Before deciding that this is a frivolous offence, I ask you to consider this photo of Brett Farvre on draft day.
When I was in school I had a friend who was long and large, and he loved to show it off. Loved to show it off. One of his apparently favorite things was to wear shorts with no underwear then sit cross-legged, and hello, there it was, all while having a conversation as if he weren’t emerging. I learned not to sit across from him. I’m sure it was a treat for some.
Yes, that was my thought with the very oh so specific length of shorts that are allowed and aren’t.
It sounds frivolous to me! It’s not like anyone has sex with shorts on. Most of these so-called “sex offense” systems seem to only indirectly have anything to do with sex. Things like urination and wearing shorts never counted as sexual acts before, and I am not convinced that they do now either.
Fashion Police is real.
Oy vey…
Well, of course it does. To you.
A Welsh sex offender called Ian Watkins and not even the famous one. Bizarre coincidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Watkins_(Lostprophets)
Which is very much beside the point, as I indicated in the rest of my post. Wearing shorts, and public urination - are not generally regarded as sexual acts by anybody. Feel free to offer some examples of people actually who classify such acts this way.
Why I think it matters is because of how a “specialist” classification gets traction even in best-cases of impartial justice. A jury of one’s peers could be told solemnly by a judge that since a law (somehow) classifies such things this way, that the jury is obliged to find them guilty of the charge, along with its statutory punishments. In many legal systems (such as the US), statutes like this trump common sense.
Every juror should be made familiar with the concept of jury nullification.
The CSI effect is already influencing jurors in a quite significant way. Could inserting the jury nullification into relevant TV shows lead to the same kind of awareness?
Counter-argument (or not):
Well, one presumes that the reason this guy was banned from wearing shorts is because he was exposing himself to people in them, for his own sexual gratification. So, in this guy’s case, wearing shorts is a sexual act. Or at least, a large part of a sexual act. So no, not frivolous in this particular guy’s case. And I’ll stop you before you even get started on your argument that it shouldn’t be considered a crime to simply expose a penis to somebody - I know that that’s how you feel, but the law disagrees with you.
I think judges should not be presuming to tailor the law for individual offenders, because then we get to this sticky area where certain actions are legal for some people, but forbidden to others. Which leads to institutionalized classism.
IF the guy was exposing himself, regardless of my own opinions about this, the exposure is already covered, as it were, by specific statutes.
I agree with you, to a degree. But if the alternative to “stop this guy from wearing shorts” is “keep him in jail/a mental health facility forever because he can’t help but expose his dick when he’s wearing shorts”… It seems like both he and society in general (due to avoiding the costs of incarcerating him indefinitely) are better served simply by stopping him from wearing shorts.
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