Romeo and Juliet laws in North Carolina.
North Carolina sets consent at sixteen and grades its statutory rape law by the gap itself: four to six years is one felony class, six or more is a worse one, and under four years is outside the statute. The arithmetic is the case.
The North Carolina baseline.
The age of consent in North Carolina is sixteen. The statutory rape statute for teenagers - G.S. 14-27.25 - covers victims who are thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen, and it is written entirely in age-gap tiers: a Class B1 felony where the defendant is at least six years older, a Class C felony where the gap is more than four but less than six years. Below thirteen, the child-victim statutes apply with B1 exposure and no gap math at all.
The gap tiers, run honestly.
Under four years of difference, G.S. 14-27.25 does not apply - the seventeen-year-old with a fourteen-year-old partner, the eighteen-year-old with a fifteen-year-old. Four to six years: Class C - up to roughly fifteen years at the top of the grid. Six or more: Class B1 - up to life imprisonment for what may be a nineteen-year-old’s relationship with a thirteen-year-old. North Carolina counts in years, measured birthday to birthday, and the tier is charged from the outset - which means the first defense motion in many of these cases is about arithmetic, and it is worth filing.
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 North Carolina conduct only - and a narrow one.
If you or your child is charged in North Carolina.
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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