Enticing a child — knowingly luring, persuading, or taking a minor from a parent’s lawful custody with intent to interfere with that custody — is a Class B misdemeanor under Penal Code § 25.04, rising to a third-degree felony when the State alleges intent to commit a felony against the child. Below: the statute, penalty tiers, verified case law, defenses, and county-court practice for Collin, Dallas, Denton, and Tarrant County.
Tell us what happened. A defense attorney reviews every submission — usually within the hour during business hours.
Independent peer-review ratings recognizing legal ability and ethical standards.
Awards reflect peer-reviewed ratings only. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes.
Texas Penal Code § 25.04 makes it an offense to act “with the intent to interfere with the lawful custody of a child younger than 18 years” by knowingly enticing, persuading, or taking the child from the custody of the parent, guardian, or “person standing in the stead of the parent or guardian.” The statute sits in Chapter 25 — Offenses Against the Family — between interference with child custody (§ 25.03) and criminal nonsupport (§ 25.05), and it protects something narrower than most people assume: not the child’s safety as such, but the parent’s right to custody.
Texas courts say so directly. Enticement of a child is a crime against the parents rather than the child, because the parent — not the minor — loses the privilege of the society, custody, care, control, and services of the child. Little v. State, 246 S.W.3d 391, 399 (Tex. App.—Amarillo 2008). That framing drives everything else about the offense: the complaining witness in the charging instrument is the parent or guardian, the child’s wishes are legally beside the point, and the State’s proof must center on what the accused intended to do to the parent’s custody rather than on whether the child came to harm.
“Custody” carries a specific meaning here. Because the Penal Code does not define the term for § 25.04, the Court of Criminal Appeals borrowed the family-law definition: custody “connotes the right to establish the child’s domicile and includes the elements of immediate and direct care and control of the child, together with provisions for its needs.” Cunyus v. State, 727 S.W.2d 561, 564 (Tex. Crim. App. 1987). Custody is broader than the family home — but it is also more than momentary supervision, which is precisely where overreaching prosecutions fail.
“Entice” is read in its ordinary sense — to draw on, to instigate by inciting hope or desire, to allure, to lead astray, to tempt. Words alone can satisfy the conduct element: no touching, no transportation, and no force is required. That breadth is exactly why the intent element does the real work in these cases, and why the verified case law below matters so much to the defense.
Section 25.04(b) sets a two-tier punishment scheme. The base offense is a Class B misdemeanor. It becomes a third-degree felony “if it is shown on the trial of the offense that the actor intended to commit a felony against the child.”
| Tier | Classification | Confinement | Fine cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base offense — intent to interfere with lawful custody | Class B misdemeanor | Up to 180 days in county jail (Penal Code § 12.22) | Up to $2,000 |
| Actor intended to commit a felony against the child | Third-degree felony | 2 to 10 years in TDCJ prison (Penal Code § 12.34) | Up to $10,000 |
| Limitations period | 2 years for the misdemeanor tier (CCP art. 12.02); 3 years for the felony tier under the felony catch-all (CCP art. 12.01) | ||
The felony tier deserves close attention because it is one of the steepest intent-driven jumps in the Texas Penal Code. Nothing about the physical conduct changes — the same act of persuading a 16-year-old to leave home supports either tier. What changes is the State’s allegation about what the actor intended to do next. The intended felony does not need to be completed or even attempted; prosecutors typically build it from text messages, search history, or the circumstances of the encounter, then argue the inference to the jury. Maximum exposure rises from 180 days to ten years — a twenty-fold increase that turns entirely on a mental-state finding.
The two-tier structure is also relatively young. As enacted with the modern Penal Code in 1974, enticing a child was a Class B misdemeanor across the board, and the appellate decisions of the 1980s describe it that way. The 76th Legislature added the third-degree-felony enhancement effective September 1, 1999 (Acts 1999, 76th Leg., ch. 685). The practical effect: the State can reach felony-grade punishment without proving an attempt under Penal Code § 15.01, which would require an act amounting to more than mere preparation toward the intended felony. Under § 25.04(b), enticement plus intent is enough.
