A Gonzales-area man was given 20 years in state prison after admitting to exchanging explicit text messages and having sex with a girl over a year-long period in which she was 13 and 14 years old.
Timothy Martinez, 51, accepted a plea deal with Ascension Parish prosecutors earlier this week on the same day he had been set for trial in Gonzales on counts of carnal knowledge of a juvenile, child pornography possession and computer-aided solicitation of a minor.
Ascension sheriff’s deputies had arrested Martinez in March 2021 after the child’s mother reported the allegations to authorities.
Sheriff’s investigators recovered sexually explicit messages and images the child and Martinez had allegedly been sharing with one another. The child’s mother told deputies she had found some of the messages before she called them, according to a sheriff’s report.
Some the messages had been sent through an Amazon Fire tablet and others through a Google message app, deputies said at the time of Martinez’s arrest.
In the plea, Martinez, of the 41000 block of Cannon Road, acknowledged that he had been messaging the teen explicit content and that she had acknowledged the roughly year-long sexual relationship with him.
Martinez had also faced 130 other counts of child pornography arising from the same incident, but those were dropped the same day as his plea, court papers say. Those charges had also been subject to a pending challenge from Martinez’s attorney.
On Tuesday, Judge Jason Verdigets of the 23rd Judicial District Court gave Martinez 10 years each on the computer-aided solicitation count and on the two counts of felony carnal knowledge of a juvenile and another 20 years on the child pornography count, court papers say.
The four sentences must be served all at the same time, or what’s known as concurrently, so the actual prison term works out to 20 years, minus the two years that Martinez has already served.
The layers of sentences ensure that if one conviction is later thrown out, others are standing behind it.
Prosecutors in Ascension didn’t return an email for comment Thursday.
Allen Davis, Martinez’s public defender, said the case “was a difficult one for all involved,” but at the end his client accepted a negotiated plea between him and the state “and agreed to by the victim.”
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