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Teens Prosecuted For Racy Photos
An anonymous reader writes with a story on CNet about two teens who were prosecuted under anti-child-porn laws in Florida for having made and emailed racy photos of each other. Both were under 18 years old, so the resulting pictures are clearly illegal; but the teens' intent was not to share the pictures with anyone else. An appeals court majority opinion found that emailing the photos from one of the kids to the other was a careless act that should, it seems, bring down the full weight of the law. A minority opinion argued that the laws were intended to protect children from exploitative adults, not from other children.
Are they going to start prosecuting 17 year olds who have sex with mutual statutory rape?
This is just hypothetical, of course, but it does illustrates many issues here. The teen case is similar to this scenario; and perhaps we'll need an actual case to make the laws sane again. Of course, anyone who does this will risk everything.
But then again, this old song of "protecting the children" is a wash, anyway, made worthless by those who have the power to judge and prosecute, but do not exercise sound judgement.
And the really sad fact? There are real children who are really being exploited, and these silly laws do nothing to help them. It's all a joke-- a wash, where the guilty goes free and the innocent are punished to make it appear as though the system "works".
Gotta love the USA.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
....and here in Canada we go to the opposite extreme. Here an 80 year old man can legaly have sex with a 14 year old girl (or an 80 year old woman with a 14 year old boy I suppose), and can even document it if the images are intended for personal use and are not shared with others. Now, which one of these systems is better?
Discuss.
"I don't know what these kids did to piss the prosecution and the court off, but there is clearly malicious intent here."
So in the vein of "Who Guards the Guards?" What recourse do we as the public have against these people who twist the intention of the law into a worse crime? I would agree that this prosecution, and labeling as sex offenders has done considerable damage to these minors. Can you criminally prosecute a judge for malicious abuse of power? And as a side note: Will this be taken off of their records when they turn 18? After all they are minors.
We are all just people.
It isn't malice to lock up these child child-pornographers; its the LAW.
Bullshit. If these two were 5-year-olds that were NOT having sex, but just taking pictures of themselves, then you would not call the cops in. You'd take the camera away, destroy the film, and tell them not to do that again.
We are treating these 16-year-olds differently because they ARE old enough to know what they're doing. And since they're old enough to know what they're doing, they can be tried as adults. That alone should be enough to negate the kiddie porn charges for the pictures of themselves.
Are you proposing that laws should be selectively enforced on an adhoc basis?
To a certain degree, yes. The cops and judges did their jobs and performed their roles as the system intended. However, the DA is there to make sure that justice is served. The DA is granted the right to select which cases are prosecuted and which are not. The DA should have shut this one down as soon as he heard of it.
Speculation, but speculation that's exceedingly likely to be correct. Look up the case of Glenarlow Wilson, a child in neighboring Georgia who will be registered as a child molester for the rest of his life, after serving a mandatory 10-year prison sentence -- because, at the age of 17, he had consensual oral sex with a 16-year-old girl. Georgia law at the time drew no distinction whatsoever about the age of the "molester"; any oral sex involving a minor, even if the partner was also a minor, was felony child molestation and left no room for judicial discretion in sentencing.
Laws that don't allow for circumstantial sentencing should be abolished outright. There is never a reason to pass a law that does not take circumstances into account. It is not a question of whether the law will be abused, but a question of when, how, and how frequently....
On the other hand, I feel that with the exception of a handful of very basic laws (rape, murder, theft), all laws should be required to have a sunset provision that makes them expire unless renewed. That would force heinous laws like this one to at least get rehashed every ten years or so....
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Thank goodness. I've met enough kids whose parents "mind their own business" and they end up really eff'ed up. Part of being a parent is sticking your nose in your kids' beeswax. It's called "caring".
I had a policy with my daughter. I let her know when I was "snooping" (such as calling her friends' parents to introduce myself when she was going to spend the night, or stopping by her school to make a pest of myself). Never did anything like that behind her back. And you know what? She was cool with it. I didn't have to sneak around and read her diary or collect the hair from her brushes to check for drug traces (those tests were just coming out then). And she knew that I cared enough to try to protect her, even though we both knew I couldn't protect her from everything.
I made myself part of my daughter's life (as did her mom, my wife). I also let her know that I loved her more than the oxygen I breathe. Then, I rolled the dice. If she did something stupid, I explained to her why it was stupid, and her mom made sure to talk to her about sex early enough (and believe me, her mom knows sex). Occasionally, when she'd bring a boy home, I'd happen to be cleaning my collection of combat knives or demonstrating my dog's attack training. Now my girl is 18 (for another week or so) and has never been pregnant and there are no visible track marks or bruises. Most of it was luck, but I have never regretted making myself part of her world. It's too easy to just be passive and too absorbed in my own world and then I'd have to leave it up to chance to make sure she makes it to 18 without too much damage. I couldn't live with that, so I did it the way my parents did it, and it turns out they weren't as stupid as I thought. Like the old saying goes, "my parents got smarter as I got older."
Now that I got that out of the way, some prosecutor needs a stern talking-to for going after two 18 year-olds trading cheesecake photos. He probably never played doctor or got any himself, so now he doesn't know his pecker from his elbow, but he's got the statute memorized. We need to have much smarter people than are currently involved in the justice system for minors. We've got way too many young ones who are having their lives messed up with brushes with the legal system, while a whole bunch of at-risk kids get ignored. "Getting tough" was never the answer and "zero tolerance" is for manufacturing quality control, not dealing young humans.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Very true. I never understood why different parts of human body are considered taboo. What is the difference between tits, and, say, legs? In some countries they prohibit women to show they legs (i.e. to wear skirts) on public. Analogy is very relevant, but we consider they laws/morality wrong.