DICKSON, J.
Having granted transfer to resolve a conflict among decisions of the Indiana Court of Appeals, we hold that the offense of Attempted Dissemination of Matter Harmful to Minors can be committed when a defendant attempts to transmit proscribed matter by the Internet to an adult police detective posing as a minor.
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The defendant was convicted of two counts of Child Solicitation and one count of At-tempted Dissemination of Matter Harmful to Minors. His appeal claims: (1) insufficient evi-2
dence to convict for Attempted Dissemination of Matter Harmful to Minors because the offending matter was received not by a minor but by an adult police officer; (2) numerous errors in the admission of evidence; and (3) erroneous admission of the defendant’s statement to police in violation of the corpus delicti rule. The Court of Appeals affirmed his convictions. King v. State, 908 N.E.2d 673 (Ind. Ct. App. 2009). We granted transfer to resolve a decisional conflict regarding the effect of an adult recipient posing as a minor in prosecutions for this attempt crime.[1]
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In the present case, the defendant does not dispute that, acting with the culpability required for the commission of the crime of Dissemination of Matter Harmful to Minors, he took the substantial step of transmitting by the Internet such proscribed matter to a person he believed was a fifteen-year-old girl. This substantial step, done with the culpability required for commission of the Dissemination offense, constitutes the charged offense of Attempted Dissemination of Matter Harmful to Minors. It matters not that his intended recipient was an adult; the Attempt statute makes clear that such “a misapprehension of the circumstances” is no defense. Ind. Code § 35-41-5-1(b); see also Zickefoose, 270 Ind. at 623, 388 N.E.2d at 510.
We agree that the unambiguous language of the Dissemination statute clearly requires that, for the commission of the completed offense, the harmful matter must in fact be distributed to a child less than eighteen years of age. We do not agree, however, that this manifests a legislative intent to foreclose application of the general Attempt statute to prosecute unsuccessful at-tempts to commit such Dissemination. We believe that the addition of subsection (b)(3) to § 35-49-3-3 in 2002, requiring the recipient to be a child less than eighteen years of age, was a legislative response seeking to comply with recent First Amendment jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court, [footnote omitted] and as such sought to protect free speech rights of adults while criminalizing the dissemination of matter to minors that is harmful to minors.
The essence of an attempt is that one or more elements of an offense are not fully satisfied, but a defendant still has taken a substantial step toward the offense while acting with the requisite intent of that offense. If each of the elements of an offense are fully satisfied, the charged offense will be the offense, not an attempt of that offense. Here, the defendant disseminated matter harmful to minors to a person he believed or intended to be a child less than eighteen years of age. The only element not met for the offense of disseminating matter harmful to minors is that the recipient was not in fact a child less than eighteen years of age. Because the recipient was not a minor, the defendant was charged with Attempted Dissemination of Matter Harmful to Minors, rather than Dissemination of Matter Harmful to Minors.
To the extent that Gibbs and Aplin may be read to prohibit convictions for Attempted Dissemination of Matter Harmful to Minors where the supposed minor is in fact an adult, these opinions are disapproved and overruled.
Shepard, C.J., and Sullivan, Boehm, and Rucker, JJ., concur.
[1] The Court of Appeals’s decision in this case is inconsistent with its decisions in Gibbs v. State, 898 N.E.2d 1240 (Ind. Ct. App. 2008), trans. denied, and Aplin v. State, 889 N.E.2d 882 (Ind. Ct. App. 2008), trans. denied. In Gibbs, the defendant appealed his convictions for Child Solicitation, Attempted Dissemination of Matter Harmful to Minors, and Attempted Sexual Misconduct with a Minor. Relying upon Aplin, a divided panel of the Court of Appeals looked at the statutory language defining the crimes of Sexual Misconduct with a Minor and Dissemination of Matter Harmful to Minors and determined that where there is no opportunity to commit the crimes because the supposed minor is in fact an adult, there can be no attempt of those crimes.