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Posted: 12:29 PM- AMERICAN FORK -- The owner of an Orem film-sanitizing company will have to go to jail for 44 days for a one-minute sexual encounter with two 14-year-old girls in January.
Daniel D. Thompson, 31, was also sentenced Friday in 4th District Court to two years of probation, fined $740 and ordered to undergo a mental-health evaluation.
"I owe my family an apology in this case," a shaken Thompson said in court before the sentence was given. "I should have done what was right."
Thompson was initially charged with two counts of sexual battery, a third-degree felony, and one count of patronizing a prostitute, a class B misdemeanor. He faced up to five years in prison on each felony charge.
On July 18, Thompson pleaded no contest to the sexual-battery charges. In return for his plea, prosecutors agreed to reduce the charges to class A misdemeanors and drop the prostitution charge.
Defense attorney Michael Petro argued that the initial recommendation of 120 days in jail was harsh because Thompson did not pay the girls for sex and that he broke off the encounter after one minute when he had bad thoughts about it.
He argued to have Thompson placed on GPS monitoring instead.
But Judge David Mortensen said the fact that Thompson asked the girls if they were 18 suggests he may have thought he was crossing into forbidden territory.
"How then do I not believe it was not a passing question?" Mortensen said. He did agree to suspend one day of the jail sentence and have Thompson serve the rest of the 120 days on electronic monitoring.
Petro said that Thompson's culpability was not the same as his co-defendant, Isaac Lifferth, who actually paid the girls for their encounter with Thompson.
Lifferth, pleaded guilty in June to two counts of unlawful sex with a minor, a third-degree felony; and one count each of patronizing a prostitute, a class B misdemeanor; and drug possession, a Class-A misdemeanor. He was sentence to nine months in jail, 3 months of probation, a $1,025 fine and ordered to complete sex-offender treatment. He was also ordered to stay away from girls under the age of 18.
Police said Lifferth paid the two girls $20 each to have oral sex with him in January. He later took them to Flix Club, where they met Thompson. The girls performed oral sex on him and left with Lifferth, who paid them $20.
Thompson, police said, told the girls that the film-editing business was merely a front for a pornography studio. Police also found a large cache of pornographic videos in the store. Thompson denied the charge of making pornography and said the smut actually belonged to Lifferth.
The girls were offering to have sex with older men to raise money to move out of their homes. They asked a 16-year-old friend to help them line up clients. The 16-year-old sent out text messages, and Lifferth responded.
The scheme was uncovered when one of the girl's mothers found a $20 bill and asked her daughter where it came from.
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