A clearly hypothetical illustration: a 24-year-old messages a 16-year-old he met through a gaming app and persuades her to slip out of her parents’ house at midnight; police stop the pair a mile away. Standing alone, that is a Class B § 25.04 case. If the message history also shows a plan for sexual contact, the State will allege intent to commit indecency with a child under § 21.11 — a felony — and charge the same midnight walk as a third-degree felony, even though no touching ever occurred.
To convict under § 25.04, the State must prove every element beyond a reasonable doubt:
These cases almost always begin with the parent, not the police. A parent reports a child missing or discovers messages on the child’s phone, a patrol report is taken, and a detective builds the case afterward — which means most § 25.04 arrests happen by warrant days or weeks after the underlying events, not at the scene.
The State’s proof is usually digital. Texts, DMs, and app messages can establish both conduct verbs (the enticing or persuading itself) and the intent element, and a download of the child’s or the accused’s phone is standard. The parent supplies the custody testimony: who the child lived with, what permission was given, and when the child’s whereabouts became unknown. Because the offense is committed against the parent, the State does not need the child’s cooperation — a point prosecutors lean on when the child is a reluctant witness who never wanted charges filed.
Intent is nearly always proved by inference. Little shows the pattern courts accept as sufficient: the defendants there actively encouraged the teenager to leave, supplied a pre-planned 2:00 a.m. pickup without informing her mother, then kept her location hidden for nineteen hours. Active planning, concealment, and keeping the child’s whereabouts from the parent are the recurring proof points. The mirror image is Cunyus, where the Court of Criminal Appeals found the evidence insufficient because nothing the defendant did diminished the parents’ ability to control or raise their children — he took them home and even suggested they call for permission first.
No intent to interfere with custody. This is the battleground, and the leading authority favors the defense. In Cunyus v. State, 727 S.W.2d 561, 564-65 (Tex. Crim. App. 1987), the Court of Criminal Appeals held that “the mere offer of an activity to a child which would remove the child from where the parents or legal guardians have permitted the child to be will not alone constitute” the offense — otherwise, the court observed, every adult who invited a child somewhere outside a parent’s immediate control would be a criminal. The court reversed and ordered an acquittal because the State had no evidence the defendant intended to intrude on the parents’ right to establish the children’s domicile or to care for and control them. Offers, invitations, and even objectionable adult behavior are not enough; the State must connect the conduct to an intended loss of parental custody.
Conduct inconsistent with concealment. Facts showing the accused kept the parent informed, returned the child promptly, or encouraged the child to get permission cut directly against the intent element — they are the exact facts that produced the acquittal in Cunyus. Notably, § 25.04 has no written safe harbor: the harboring-a-runaway statute, § 25.06, gives express defenses for close relatives and for people who notify a parent or law enforcement within 24 hours, but the Legislature wrote neither into § 25.04. The same facts still matter — not as a statutory defense, but as evidence negating intent.
Custody and standing problems. The State must prove the child was taken from a parent, guardian, or person standing in a parent’s stead, and that the complainant actually held lawful custody at the time. Informal arrangements — a child staying with a godparent, shuttling between separated parents with no orders in place — can leave real doubt about whose custody was interfered with, and whether the accused knew it.
No enticement at all. A child who leaves on her own and shows up at someone’s door has not been enticed by that person. Presence and shelter alone are a § 25.06 harboring question, not enticement — and the distinction matters because harboring carries its own built-in defenses.
Attacking the felony bump. In the third-degree tier, the intended-felony allegation is often the weakest link: it rests on inference from messages or circumstances. Forcing the State to specify the intended felony and excluding speculative readings of ambiguous messages can collapse the case back to a Class B misdemeanor — a different universe of exposure.
What does not work: the child’s consent. Texas courts have been consistent for decades that the minor’s willingness — even her initiative — is no defense, because the offense is committed against the parent. Little, 246 S.W.3d at 399. “She wanted to leave” and “she messaged me first” explain the facts; they do not answer the charge.
