Romeo and Juliet laws in New York.
New York has no Romeo and Juliet statute. What it has instead is a seventeen-year age of consent and an offense ladder with actor-age thresholds built in - which produces close-in-age results without ever saying so.
The New York baseline.
The age of consent in New York is seventeen. Below it, the Penal Law builds actor-age floors into each offense: rape in the third degree requires an actor twenty-one or older with a victim under seventeen; rape in the second degree requires an actor eighteen or older and at least four years older than a victim under fifteen. There is no affirmative defense named for star-crossed teenagers - the protection, such as it is, lives in those thresholds.
Reading the thresholds like a defense lawyer.
Run the pairs: a nineteen-year-old with a sixteen-year-old partner is outside rape 3rd (the actor is under twenty-one) and outside rape 2nd (the victim is over fourteen) - no statutory rape charge fits. A twenty-one-year-old with the same sixteen-year-old is a Class E felony. An eighteen-year-old with a fourteen-year-old is protected by the four-year gap rule only if the gap is under four years - birthday math again. And below thirteen, rape in the first degree applies regardless of anything. The lines are bright, unforgiving, and entirely about dates of birth.
One more New York wrinkle: the statute provides a defense to some second-degree counts where the actor was married to the victim - a relic, but one that still appears in the code.
What the exemption never covers.
Close-in-age rules govern one thing: consensual contact between peers. They do not touch positions of trust - teachers, coaches, clergy, and employers face separate statutes regardless of age gaps. They do not legalize images: explicit photos of anyone under 18 are child pornography under federal law, even a photo of yourself, even sent willingly between two teenagers. And they do not travel: crossing state lines changes the applicable law mid-trip, and federal statutes like § 2423 attach the moment travel or the internet is involved. The exemption is a shield for New York conduct only - and a narrow one.
If you or your child is charged in New York.
These cases begin with a phone extraction and an interview - and the interview is where they are usually lost. Say nothing, consent to nothing, and get counsel moving the same week: the age documentation, the messages showing what each person represented, and the relationship timeline all get assembled before the narrative hardens. Where the close-in-age rule applies, we make prosecutors confront it early - many of these cases are declinable on the math alone.
And because registration is the real, permanent penalty here, every decision - plea, trial, diversion - gets measured first against the registry. This firm defends these cases in state and federal court, and the first consultation is free and confidential.
Reading is good. Calling is better.
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