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The Stigma Associated With Being Accused Of A Sex Crime In New Jersey

Interviewer: For the people that come to you with these kind of crimes, I mean what’s their mindset when they speak to you? Are they just devastated or how do they seem?

Tom Chaves: Everything is an individual circumstance and especially, with respect to criminal law in general, you can’t really make general statements with respect to any case. So, each individual is different with respect to what their feeling or position is with respect to a case. Obviously, however, if somebody admits to this crime either by giving a statement to the police, which is mostly a confession, or essentially confessing or giving a statement to someone else, then that puts the case in a different posture because then, once a person is giving a statement either to the police and telling me it was done correctly that they were given their Miranda Rights and they signed a Miranda Waiver Form and in addition, that the videotape was taking place of the statement so there’s no claim that the person was coerced in some way.

It is Very Difficult To Persuade A Court of Your Innocence If You’ve Already Made a Confession to the Police

In those cases, it’s very difficult for the person to say that they’re not guilty when they’ve already confessed to being guilty. So, I guess you could say, to use your phrase, that those people have a sense of doom with respect to what’s going to occur as opposed to the most people who don’t give statements and really many times will deny that there was something that occurred that was inappropriate, they will often take the position that whatever happened was consensual.

An Overview of Child Pornography Offenses in New Jersey

Interviewer: Assuming someone would have hundreds and thousands of images and videos of Child Pornography, How would they be treated?

Tom Chaves: This really has to do a lot with the internet and proliferation of pornography that’s available on the internet. I had a case and I did some research and there are over 30,000 websites they are available that involve pornography of one kind or another. Obviously, child pornography is illegal anywhere in the world. However, that’s not to say that there’s not a lot of it that can be easily found on the internet. Much of the child pornography originates both from Russia and from Eastern Europe, not that it’s legal in either place but people get involved with it there to put it on the internet for the purposes of selling different things and typically, what will happen with the child pornography case is that the police will receive information of some kind or other indicating that this individual has the child pornography, they also sometimes do undercover sting operations to try to find people who’re involved with it but that’s a separate discussion.

Police Try to Develop Sufficient Evidence to Procure a Search Warrant For the Individual Alleged To Possess Child Pornography

But they have reason to believe that one particular individual may possess it, they try to develop that evidence more into enough evidence to present to a superior court judge to obtain a search warrant, and the search warrant involves the person’s home computer, their computer at work, their mobile device and their laptop if they have one to try to examine the computer’s hard drives and do some forensic examination of each computer to see what’s there.

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