• The short answer. A sexual assault accusation in Bexar County is not one problem. It is two. The first is the prison range, which for aggravated sexual assault is five to ninety-nine years or life and can carry a twenty-five year minimum. Tex. Penal Code § 22.021(f). The second is sex offender registration, which for most of these offenses lasts until you die. Tex. Code Crim. Proc. art. 62.101(a). A trial can answer the first question. Only a dismissal, or a reduction to the right offense, answers the second. That is why I go after both, and why I start before an indictment is ever returned.

Most people find me on one of three days.

The day a detective leaves a card in the door. The day a text arrives that says we need to talk about what happened. Or the day the handcuffs go on in a parking lot at six in the morning, in front of the neighbors.

Whichever day it is, the same thing is true. You have already lost something you are not going to get back, and there is a window open right now that is going to close.

What you are actually facing

Texas sorts these accusations into offenses that sound similar and are not remotely the same.

Texas sexual offenses, punishment ranges, and registration

Look at the last two rows. Same statute. One subsection apart. The difference between them is the difference between reporting to a police department for the rest of your life and reporting for ten years and then being finished.

Hold onto that. It is the single most important thing on this page, and I will come back to it.

Registration is the real sentence

People fixate on the prison number. I understand why. But I have watched men walk out of the penitentiary and discover that the sentence they are actually serving started the day they got out.

Under article 62.101(a), the duty to register for a sexually violent offense ends when you die. For other reportable offenses it runs ten years, and not ten years from the offense. Ten years from the later of the day the case is dismissed and you are discharged, the day you leave a penal institution, or the day you finish community supervision.

What it means day to day is this. Your address, your employer, your school, your vehicle, your photograph, and your fingerprints in a public database. Employment restrictions under article 62.063. Residence restrictions under article 62.064. A notification requirement if you set foot on a school campus under article 62.065. And under article 62.102, failing any one of those duties is its own felony, running from a state jail felony to a second degree felony, and it goes up a level if you have been convicted of it before.

That last part is worth reading twice. Registration is not a passive status. It is a standing opportunity for the State to charge you again, for the rest of your life, over a paperwork deadline.

A jury verdict of not guilty is a magnificent thing. I have gotten them. But a verdict comes after two years of your name in the newspaper. A dismissal comes before that. When a family asks me what I am aiming at, the honest answer is that I am aiming at the outcome that gives them the most life back, and that outcome is usually not a trial.

The window almost everybody wastes

The most valuable period in one of these cases is the period before charges are filed, and it is the period most people spend making things worse.

Here is what typically happens. A detective calls. He is calm and he sounds reasonable. He says he just wants your side, that this is your chance to clear it up. The accused person, who has never been in trouble and believes that innocent people explain themselves, goes down and talks for ninety minutes on video without a lawyer.

That video is now the centerpiece of the State’s case. Not because he confessed. Because he got a date wrong, or minimized something small, or said “I don’t remember” about a thing he should have remembered, and a prosecutor will play those forty seconds to a jury and call it consciousness of guilt.

When I am hired before charges, the work is different and it is quiet:

• I speak to the investigator. You do not.
• Phone records, rideshare records, door access logs, badge swipes, and receipts get pulled and preserved while they still exist, because carriers and businesses purge them on schedules that do not care about your case.
• The forensic interview or the SANE examination gets obtained and examined for how the questions were asked, not just what the answers were.
• Where it is appropriate, a defense presentation goes to the prosecutor, and sometimes to the grand jury, before the State has committed itself publicly to a theory it then has to defend.

A case that is never indicted is a case that never happened, as far as the rest of your life is concerned. Read more on pre-charge defense in Texas .

What a reduction actually buys you

This is the part of the practice that almost no website explains, and it is where a lot of my best work in these cases has been done.

People hear “reduction” and think it means a smaller number of years. Sometimes it does. In a sex case, what it can mean is something far bigger: whether you are on the registry at all, and for how long.

One subsection can cut a lifetime to ten years

Go back to that table. Indecency with a child by contact under § 21.11(a)(1) is a second degree felony and it carries lifetime registration. Indecency by exposure under § 21.11(a)(2) is a third degree felony, and under article 62.101(a)(4) it carries lifetime registration only if the person has another reportable conviction. Standing alone, it is ten years.

Same complainant. Same police report. A different subsection, and one man is reporting to a police department when he is seventy-five and the other one is not.

The finding that can get you off the registry entirely

There is a path most people have never heard of. Under article 42A.105(c), when a judge places a defendant charged under § 21.11 or § 22.011 on deferred adjudication, the judge shall make an affirmative finding if the defendant was not more than four years older than the complainant, the complainant was at least fifteen, and the charge rests solely on the two ages.

That finding is a key. It makes the person eligible under article 62.301 to petition the court for an order exempting him from registration altogether. The court can grant it on a preponderance if the exemption does not threaten public safety, the conduct was not without consent as described in § 22.011(b), and the exemption is in the best interest of the complainant and of justice.

