Since the Texas Legislature made online solicitation of a minor a crime in 2005, it's been used to lock up any number of gymnastics coaches, teachers, as well as plenty of non-educators caught digitally cruising for sex with underage kids. Today, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled unanimously that the law is unconstitutionally vague.

The justices don't have an issue with the idea behind the law, which is that adults should be punished for attempting to have sex with children, regardless of whether any sexual contact occurs. Their problem is with the wording of the statute. Here's the offending passage, which describes a third-degree felony:

A per­son who is 17 years of age or older com­mits an offense if, with the intent to arouse or grat­ify the sex­ual desire of any per­son, the per­son, over the Inter­net or by elec­tronic mail or a com­mer­cial online ser­vice, inten­tion­ally com­mu­ni­cates in a sex­u­ally explicit man­ner with an indi­vid­ual who rep­re­sents him­self or her­self to be younger than 17 years of age.

According to the court's opinion, available here, that provision is "overbroad because it prohibits a wide array of constitutionally protected speech and is not narrowly drawn to achieve only the legitimate objective of protecting children from sexual abuse."