Were any U.S. state legislators from the Democratic Party convicted of child sexual crimes between 2015 and 2025?

1. A headline conviction: the Farnham case that anchored 2015 reporting

Keith Farnham, a Democrat and former Illinois state representative, pleaded guilty to charges related to transporting and possessing child pornography and received an eight-year sentence in federal court in 2015, a case developed under Operation Predator; investigators found thousands of images and at least one testimonial allegation of personal abuse that the judge found credible, making Farnham’s case a clear example of a convicted Democratic state legislator for child-sex offenses within the 2015–2025 window ^{[1] [2]}. The reporting from March 2015 documents both the plea and the sentence, establishing a firm factual baseline for that year’s connected prosecutions ^{[1] [2]}.

2. A 2025 appellate decision that confirms another conviction

In 2025, an appeals court upheld the conviction of Tony Navarrete, a former state legislator, on multiple felony counts related to child sexual crimes; the appellate ruling confirms the lower-court findings and leaves the conviction in force, representing an additional, independent instance of a Democratic-affiliated state lawmaker being convicted within the 2015–2025 timeframe ^[3]. The appellate report documents the legal process through appeal and the court’s refusal to overturn the guilty verdicts, making this ruling a definitive legal outcome in the record supplied ^[3].

3. Charges, resignations and the boundary between accusation and conviction

The supplied material also documents Democratic lawmakers who were charged or resigned amid allegations involving minors but for whom convictions are not recorded in these sources. For example, Stacie Laughton, a former New Hampshire lawmaker, faced federal charges related to aiding and abetting sexual exploitation of children in 2023, but the material identifies those matters as charges rather than completed convictions, so they do not change the tally of confirmed convictions absent an identified guilty verdict in the provided records ^[4]. Other items catalog misconduct allegations across parties; several serious accusations led to resignations or investigations but are not reflected here as convictions of Democratic state legislators within the period ^{[5] [6]}.

4. What the pattern shows: rare but legally confirmed occurrences

Across the supplied accounts, convictions of Democratic state legislators for child-sex offenses between 2015 and 2025 appear uncommon but documented, with Farnham’s 2015 sentencing and Navarrete’s 2025 conviction-affirming appeal as the principal confirmed instances in this set of sources. The dataset also highlights a larger pool of allegations, indictments, and administrative consequences involving lawmakers of various parties—showing that while allegations are more numerous, verified convictions among Democratic state legislators within this period are limited to the specific cases noted above in the supplied evidence ^{[1] [2] [3] [5]}.

5. Caveats, missing links and the need for corroboration

The sources provided give solid documentation for specific convictions and for several charged-but-not-yet-convicted cases, but they are not an exhaustive national database; the materials include news reports and an appellate notice that together establish at least two confirmed convictions involving Democratic state legislators in the 2015–2025 timeframe, while other cases remain in the charged or alleged category and require additional legal-record checks to confirm outcomes. Readers should treat the supplied dataset as a partial record: it demonstrates confirmed convictions in two named cases but leaves open the possibility of other convictions or overturned cases outside these cited items, so further public-court-record verification would be required for a comprehensive national count ^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]}.