Nobody hands you that finding. It has to be built, pled for, and put in the record at the right moment. Miss the moment and it is gone.

Charge selection decides eligibility

Under article 42A.102, a judge may place a defendant charged under § 21.11, § 22.011, or § 22.021 on deferred adjudication regardless of the complainant’s age, but not where the charge is continuous sexual abuse under § 21.02, and not where aggravated sexual assault is punishable under § 22.021(f).

So the count the State chooses to indict, and the count it is willing to proceed on, controls what a judge is even permitted to do. Getting a § 21.02 allegation off an indictment is not a technicality. It is the difference between a range that starts at twenty-five years with no parole and a case a judge still has discretion in.

And sometimes the answer is a different offense entirely

Some cases resolve to an offense that carries no registration duty at all. When that is available and appropriate on the facts, it is worth more than shaving years off a number, because it ends when it ends.

What actually moves a prosecutor off a sex case

Not indignation. Not a phone call saying my client is a good man. I ran the Major Crimes Division at the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office. I know what gets read and what gets filed.

What moves a case is a proof problem the prosecutor can see for himself:

• A timeline reconstructed minute by minute from records rather than memory, that the allegation does not fit.
• The first account compared word for word against the second and the third. Not the gist. The words.
• A forensic interview where the questions were leading, or where a disclosure arrived only after the fourth adult asked.
• The State’s own scientific evidence, read closely, which in most of these cases proves contact nobody disputes and proves nothing at all about consent.
• A motive that exists in the record: a custody fight, an immigration application, a pending divorce, a job.
• The physical impossibility. Rooms are a certain size. Doors lock. People were somewhere else.

Every one of those is document work, done early, by someone willing to read all of it. There is no shortcut and there is no speech that substitutes for it.

Two changes in the law you need to know about

The Legislature moved this area in 2025. Lack of consent under § 22.011(b)(6) now reaches an actor who knows the other person is intoxicated or impaired to the point of being incapable of consenting, whoever supplied the substance, and it applies only to offenses on or after September 1, 2025. The rape shield rule now lives in Code of Criminal Procedure article 38.372, and it is stricter than most lawyers assume. Both are covered in detail in what changed in Texas consent law .

What I will not tell you

I will not tell you I can get your case dismissed. Nobody can say that about a case they have not read, and a lawyer who says it in the first meeting is telling you something important about himself.

I will not tell you these are easy cases. They are the hardest cases in the courthouse. A complainant is describing the worst thing that ever happened to her, and a man is facing the loss of the rest of his life, and both of those can be true in the same courtroom.

And I will not build a defense by attacking a young woman’s character. Article 38.372 mostly forecloses it, and juries in Bexar County punish it even where the rules would allow it. What I do is hold the State to its proof, examine how the investigation was actually conducted, and insist that the person accused is a person and not a category.

My record in these cases

I have tried sex cases to verdict and obtained acquittals, including on a charge of aggravated sexual assault. Trials are part of this work and I do not avoid them.

But the results I am proudest of in this practice area are the dismissals and the reductions, because those are the outcomes that give a man his name back. In 2026 I obtained a full dismissal, before trial, of charges of aggravated sexual assault of a child, indecency with a child, and improper relationship between educator and student in Guadalupe County. The lead count alone carried five to ninety-nine years or life and lifetime registration.

Those outcomes came from the same place every time: reading every page, finding the proof problem, and putting it in front of the State in a form a chief has to take seriously. You can see more on the case results page .

None of it predicts what will happen in your case. Every case is decided on its own evidence. I would not believe a lawyer who told you otherwise, and I am not going to be that lawyer.

If you are under investigation or already charged

Do not talk to the detective. Do not text the complainant or anyone close to her, because that becomes a tampering allegation and it is a felony of its own. Do not delete anything on your phone, including the messages that embarrass you, because deletion is its own problem and forensics will find the gap. Write down everything you remember today, in order, on one page.

Then call me at 210-663-3750 . I answer my own phone. The sooner you call, the more of that window is still open.

Related reading: sexual assault defense , sex offender registration in Texas , how to choose a criminal defense lawyer , and about Mario Del Prado .

• The short answer. The Legislature made two changes in 2025 that matter in almost every sexual assault case now filed in Bexar County. House Bill 3073, called the Summer Willis Act, rewrote Penal Code § 22.011(b)(6) so that an act is without consent when the actor knows the other person is intoxicated or impaired by any substance to the extent that the person is incapable of consenting. It applies only to offenses committed on or after September 1, 2025. Separately, the rape shield rule now lives in Code of Criminal Procedure article 38.372, and it is stricter than most people assume.

I want to start with something that is not a legal argument. Sexual assault cases are the hardest cases in this courthouse for everyone in the room. The person who made the report is describing the worst thing that ever happened to her. The person on trial is facing the loss of the rest of his life. Both of those can be true in the same case, and it is the reason the rules of proof exist at all.

