In a downtown Chattanooga hotel meeting room packed with nearly 100 district attorneys, Jennifer Moore Mason posed the question - What is Tennessee's current law for sexting?
Mason clicked to a picture on her presentation, hanging in the center of the room, which showed one large goose egg.
"It's a big fat goose egg," the district attorney said Thursday. "We don't have anything."
Mason, whose jurisdiction includes Williamson, Perry and Hickman counties, was one of hundreds of district attorneys general in Chattanooga this week for an annual conference.
Starting Tuesday, prosecutors statewide gathered to discuss new changes to laws. Part of those conversations involved breakout sessions on difficult topics such as cyberbullying and sexting, where there isn't always a clear legislative solution.
"Even if you could prosecute, where do you start?" Mason asked the room. "Can't you prosecute a sexting case? Is anybody prosecuting them?"
One man raised his hand.
The problem, Mason said, is that no specific statute exists for juvenile sexting, where teens exchange sexually explicit photos via email or text. Instead, teenagers can get hit with charges of sexual exploitation of a minor, or harassment. And those consequences are serious, Mason said. The first, designed more for child pornographers, can land juveniles on the state's sex offender registry.
"Is that really what we want to do to our minors?" Mason asked. "The laws we have don't necessarily fit morally. And I think that's the question you guys are having."
Jason Ponder, a district attorney from Coffee County, said education will be instrumental to informing the public and effecting constructive change at the legislative level.
"But I don't know how you start to write this," he said. "You don't want to create loopholes for actual pornographers, but you don't want to dilute the bill either."
One room over, Antoinette Welch, a former Nashville prosecutor, tackled a very different but equally straining topic: human trafficking.
Welch, the executive director of the Hannah Project - a court-ordered project to educate women charged with prostitution - started with jargon.
"What is a stable?" Welch asked.
She paused before answering, "a group of girls."
After several more examples, she explained: "When you start prosecuting these cases, they're going to say these things because that's their language."
Welch urged district attorneys to remember that prostitutes find themselves in horrible situations for a variety of reasons. They are often drug addicts. Isolated from their families. Blackmailed, penniless, abused.
She walked through the laws surrounding prostitution and human trafficking, which have changed steadily since 2010.
As of this past July, prosecutors can do a wiretap on a sex trafficking case, Welch said.
She cautioned, however, that "it would be difficult to get a judge's approval. You would need to have a lot of information in advance."
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