I have a continuous sexual assault of a child case where two acts happened on the same day and another act happened several months late. Can I allege all three acts in the same indictment even though two of them occured within a thirty day period?

Assuming that your victim is less than 14 and the perv is more than 17, you can allege all of the acts in a one count indictment, per 21.02(b).

Depending on your jurisdiction and the nature of the conduct, you MAY want to go with 3 counts (assuming you have 1st degree offenses), and file a motion to stack. If your judge has the will, you can really hurt this guy.

Good luck!

If you only have 3 alleged incidents, it's better to a jury to do Aggravated Sexual Assault of a Child.

A jury (Casey Anthony flashbacks) may have issues of sending someone to prison for 25 years minimum for "only" 3 acts.

Just do the 1st degree Agg Sex of a Child and move along.

I have two different victims. If I charge this way, I can get both children in front of one jury and not worry about arguing extraneous offenses coming in at guilt innocence. Many of our jurors have told us prior to this law that if they had known there were other accusations they would have found a defendant guilty. In addition, I think it is an unwarranted assumption that the Anthony prosecutors overcharged. The jurors had lesser included offenses as a choice.

Charge continuous sexual abuse. You can also allege separate counts for Agg. Sexual Assault, the jury would just have to find him not guilty on CSA to get to the other charges.

CSA was created to assist very young victims who have been repeatedly sexually abused. You can include multiple victims and/or multiple offenses into a single count, permitting the jury to hear about the entire body of work of a sex offenders. You also ease the burden on the child victim because you avoid the difficulty of an election demand by the defense and the need to specify a particular time, date and place for every single act of abuse.

Use the tools given to you on behalf of children. I've e-mailed to you an article on the statute and some sample indictments and a jury charge.

JB,

I am getting ready to try our first Continuous Sexual Abuse case. Can you send me any indictments or charges you have available? I would really appreciate it. My e-mail is bprice@co.brazos.tx.us

I agree with John - charge with CSA. If the jury wants to find him guilty of something lesser; that's on them. But charging with CSA allows you to weed out all the people who say they can't consider the max and think the minimum's too high "for just a couple touchings". I tried that was based on 3 acts of indecency and it was a relatively quick guilty on CSA (after a relatively LONG trial).

I'm sending you an indictment I used this winter and will dig for the jury instructions we drafted.