The Missing Element: Why Intent Collapses the Case Against Laura Owens

Criminal prosecutions are often framed as disputes over facts. But beneath the surface, every felony case turns on a more exacting question: whether the defendant possessed criminal intent at the moment the alleged conduct occurred. Not confusion. Not fear. Not emotional distress. Intent—mens rea—requires knowledge and purpose that the law recognizes as culpable.

That requirement is not a technicality. It is a constitutional safeguard, designed to prevent the criminal law from punishing people for conduct that was not clearly understood, at the time, to be criminal.

Measured against that standard, the prosecution of Laura Owens encounters a structural problem that cannot be cured by narrative force or public disapproval. The State has charged conduct that unfolded in a legal environment where criminal liability had never been contemplated, and it has done so without a viable theory of intent. Even if every disputed factual inference were resolved against Owens, the mental state required by law remains absent.

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Criminal Intent Requires Fair Notice

Mens rea presupposes foreseeability. A person cannot intend to commit a felony unless the law has given fair notice that the conduct at issue is criminal.

For more than half a century, paternity petitions filed during pregnancy—even those later withdrawn, dismissed, or proven mistaken—have been treated uniformly as civil matters in the United States. Courts have sanctioned parties, awarded fees, criticized credibility, and dismissed cases. They have not referred women for prosecution, let alone charged them with serious felonies.

That historical practice matters. It defines the legal environment in which conduct occurs. Where prosecution has never been contemplated, intent cannot be inferred after the fact. A defendant cannot form the intent to commit a crime that the legal system itself has never recognized.

If Arizona now wishes to criminalize certain uses of the family court system, it may seek legislative authorization going forward. What it cannot do—consistent with due process—is retroactively assign criminal intent to conduct that occurred in a framework where criminal exposure was unimaginable.

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Mental State Is Not Abstract - It Is Contextual

Intent does not exist in a vacuum. Courts routinely consider whether a defendant’s mental and cognitive profile affects how actions are perceived, processed, and understood.

Owens has publicly disclosed that she is autistic and has been diagnosed with panic disorder, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and traumatic brain injury. These conditions are not invoked to excuse wrongdoing; they are relevant because criminal intent requires conscious, knowing deception—not misunderstanding, miscommunication, emotional dysregulation, or distorted threat perception.

Autism spectrum conditions, in particular, are well documented to affect social communication, interpretation of interpersonal cues, and responses under stress. Panic disorder and PTSD further complicate perception during emotionally charged events. None of these conditions negate responsibility—but they do bear directly on whether conduct reflects calculated criminal purpose or maladaptive response to crisis.

Criminal law distinguishes sharply between deliberate fraud and conduct driven by confusion, fear, or impaired judgment. Where mental health conditions plausibly affect how someone understands and reacts to a situation, the inference of intent must be supported by evidence—not assumed.

Here, that evidence is absent.

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The Absence of Motive Is the Absence of Intent

Because intent is rarely proven directly, courts look to motive. Fraud schemes are driven by gain. Extortion is driven by leverage. Perjury is driven by the desire to avoid consequences.

In the Echard matter, Owens stood to gain nothing unless Echard was biologically determined to be the father—a fact she could not control and that testing alone could establish. If he was not the father, she would receive nothing. Filing a paternity petition does not generate money, advantage, or leverage; it triggers a binary process that ends in confirmation or dismissal.

In the earlier Gillespie matter, the civil litigation likewise did not present any meaningful financial incentive consistent with a criminal scheme. At one point, Owens proposed that any monetary remedy be directed to a women’s charity rather than herself. Whatever one thinks of that proposal, it does not resemble the architecture of intentional fraud.

When conduct produces no discernible benefit, motive collapses. And when motive collapses, intent cannot be fraud.

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When Two Things Can Be True — and Still Not a Crime

The State’s perjury allegations sharpen the problem rather than resolving it. One such count related to Echard focuses on statements concerning sexual exclusivity during a window in which conception could have occurred.

For that statement to be material—an essential element of perjury—the possibility of pregnancy must be taken seriously. If pregnancy was never possible, exclusivity is legally irrelevant. If pregnancy was possible, then the case necessarily involves early gestation, an arena defined by medical uncertainty rather than certainty.

Either way, the elements fail. A statement that cannot influence a legal outcome is not perjury. And a statement made amid unresolved biological conditions cannot be shown to be knowingly false at the moment it was made.

The prosecution cannot simultaneously deny pregnancy and rely on the mechanics of conception without defeating its own theory of intent.

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No Intent Exists Where the Defendant Tried to Disappear, Not Benefit

If Owens were engineering a calculated deception, one would expect behavior consistent with self-promotion: attention-seeking, strategic leaks, public positioning. Instead, once the matter became public, she retreated. She approached the press anonymously, begged journalists not to publish her name, stopped producing new podcast episodes, and shut down her public social-media accounts. That is not the profile of a fraudster. It is the profile of a person who expected nothing from the process except privacy.

The law presumes intent from actions, and every action here points not to scheming but to fear, confusion, and the instinct to withdraw. None of those mental states satisfy the intent element of any felony.

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Without Intent, the Prosecution Has Narrative — Not Law

A prosecution without intent is not a prosecution. It is a story. And stories do not convict people in constitutional systems — statutes do.

Fraud requires a deliberate plan to obtain a benefit.

Perjury requires knowledge of falsity.

Identity theft requires purposeful misrepresentation for gain.

Extortion requires an attempt to coerce payment or advantage.

None of these elements survive sustained scrutiny here—not because the facts are undisputed, but because the mental state required by law cannot be established in a context where the conduct was lawful, the outcomes uncertain, the incentives absent, and the precedent nonexistent.

Absent intent, what remains is a story. And stories—however compelling—are not crimes.

This article relies on publicly accessible filings, testimony, and reporting. It aims to summarize and contextualize the existing record but does not purport to speak for any party involved in the litigation. All interpretations are based on documents already in the public domain.