Texas unlawful electronic transmission — Penal Code § 21.19

“Cyber flashing” is a crime in Texas. Penal Code § 21.19 — unlawful electronic transmission of sexually explicit visual material — makes it a Class C misdemeanor, with a fine up to $500, to knowingly send an explicit image by text, email, app, or AirDrop unless the recipient asked for it or gave express consent. Below: the controlling statute, what the State must prove, the defenses that work, the constitutional backdrop, and how these cases run in Collin, Dallas, Denton, and Tarrant County courts.

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What Is Unlawful Electronic Transmission Under Texas Law?

Texas Penal Code § 21.19 makes it a crime to “knowingly transmit[] by electronic means” visual material that depicts “any person engaging in sexual conduct or with the person’s intimate parts exposed” or “covered genitals of a male person that are in a discernibly turgid state,” when the material “is not sent at the request of or with the express consent of the recipient.” In plain English: sending an unsolicited explicit image — the conduct everyone calls cyber flashing — is a misdemeanor in Texas, full stop.

The statute’s origin story is unusual for the Penal Code. House Bill 2789, authored by Representative Morgan Meyer of Dallas, was developed with Austin-based dating platform Bumble, whose leadership testified for the bill in both chambers during the 2019 session. It cleared the Senate unanimously and took effect September 1, 2019, making Texas the first state to put a criminal statute on unsolicited explicit images. The legislative target was the dating-app inbox, but the text is far broader — “by electronic means” reaches text messages, email, AirDrop and Bluetooth drops, social-media DMs, chat platforms, and shared-album invites.

Section 21.19 does not define its own vocabulary. Subsection (a) borrows “intimate parts,” “sexual conduct,” and “visual material” from § 21.16 — the unlawful-disclosure statute most people know as the revenge-porn law. That borrowing matters twice over. First, it fixes the statute’s reach: “visual material” covers photographs, film, video, and digital images displayed or transmitted by computer or other electronic method, and “intimate parts” means the naked genitals, pubic area, anus, buttocks, or female nipple. Second, it ties § 21.19’s constitutional fate to a statute the Court of Criminal Appeals has already examined — more on that below.

One drafting detail worth noticing: the depicted-person element says “any person.” The image does not have to depict the sender, and it does not have to depict the recipient. A forwarded explicit photo of a third party, sent to someone who never asked for it, sits inside the statute just as squarely as the classic unsolicited selfie.

What Are the Penalties for Cyber Flashing in Texas?

A § 21.19 offense is a Class C misdemeanor in every form — the lowest criminal grade Texas has. Under Penal Code § 12.23 the punishment is a fine up to $500 and nothing else: no jail, no county-jail backup time, no probation tail. The statute also has no internal enhancement ladder. Unlike voyeurism, which climbs to a Class B with priors, a tenth § 21.19 citation is graded exactly like the first. That is rare drafting in Chapter 21, and it tells you where the real fight is: not the fine, but the permanent record entry and the neighboring statutes prosecutors can reach for instead.

Read the table the way a prosecutor does. The grade gap between § 21.19 and § 21.08 is its own insight: exposing yourself on a sidewalk is a Class B with jail exposure, while the identical exposure delivered by text is a Class C with none — the Legislature priced the digital version one full grade cheaper. The escalators run the other way too. Repetition converts a fine-only case into jailable harassment, and a recipient younger than 17 takes the case out of § 21.19 entirely and into Class A or felony territory. The age of the person on the other end of the send is the single most important fact in any of these files.

Elements the State Must Prove

To convict under § 21.19, the State must prove every element beyond a reasonable doubt:

1. A knowing transmission

The defendant — not a roommate, not a hijacked account — knowingly sent the material. “Knowingly” under Penal Code § 6.03(b) means awareness of the nature of the conduct. An accidental attachment, a misdirected send, or an auto-synced album is not a knowing transmission of explicit material to that recipient.

2. By electronic means

Text, email, app message, AirDrop, DM, chat upload — the statute names no specific platform, and the breadth is intentional. Handing someone a printed photograph is not this offense (though it may be another).

3. Visual material

As defined by § 21.16(a): photographs, film, video, and digital images displayed or transmitted electronically. Text descriptions, emoji, and audio fall outside the statute — however graphic, words alone are not “visual material.”

4. Depicting the listed content

The image must show any person engaging in sexual conduct, any person with intimate parts exposed, or covered male genitals in a discernibly turgid state. Shirtless photos, swimwear shots, and suggestive-but-covered images do not meet the definition — the line is exposure or the specific covered-genitals prong, not offensiveness.

