Romeo and Juliet laws in Ohio.
Ohio sets consent at sixteen and runs teenage cases through one statute - unlawful sexual conduct with a minor - whose penalty collapses from felony to misdemeanor when the actor is less than four years older. The gap is everything.
The Ohio baseline.
The age of consent in Ohio is sixteen. The teenage statute is R.C. 2907.04 - unlawful sexual conduct with a minor - covering actors eighteen or older with partners thirteen to fifteen. Below thirteen, Ohio charges rape regardless of claimed consent, with penalties running to life. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-old actors with thirteen-to-fifteen-year-old partners fall outside 2907.04’s definition entirely.
The four-year sliding scale.
What makes Ohio unusual is the penalty architecture inside 2907.04: the offense is a fourth-degree felony by default, but drops to a first-degree misdemeanor if the actor is less than four years older than the minor - and climbs to a third-degree felony if the actor is ten or more years older, or has priors. Same conduct, three different criminal universes, all decided by subtraction. An eighteen-year-old senior with a fifteen-year-old sophomore: misdemeanor. A twenty-year-old with the same partner: felony four. A twenty-six-year-old: felony three and near-certain registration.
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 Ohio conduct only - and a narrow one.
If you or your child is charged in Ohio.
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.
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