What did the Summer Willis Act change?

The old version of subsection (b)(6) was about drugging. It required that the actor intentionally impaired the other person’s ability to appraise or control her conduct by administering a substance without her knowledge. The State had to prove the accused did the impairing.

The new version is about knowledge of a condition, whatever caused it.

Penal Code § 22.011(b)(6), before and after September 1, 2025

That is not a technical amendment. It moves the whole case onto two questions that are usually contested and rarely documented: how impaired was she, and what did he know about it.

The same bill added two more circumstances to the list: a coach or tutor who exploits a dependency, at § 22.011(b)(13), and a hired caregiver who exploits a dependency, at (b)(14). It also added a line to subsection (c) providing that “consent” has the meaning assigned by Penal Code § 1.07.

Why the date of the alleged offense controls everything

Section 4 of the act says the change in law applies only to an offense committed on or after the effective date. September 1, 2025. An allegation about a night in 2023, indicted in 2026, is governed by the old subsection (b)(6), not the new one.

People assume the law that applies is the law in the newspaper. It is not. It is the law on the date of the conduct. In an outcry case where the date is given as a season or a school year rather than a day, that one fact can decide which version of the statute the jury is charged on. It is the first thing I look for in the indictment.

What does Article 38.372 do?

Article 38.372 governs evidence of a complainant’s past sexual behavior in prosecutions under a list of statutes that includes sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault, indecency with a child, continuous sexual abuse, indecent assault, and certain trafficking offenses.

The structure is strict and worth reading carefully.

• Reputation and opinion evidence about a complainant’s past sexual behavior is not admissible. Not weighed, not balanced. Not admissible. Art. 38.372(c).
• Specific instances of past sexual behavior are also inadmissible, subject to one narrow path. Art. 38.372(d).
• That path requires the accused to file a motion, outside the jury’s presence, and obtain an in camera examination of the evidence with a court reporter present. 38.372(e)(1).
• The court must then find the probative value outweighs the danger of unfair prejudice to the complainant, and that the evidence fits one of five categories. 38.372(e)(2).
• The record of that examination is sealed and preserved as part of the record. 38.372(f).

The five categories are: evidence necessary to rebut or explain scientific or medical evidence the State offered; past sexual behavior with the accused offered to prove consent, where lack of consent is an element; evidence relating to the complainant’s motive or bias; evidence admissible under Texas Rule of Evidence 609; and evidence that is constitutionally required to be admitted.

What this means in a courtroom

It means the fight over this evidence happens before the jury ever hears a word of it, and it means there is no such thing as raising it in the moment. A lawyer who has not filed the motion and asked for the hearing has not preserved anything. The appellate record will show the evidence was never offered, and the point will be gone.

It also means the fifth category, evidence constitutionally required to be admitted, is where the serious work is. The Sixth Amendment right to confront the witnesses against you and the Fourteenth Amendment right to present a complete defense do not stop at a state evidentiary rule. Those arguments have to be made specifically, on this record, about this piece of evidence, with an offer of proof. Made generally, they lose.

Can someone be convicted on one person’s word?

Yes, and people are surprised by this every single time.

Article 38.07 provides that a conviction for sexual assault and certain related offenses is supportable on the uncorroborated testimony of the complainant, if she informed any person other than the accused of the alleged offense within one year. And that one-year requirement does not apply at all where the complainant was 17 or younger, 65 or older, or an adult who by reason of age or physical or mental disease, defect, or injury was substantially unable to meet her own basic needs.

So there is no rule requiring DNA. There is no rule requiring injury. There is no rule requiring a witness. When people tell me the State has no evidence, what they usually mean is that the State has no physical evidence. Those are different sentences, and only one of them is a defense.

Where these cases are actually won or lost

In my experience the real work in a consent case sits in four places. The timeline, reconstructed minute by minute from phone records, rideshare records, door access logs, and receipts, rather than from memory. The forensic interview or the SANE examination, and whether the questions asked were open or suggestive. The reports of what the complainant said in the first hours, compared word for word with what she said in the second interview and at trial. And the State’s own scientific evidence, which frequently proves contact that nobody disputes and proves nothing at all about consent.

None of that is dramatic. All of it is document work done early, before phones are traded in and before businesses overwrite their video.

A word about tone

I do not build a defense by attacking a young woman’s character. Article 38.372 mostly forecloses it, and juries in Bexar County punish it even when the rules allow it. What I do is hold the State to its proof, examine how the investigation was conducted, and insist that the person accused is a person and not a category.

If you are under investigation and no charge has been filed yet, that is the most important moment in the case and most people spend it talking to a detective. Read what to do before charges are filed .

If you want to talk about a case, call 210-663-3750 . I answer my own phone.

Related reading: sexual assault defense  and sex offender registration in Texas