5. Not requested, no express consent

The material “is not sent at the request of or with the express consent of the recipient.” This is the element that decides most contested cases — and note the word express. Penal Code § 1.07(a)(11) defines consent generally as assent in fact, “whether express or apparent”; § 21.19 deliberately accepts only the express kind or an outright request. Assumed willingness, a flirtatious tone, or a dating-app match is not express consent.

How Do Prosecutors Prove Cyber Flashing?

The State’s evidence is almost always the recipient’s phone: screenshots of the image, the surrounding conversation, and the sender’s profile or number. Where the case is worked harder — usually because it travels with other charges — investigators add platform records tying the account to the defendant, subscriber data for the sending number, and occasionally a device extraction. The two proof problems that recur are attribution (who actually pressed send from that account) and consent context (what the full thread, not the cropped screenshot, shows about requests and prior exchanges).

Procedure shapes these cases as much as evidence does. A Class C charge is filed by complaint in municipal or justice court — not by information in county court — and tried, if it goes that far, to a judge or a six-person jury, with the State holding the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt burden. Marshaling platform records for a $500 fine is real work, and city prosecutors handle heavy dockets; a defense that surfaces a genuine attribution or consent problem early often produces a dismissal or a deferred-disposition offer rather than a trial setting.

One charging pattern to understand: § 21.19 frequently appears as the companion count. In a breakup dispute it rides alongside harassment; in an ongoing-contact case, alongside stalking or a protective-order application. Prosecutors use the Class C count as the easy-to-prove anchor while the heavier charge is the real fight. Treating the “little” citation casually in that posture is a mistake — admissions made resolving it feed the felony file.

What Defenses Work Against a § 21.19 Charge?

L and L Law Group builds § 21.19 defenses around the statute’s five load-bearing elements:

• Request or express consent. The full conversation often reads differently than the complainant’s screenshot. Messages soliciting “pics,” reciprocal exchanges minutes earlier, or an established pattern of consensual image-trading puts the consent element in genuine dispute — which is why preserving the entire thread, including the complainant’s side, is the first defense task.
• No knowing transmission. Group-chat sends where the defendant did not select the complainant, auto-forwarded content, shared cloud albums that synced to an unintended device — the knowing mental state fails when the defendant did not knowingly direct explicit material to that recipient.
• Attribution. Shared phones, logged-in devices left behind after a breakup, spoofed numbers, and compromised accounts all break the link between the account and the defendant. Login records and device-possession timelines win these cases.
• The image does not meet the definition. The statute’s content prongs are specific. An image that does not show sexual conduct, exposed intimate parts, or the discernibly-turgid-state prong is outside the statute no matter how unwelcome it was.
• Words are not visual material. Explicit text messages alone cannot support a § 21.19 charge — the State sometimes cites the wrong statute for pure-text conduct that belongs, if anywhere, under § 42.07.
• First Amendment as applied. No published opinion has tested § 21.19; the constitutional framework from the neighboring statutes is set out in the next section, and the argument remains available in an individual case.

A hypothetical, purely illustrative: two people match on a dating app and trade messages for a week, including jokes with sexual innuendo. He sends an explicit photo of himself; she unmatches and files a report with a screenshot of the photo alone. On the screenshot, the case looks clean. On the full export, her messages two days earlier asked for “a preview” — and the consent element collapses. Same statute, same image; the file is decided by which slice of the conversation the prosecutor sees. A second variation: if his photo had gone to her seventeen-year-old sister’s account on a shared tablet, the analysis would leave § 21.19 entirely — and the stakes would stop being a fine.

Is the Texas Cyber-Flashing Law Constitutional?

No published Texas appellate opinion has ruled on § 21.19 as of this writing. That is partly structural: Class C convictions from non-record municipal courts are appealed de novo to county court rather than briefed to a court of appeals, so a fine-only statute can sit on the books for years without generating precedent. But the constitutional terrain around it has been mapped by two Court of Criminal Appeals decisions on neighboring statutes, and both cut in directions a § 21.19 defendant should understand.

First, the statute § 21.19 borrows its definitions from has already survived a facial challenge. In Ex parte Jones, No. PD-0552-18 (Tex. Crim. App. May 26, 2021), the Court of Criminal Appeals reversed a court of appeals that had struck the unlawful-disclosure statute, holding that § 21.16(b) — properly construed to include culpable mental states for its circumstance elements — is a content-based restriction that is narrowly tailored and survives strict scrutiny. The court treated sexual privacy as a compelling governmental interest, and it showed its willingness to read in knowledge and recklessness requirements rather than strike a statute that swept too broadly as drafted. Any overbreadth attack on § 21.19 has to reckon with that narrowing-construction approach.

