An Illawarra man who struck up a sexually charged online relationship with an under-age girl has failed in a bid to have his conviction for a stalking charge quashed.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Jason Mercieca, 31, was engaged to another woman when he befriended the 15-year-old girl in March 2013 via the social networking site "SMS Fun", offering to pay for her mobile phone credit so the pair could stay in touch.
One day in June, the girl told Mercieca her father was sick and couldn't pay for groceries, prompting Mercieca to transfer $90 into her bank account.
Bank records show Mercieca gave the girl almost $4000 in multiple, separate transactions between June and October.
In July, their relationship took a sexual turn, when Mercieca asked the girl to send him nude photos of her as a "birthday surprise".
The girl refused, however Mercieca offered up his own surprise in return, sending the teen naked pictures of himself.
He then told her he was going to stop sending her money if she didn't send her own pictures, before claiming he was a virgin and saying he wanted to lose his virginity to her, despite her young age.
The girl stopped talking to Mercieca in October, but he continued to bombard her with emails asking why she wasn't speaking to him and telling her he loved her.
Mercieca was eventually arrested after the girl reported the situation to her school counsellor, who passed the information on to her father.
Mercieca was originally charged with an offence of (sexual) grooming of an under-age person.
However, that charge was dropped and replaced with a stalking charge, to which Mercieca pleaded guilty in the Local Court in October.
He was convicted and placed on a good behaviour bond, but challenged the decision in the District Court in Sutherland on Monday, seeking to have the court not record a conviction in the matter.
Defence lawyer Aaron Kernaghan pointed to Mercieca's mild intellectual disability as a mitigating factor, adding his client had lost his job at a local golf club and been left by his fiancee because of the charge against him.
Mr Kernaghan said his client was not a dangerous person.
"This is not a case where this man acts in a predatory way," he said.
Judge Paul Conlon accepted Mercieca had limited social skills due to his disability, but found the magistrate had made the right decision in recording a conviction for the offence.
"It's the nature of the [stalking] that in my view places this offence out of the range of where the court could consider the non-recording of a conviction," he said.