A second, plainly hypothetical example: after a shouting match at home, a 15-year-old calls her grandmother, who picks her up from a friend’s house, lets her spend the weekend, and does not call the girl’s mother until Sunday. If the mother reports it, a charging decision could go three ways — enticing under § 25.04, harboring under § 25.06, or no charge at all. The grandmother’s defense lanes are strong (no persuasion to leave, no concealment, family-conflict context), but only § 25.06 would give her a statutory relative defense — which is exactly why charge selection, and challenging it, matters in family cases.
Dismissals in § 25.04 cases usually come from one of three directions. First, the intent evidence collapses under Cunyus — once the State’s file shows the child was returned, never hidden, or invited with a parent’s knowledge, the custody-interference theory loses its spine. Second, the family context resolves: many of these charges grow out of custody disputes and family blowups, and when the family court sorts out possession — or the complaining parent’s account softens — misdemeanor prosecutors frequently re-evaluate. A complainant’s wishes are never controlling, but in county-court misdemeanor dockets they carry practical weight. Third, negotiated outcomes: deferred adjudication under Code of Criminal Procedure chapter 42A is available, and in appropriate Class B cases pretrial-intervention or diversion criteria may fit.
The record consequences differ sharply by outcome. An acquittal or a dismissal can support expunction under Code of Criminal Procedure chapter 55A — the full destruction of the arrest record. A successfully completed deferred adjudication may support an order of nondisclosure under Government Code chapter 411, subchapter E-1, sealing the record from most private parties. A final conviction — even Class B — generally forecloses both. That asymmetry drives strategy: keeping the case at the misdemeanor tier and steering it toward dismissal or deferred preserves a realistic path to a clean record; a felony conviction under the enhanced tier forecloses it permanently.
Section 25.04 sits inside a cluster of overlapping statutes, and the charging choice among them often matters more than the facts. The fault lines: whether a court order governs custody, whether force or concealment was used, and whether money or sexual purpose is in the picture.
| Offense | Statute | Level | Key difference from § 25.04 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enticing a child | PC § 25.04 | Class B misdemeanor / 3rd-degree felony | Interference with a parent’s custody; words alone can suffice |
| Kidnapping | PC § 20.03 | 3rd-degree felony | Requires abduction — restraint plus secreting or threatened deadly force |
| Interference with child custody | PC § 25.03 | State jail felony | Keys on violating a court custody order; § 25.04 needs no order at all |
| Agreement to abduct from custody | PC § 25.031 | State jail felony | Agreeing, for money or other consideration, to abduct a child from custody |
| Harboring a runaway child | PC § 25.06 | Class A misdemeanor | Sheltering a runaway; express relative and 24-hour-notification defenses |
| Child grooming | PC § 15.032 | 3rd-degree felony | 2023 statute aimed at conduct patterns facilitating future sexual offenses |
| Online solicitation of a minor | PC § 33.021 | 3rd- to 2nd-degree felony | Sexually explicit communication or solicitation by electronic message |
Two distinctions carry real strategic weight. The custody-order fork: when a divorce decree or SAPCR order governs the child, takings and retentions are usually charged as interference with child custody under § 25.03 — a state jail felony; when no order exists, § 25.04 is the State’s tool, and it protects de facto custody. Separated parents, new partners, and relatives are routinely on one side or the other of that line, and which statute applies changes the punishment range, the available defenses, and the family-court fallout.
The kidnapping line: kidnapping protects the victim’s liberty and requires abduction; enticing protects the parent’s custody and requires none. The registration consequences split the same way — kidnapping or unlawful restraint of a victim younger than 17 can trigger sex-offender registration through an affirmative finding under CCP article 62.001(5)(E), while a § 25.04 conviction never appears on that list. When an indictment stretches custody-interference facts into an abduction theory, driving the case back down to § 25.04 is often the single most valuable thing defense counsel can do.