Second, the CCA has been unreceptive to First Amendment attacks on electronic-communication offenses generally. In Ex parte Barton, 662 S.W.3d 876 (Tex. Crim. App. 2022), the court held that the electronic-harassment statute, § 42.07(a)(7), regulates non-speech conduct that does not implicate the First Amendment at all — making facial overbreadth unavailable and leaving only rational-basis review, which the statute passed. If a court characterizes an unsolicited explicit send the same way — as conduct invading the recipient’s privacy rather than expression — the facial challenge never gets out of the gate.

Where does that leave § 21.19? Its consent element does real constitutional work: the statute only reaches images the recipient never asked for, which narrows it in exactly the way the Jones court found persuasive for § 21.16. The honest assessment for a defendant: the as-applied challenge on unusual facts — satire, art, newsworthy material forwarded for commentary — is live and unresolved; the facial kill-shot is unlikely under current CCA doctrine. Defense value here is usually leverage and preservation, not dismissal on constitutional grounds alone.

Can a Cyber-Flashing Charge Be Dismissed or Expunged?

Dismissal paths run through the elements and through Class C procedure. Element failures — consent context, attribution, definitional shortfalls — drive negotiated dismissals. And municipal and justice courts can grant deferred disposition under Code of Criminal Procedure Chapter 45A: a deferral period with conditions, ending in dismissal when the conditions are completed. On a Chapter 21 citation, expect conditions beyond a traffic ticket’s — no-contact terms and sometimes an evaluation or class.

Expunction follows the disposition. An acquittal or a dismissal — including the dismissal that completes deferred disposition — can support an expunction petition under Code of Criminal Procedure Chapter 55A, erasing the citation and arrest records. A conviction is the opposite: permanent and ineligible. Which makes the central trap of this offense procedural, not legal — paying the fine is a conviction. A § 21.19 citation looks like a traffic ticket, arrives like a traffic ticket, and can be paid online like a traffic ticket; doing so converts a defensible Class C into a lifetime Sexual Offenses chapter entry. The first move is a not-guilty plea, then the endgame analysis. Our guide to clearing a Texas record walks through the mechanics.

Where Are § 21.19 Cases Heard in Collin, Dallas, Denton, and Tarrant County?

Because the offense is a Class C, these cases are filed in municipal court when a city officer writes the citation and in justice of the peace court when the case comes through a sheriff’s office or constable. The county-level courthouses you may have heard of — the Collin County Courthouse (Russell A. Steindam Courts Building) in McKinney, the Frank Crowley Courts Building in Dallas, the Tim Curry Criminal Justice Center in Fort Worth, and the Denton County Courts Building in Denton — enter the picture in two ways: de novo appeals from non-record municipal courts land in the county courts at law, and any escalation of the same facts into harassment, disclosure, or minor-recipient charges is filed there or in the district courts.

Collin County: a Frisco PD citation goes to Frisco Municipal Court, minutes from our Preston Road office; Plano, McKinney, and Allen each run their own municipal dockets, and unincorporated-area cases go to the JP precincts. Dallas County: city cases run through Dallas Municipal Court and the suburbs’ own courts — Richardson, Garland, Irving — with JP courts covering the rest. Denton County: Denton, Lewisville, and Flower Mound municipal courts handle city filings. Tarrant County: Fort Worth Municipal Court carries the city docket, with Arlington and the mid-cities running theirs.

A practice observation that holds across all four counties: when a § 21.19 allegation arrives inside a breakup or harassment dispute, the municipal citation is often the visible tip of a file that a county prosecutor is still evaluating. Resolving the Class C quietly — without admissions, with an expunction-eligible disposition — while watching the companion exposure is the actual job. We defend these cases across the region from our single office at 5899 Preston Rd, Suite 101, Frisco.

What Happens After a Cyber-Flashing Citation in Texas?

Most § 21.19 cases start with a citation or a summons rather than a booking: the complainant reports, an officer reviews the messages, and the citation issues with an appearance date. Appear by that date — in person or through counsel — enter a not-guilty plea, and request the State’s evidence. From there the case follows the Class C arc: negotiation, deferred disposition, dismissal, or trial to the bench or a six-person jury. An appeal from a justice court or non-record municipal court is heard de novo in the county courts — a complete second trial.

Three wrinkles are specific to this offense. First, counsel: courts do not appoint lawyers on fine-only Class C cases, so defendants either hire counsel or stand alone against a prosecutor — and on a Sexual Offenses chapter citation, standing alone is how the pay-the-fine conviction happens. Second, devices: where the allegation travels with harassment or stalking counts, officers may seek the defendant’s phone; nothing about the Class C grade prevents a warrant from issuing on the companion charges. Third, parallel fallout moves faster than court: complainants report the account to the platform (dating apps ban senders on receipt of a report), and employers, schools, and licensing boards react to the allegation itself. Our step-by-step process guide covers the arc from citation through resolution.

