A federal judge has acquitted a Delray Beach man of flying an Iowa teenager to his home for sex, ruling that the government charged him with breaking the wrong law.
U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks granted Ronald Frankel’s motion for acquittal April 22, finding that the evidence presented during his trial in February could not support a conviction under the statute prosecutors chose to pursue.
“I do not mean to suggest that Mr. Frankel did not commit some other crime,” Middlebrooks wrote, “nor should my ruling be interpreted as absolving Mr. Frankel of all criminal responsibility.”
A federal grand jury charged Frankel, 68, with transporting a minor with the intent to engage in illegal sexual activity, a felony punishable by life in prison. All but two jurors — both women, one a retired lawyer — believed he was guilty.
Middlebrooks declared a mistrial when they could not reach a unanimous verdict. Federal prosecutors indicted Frankel a second time in March, adding the word “prostitution” to the new charges in hopes of winning over a different panel of jurors, but Middlebrooks’ ruling ends the case before a retrial could begin.
Judge, in acquitting Delray man of one charge, suggests others that might have stuck
The judge’s 24-page order revolves around the same question jurors raised in a handwritten note during their deliberations: what does it mean to “transport” someone?
Prosecutors argued that Frankel transported the girl by sending her $1,000 to buy a plane ticket from Iowa to Fort Lauderdale. The attorneys pointed to the Eleventh Circuit’s standard jury instruction, which defines transportation to include “causing” someone to be moved. Middlebrooks deemed that instruction wrong.
Tracing the statute back to 1910, the judge found that “cause to be transported” was explicit in the original law but was deliberately stripped out over a century of amendments, rendered unnecessary, Congress explained, by a separate federal provision making it a crime to aid or abet another person’s criminal act.
Under that aiding-and-abetting framework, Frankel still couldn’t be convicted, Middlebrooks found. Aiding and abetting requires a defendant to assist someone else in committing a crime. But the someone else here was the girl herself, and the same statute that criminalizes transporting a minor explicitly excludes the minor from punishment.
“The Eleventh Circuit’s innocent intermediary cases presuppose that the intermediary is functioning as the instrumentality of the crime, not its protected object,” the judge wrote.
Sending money, the judge concluded, was persuasion or enticement; conduct Congress assigned to a different statute that prosecutors never charged.
“Why the Government chose to rely solely on Section 2423(a), without reference to any other potential avenue of liability, is unclear,” Middlebrooks wrote. “I posed this question to the prosecutor at oral argument, but he did not seem to know either.”
The judge listed several statutes he suggested might have fit the facts better: a federal law criminalizing enticement of a minor to engage in sex, a sex-trafficking provision and child pornography charges related to the nude FaceTime sessions Frankel paid the girl to perform before she flew to Florida.
Frankel’s attorney, David Markus of Miami, who also represents Ghislaine Maxwell in her ongoing efforts to overturn her sex trafficking conviction, had argued since before the first trial that the government’s theory was legally unsound.
“We are extremely grateful to Judge Middlebrooks for his thoughtful and well-reasoned order,” Markus said over text April 23. “It’s far too easy these days in a case like this to ignore the law, but our judicial branch is still strong, just and courageous.”
Hannah Phillips is a journalist covering public safety and criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Delray man had sex with a minor; why a judge acquitted him anyway
Reporting by Hannah Phillips, Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
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