Collin County. Class B filings land in the County Courts at Law at the Collin County Courthouse (the Russell A. Steindam Courts Building), 2100 Bloomdale Road in McKinney; the felony tier goes to the grand jury and the district courts in the same building. Custody-dispute cases here often run parallel to active family-court files, and the misdemeanor courts see a steady diet of family-conflict dockets — our Frisco office sits minutes from the courthouse.
Dallas County. Misdemeanor cases are heard in the County Criminal Courts at the Frank Crowley Courts Building on Riverfront Boulevard, with the felony district courts in the same complex. Dallas intake prosecutors screen family-offense cases for companion charges — interference with custody, harboring, or assault-family-violence — so the charge that is filed is not always the charge the case ends with.
Denton County. Both misdemeanor and felony dockets run through the Denton County Courts Building in Denton. Magistration and bond-setting move through the county jail, and family-adjacent misdemeanors are commonly resolved with conditions keyed to the family court’s expectations.
Tarrant County. The Tim Curry Criminal Justice Center in Fort Worth houses the county criminal courts and the criminal district courts under one roof. As a general practice observation, Tarrant prosecutors are attentive to any sexual-purpose evidence in § 25.04 files — the difference between the Class B tier and the felony tier — which makes early defense engagement on the intent question especially valuable there.
The typical sequence runs report → investigation → warrant, rather than an on-scene arrest. After arrest, the accused is magistrated under Code of Criminal Procedure article 15.17 — ordinarily within 48 hours — where bail is set and conditions attach. Expect a no-contact condition covering the child and frequently the complaining parent’s household. For relatives, that condition can collide with existing family-court possession schedules; a motion to modify bond conditions, coordinated with the family file, is often the first meaningful defense filing.
Charging follows: an information for the Class B tier, a grand-jury indictment for the felony tier. Discovery then opens under article 39.14 (the Michael Morton Act) — offense reports, the phone downloads, body-cam, and the forensic-interview recording if one occurred. Pretrial litigation in § 25.04 cases tends to focus on three things: the specificity of the charging instrument on the custody allegation, suppression of phone seizures and statements, and — in the felony tier — narrowing or striking the intended-felony allegation. Resolution paths range from outright dismissal to diversion, deferred adjudication, a reduced charge, or trial. Because the offense protects the parent rather than the child, expect the State to evaluate the parent’s credibility and posture continuously — and expect the defense to document every fact showing the child’s location was never concealed.
Sex-offender registration: none for § 25.04 itself. Enticing a child does not appear in the reportable-conviction list of CCP article 62.001(5) — but companion convictions can change that picture entirely, since the intended felony (indecency, sexual assault) and kidnapping-with-findings are registrable.
Firearms. A felony-tier conviction triggers the Texas felon-in-possession statute, Penal Code § 46.04, and the federal prohibition under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g). The Class B tier carries no firearm disability.
Family court. Charges and convictions arising from custody interference surface in custody and possession proceedings, where judges weigh them when deciding conservatorship and possession — often the most consequential forum for a parent or relative accused under § 25.04.
Employment and licensing. An offense “against the family” on a background check is a serious problem in child-contact fields — education, childcare, healthcare — and a parallel CPS investigation can create central-registry exposure independent of the criminal outcome.
Immigration. For noncitizens, any conviction involving a minor warrants immigration-specific counsel before a plea; the felony tier in particular raises serious removability questions that depend on the person’s status and history.
Co-Founding Partner · Texas Bar No. 24043514
Reggie London co-founded L and L Law Group with a focus on federal criminal defense, complex felony defense, and TEA/SBEC matters. Licensed in Texas, admitted to TXND and TXED.
Co-Founding Partner · Texas Bar No. 24043266
Njeri London co-founded L and L Law Group with a focus on DWI defense, family violence cases, and juvenile defense. Licensed in Texas, admitted to TXND and TXED.
Co-founding partners Reggie London and Njeri London personally handle every case. Free consultation. Frisco, Texas.
Call (972) 370-5060L&L Law Group represents clients across North Texas counties for DWI, assault, drug crimes, juvenile defense, outstanding warrants, bond reduction, and expunction matters.
