Michael Ramos pleads guilty

Man accused in MySpace luring agrees to plead guilty:

This is a follow-up to the story of Michael Ramos, the man who was stung by a group of teenage boys…

FONTANA – A man arrested after traveling to a park to allegedly have sex with an imaginary girl conjured up by teens on MySpace.com agreed to a very real deal with prosecutors on Wednesday.

Fontana resident Michael Ramos, 48, was taken into custody in early March after trying to meet who he thought was a 15-year-old girl named Jessica. He’d been chatting with ‘her’ for weeks on MySpace.

The girl actually was a fake account set up by a group of boys looking to cheer up a friend who recently had broken up with a girlfriend.

After the boys spied on Ramos at the park, they called police, who arrested him.

On Wednesday, Ramos agreed to plead guilty to one count of an attempted lewd act with a child aged 14 or 15 and will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

He will be sentenced July 26, at which time a judge will rule on the details of the plea as well as a probation officer’s recommendations, said Prosecutor Karen Martinez of the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office.

Other terms of the agreement that could be imposed include five years of probation and a list of prohibited search terms on his home computer, she said.

There’s a link to his MySpace on the original entry, and it’s still up.

Comments

One response to “Michael Ramos pleads guilty”

  1. billy Avatar
    billy

    Seems kind of harsh considering that California is reputed for its sexual promiscuity among teenagers and this man never really harmed anyone. High-profile attorney Alan Derschowitz once argued with Geraldo Rivera that there were too many sexually active and promiscuous adolescents taking wrongful advantage of the age of consent laws in California. After having lived in Los Angeles for 7 years and hearing about this 17-year old boy who drugged a 46-year old woman, raped her, and had the audacity to have her charged with statutory rape, I see Alan Derschowitz’s point of view. It greatly appals me that we live in probably the only country in the world where a virgin can be branded with sex offender status. They came out with a movie titled “40-year old Virgin” they ought to come out with a movie titled “40-year old Virgin Gets Branded With Sex Offender Status” and have it be about all the absurdities of our criminal justice system and the way the age of consent laws read on our book. I don’t deny that teenage girls have gotten hurt by an unpleasant sexual encounter, but it seems hypocritical to me that in face of all the individuals like Michael Ramos who have gotten branded by the system in one way or another, there’s not even one teenage boy who’s gotten accused of being a pedophile for getting teenage girls pregnant and then leaving them high and dry. The Lakewood incident back in 1983 was pretty representative of this virtual cloak of age-appropriateness that seems to present this sort of double standard.

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