Florida Tries to Make Teen Sexting a Crime, Actually Makes Teen Sexting Impossible to Prosecute
lierne/FlickrEvery now
and then lawmaking goes delightfully, rather than horribly, wrong.
Today in this rare but beautiful category: a Flordia law meant to criminalize teen sexting
actually makes it impossible for the state to prosecute teens for
sending each other sexual images. Mark Joseph Stern at Slate explains:
In 2011, the legislature passed a "sexting" statute barring minors from sending images of nudity (their own or somebody else’s) to other minors. The first offense would qualify as only a civil infraction; minors who violated the law would merely have to perform court-ordered community service or pay a $60 fine. The second and third offenses, however, would qualify as misdemeanors, while the fourth offense would qualify as a felony.Because no one can be convicted of a first offense, there's no charging teens for subsequent offenses either, obviously. Now that the state knows the statute stinks, however, it probably won't be long until they amend it to legitimize their batshit insane aims.
Under this law, Florida prosecutors thought they had a slam-dunk case when they brought charges against a minor who texted a picture of her own vagina to a classmate because she was "bored." But the state quickly ran into a problem: Florida law doesn’t give any court jurisdiction of civil infractions by juveniles—as opposed to criminal infractions—and the sexting statute doesn’t grant any court this kind of jurisdiction. Accordingly, no court in the state currently has legal authority to hear a case involving minors sexting. The prosecutors attempting to prosecute the sexting teen got their case thrown out of court, a decision an appeals court later affirmed.
Florida isn't the only state that thinks criminalizing consensual communication between teens is somehow a worthwhile (and constitutional) activity. In Pennsylvania, it's a crime for a minor to share nude images of anyone ages 12-17, including themselves. In Arizona, it's a misdemeanor for a juvenile to send or receive a nude or sexually-explicit picture. And these are just a few examples. I've been cataloguing a bunch of recent instances of police treating teen sexting as a criminal matter (results coming soon!) across the country. Of course, the teen sexting panic has been building for years now—here's Jacob Sullum writing about teen sexters arrested on child pornography charges in 2009 in Pennsylvania.
26/2/2015
Woman raped at gunpoint in Uttar Pradesh
A 30-year-old woman was allegedly raped at gunpoint by
her neighbour at Hasanpur village in neighbouring Shamli district,
police said on Thursday.
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Representational Image; dna Research & Archives
A 30-year-old woman was allegedly raped at gunpoint by her neighbour at Hasanpur village in neighbouring Shamli district, police said on Thursday.
The incident took place on Wednesday when the woman was sleeping in her house and the accused identified as Suraj Kumar entered her house, police said. He then raped the woman at pistol-point and threatened her, they said. A case has been registered against the accused, police said, adding that further investigation is on.
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