How Does § 21.19 Compare to Neighboring Texas Statutes?

Chapter 21 and its neighbors slice electronic sexual misconduct thinly, and the right statute depends on three questions: who is depicted, who received it, and how often it happened. Unlawful disclosure under § 21.16 protects the person in the image — sharing your ex’s intimate photos with others, a Class A misdemeanor. Section 21.19 protects the person receiving the image — the consent that matters is the recipient’s, and the depicted person can be the sender himself. Harassment under § 42.07(a)(7) punishes repeated electronic communications sent to harass — one unsolicited image fits § 21.19; a barrage of them invites the Class B charge. Online impersonation under § 33.07 enters when the send comes from a fake or hijacked identity. And indecent exposure under § 21.08 remains the in-person analogue — one grade higher, and reportable for registration on a second conviction, which § 21.19 never is.

The minor-recipient line deserves its own paragraph, because it is the cliff edge. Sending explicit material to someone under 17 is not a § 21.19 problem — it is prosecuted under § 43.24 (sale, distribution, or display of harmful material to a minor, a Class A misdemeanor in most forms) or, with intent to arouse or an accompanying solicitation, under § 33.021, a second- or third-degree felony. Texas also has a dedicated teen-to-teen statute: § 43.261 covers minors who send explicit images of minors, with its own graduated misdemeanor scheme. Adults never get the benefit of that statute.

One more statutory detail with real consequences: § 21.19(d) provides that when the same conduct violates § 21.19 and another law, the actor “may be prosecuted under this section or the other law” — an either/or election. Compare § 21.17(e), which expressly allows prosecution under “this section, the other law, or both.” The Legislature knows how to authorize stacking when it wants to; for cyber flashing it chose a single election, and a charging instrument that pleads both § 21.19 and, say, § 42.07 for one send is vulnerable on that ground.

Civil Exposure: Where Chapter 98B Does — and Does Not — Reach

The criminal statute has a famous civil cousin, and understanding the gap between them is one of the most misunderstood corners of this area. Civil Practice and Remedies Code Chapter 98B — enacted in 2015 alongside § 21.16 and amended in 2019 — gives a person depicted in intimate visual material a damages action against someone who disclosed or promoted it without consent. It is the revenge-porn civil claim, and it is a serious one: damages, injunctive relief, and attorney’s fees.

But notice what Chapter 98B does not do. It protects the depicted person against disclosure; it gives the unwilling recipient of an unsolicited explicit image no statutory claim at all. When the Legislature created § 21.19 in 2019, it built the crime without a civil twin — so the classic cyber-flashing fact pattern, a sender transmitting images of his own body, produces a Class C citation but no Chapter 98B suit, because the only person depicted is the sender. Recipients pursuing money damages are left to common-law theories such as intentional infliction of emotional distress, which are hard claims on a single-image fact pattern.

The civil exposure flips, though, the moment the image depicts someone else. Forwarding an explicit photo of a third person — an ex, a former friend — can simultaneously violate § 21.19 as to the recipient, § 21.16 as to the person depicted, and Chapter 98B civilly. In that triangle, the Class C citation is the least of the sender’s problems, and anything said resolving it is discoverable in the civil case. Sequence matters; counsel should control it.

Collateral Consequences of a § 21.19 Conviction

The direct sentence is the lightest in the Penal Code — a fine. The collateral profile is heavier than the grade suggests, and it is the reason these citations deserve a defense rather than a checkbook.

No sex-offender registration. Section 21.19 does not appear in the reportable-conviction list of Code of Criminal Procedure article 62.001(5) — no § 21.19 conviction, however many, triggers registration. Background checks: the conviction reads as a Penal Code Chapter 21 — Sexual Offenses — entry, and employers see the chapter heading, not the fine amount. Licensing: educators, nurses, and other license holders should expect fitness inquiries when any sexual-misconduct finding appears, regardless of grade; a deferred-and-dismissed disposition reads very differently to a board than a conviction. Immigration: noncitizens should obtain immigration review before resolving any Chapter 21 charge; moral-turpitude analysis is fact-specific and the chapter placement invites scrutiny. Firearms: a Class C conviction does not affect firearm rights. Platforms and protective orders: dating apps ban reported senders, and repeated conduct toward the same complainant can support a harassment-based protective-order application — turning a one-image case into a standing court order with its own criminal teeth for violations.