on the Internet.
McQuiston said post-arrest investigations discover actual juvenile victims in about one-third of ICAC enticement cases.
Capt. Chris Ahern, the commander of ICAC, says the man who was arrested for enticement and arrested again after he left jail admitted in his second police interview to having sex with six or seven teenagers whom he had met online.
"He was quite an example of why we do what we do," Ahern said.
Buie agrees many of the people arrested for enticement are socially awkward and often turn to the anonymity of the Internet. But he believes enticement suspects pose a danger.
"Even if they didn't act out, I would argue that their behavior is so close to the line that, if they're willing to get in a car and meet someone, it is very likely they would act out," Buie said.
Few enticement cases result in a trial, according to lawyers familiar with the task force and cases reviewed by The Tribune. Nearly all end in plea agreements, usually with the defendant pleading guilty to a third-degree felony. And those plea bargains rarely result in prison sentences. According to the Utah Department of Corrections, there were 53 convictions in state courts for some form of child enticement in 2003. The defendant went to prison in five cases. Five of 50 enticement convictions led to prison sentences in 2004, and five of 39 in 2005, Corrections said.
The typical sentence for child enticement in Utah is a suspended prison term, a jail term of 90 days or less and three years of probation. Utah also requires anyone convicted of a sex crime to register as a sex offender for 10 years after completion of their sentence.
Prison terms are given in most enticement cases prosecuted by the federal government, said Paul Amann, the assistant Utah attorney general who formerly was certified as a federal prosecutor. But over the years, the U.S. Attorney's Office has prosecuted only about a quarter of ICAC arrests, he said. And the office hasn't prosecuted any ICAC arrests since December, when Utah and federal law enforcement had a falling out over differing philosophies about how to pursue cases.
Amann said so many defendants accept plea agreements because the evidence against them is overwhelming and avoiding trials are in their interests and the public's. He also pointed out Utah defendants rarely receive prison terms for any type of third-degree felony; jail sentences are more common.
"They're receiving jail sentences, and they're receiving relatively harsh jail sentences when you compare them with other third-degree felonies," Amann said.
Shurtleff said he would like to see more prison terms imposed for enticement convictions, but prosecutors have a large number of cases and the pleas help free up court dockets. For those cases where a court has found a defendant guilty, Shurtleff said there might be a need to educate judges about "how serious these guys are."
A repeating scenario: ICAC investigators say the man they arrested earlier this month for suspicion of enticement constitutes a typical arrest. McQuiston went into Internet chat rooms posing as a girl and within 10 minutes had two users flirting with him. Within 20 minutes, one user asked for oral sex. The user continued by describing other acts he wanted performed. Within an hour, he was asking the "girl" for a meeting later that night. The suspect said he would be in a big truck, was 6-foot-1 and a University of Utah football player.
At the meeting site, ICAC investigators stopped a truck with one man inside. He was in his 20s, shorter than the suspect described and wasn't a university football player, but when he gave the detectives inconsistent stories about what he was doing there and where he was going, they arrested him.
It's also typical that the suspect admitted to chatting with the girl, but denied trying to meet her, police said. The suspect had no felony criminal history nor any history of sex crimes. Despite the suspect's denial of a meeting, McQuiston called the arrest "as clean a case as any."
ICAC allowed a Tribune reporter and photographer to accompany detectives on an arrest, but requested the newspaper not disclose details of how they find, engage and arrest enticement suspects. As of Friday, there was no record of the suspect having been charged with enticement.
Only once, McQuiston said, did a suspect turn out to be a minor trying to pick up someone his own age. When detectives arrived at the meeting location and found the 16-year-old boy in his high school football jersey, they "gave him the scare of his life and sent him home," McQuiston said.
ICAC also has one person dedicated to providing education about Internet safety. And this year the Legislature appropriated $1 million to the Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice for educating the public on how to prevent child exploitation. Richard Ziebarth, a contract grant analyst at the commission, said at least 75 percent of that money will be used toward preventing child exploitation on the Internet.
Wallentine, of the attorney general's office, maintains child pornography cases will soon be the bulk of arrests made by ICAC as the task force becomes more proactive in finding distributors.