The case was argued before 7 judges. 6 of them ruled against the teen.
I’m guessing at least 6 of those judges were men.
“In Maryland, a 16-year-old girl texted a video of herself engaging in a consensual sex act to her best friends.”
I think we need to separately consider consent for several different actions here.
This quote states the sex act was consensual. Since the 16 year old woman instigated the actions, I suspect it’s probably also safe to assume her consent with respect to the recording of the video and the sending of the video via text.
What is not clear is whether she explicitly sought the consent of her best friends to be receivers of the video. If she made no attempt to obtain their consent, the scenario seems comparable to flashing, which is an offense is most jurisdictions.
Sometimes the recipient initiated the exchange by making an explicit request for the sext, so the consent to receive it can reasonably be assumed. There’s nothing in the report to suggest that happened in this particular case. In other cases, the person sending the sext initiated the exchange, and in these cases news reports seldom indicate whether the recipients consented to be recipients. Such consent is important, so it’s unfortunate that it is seldom considered in news reports.
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Excuse my ignorance but which of his high crimes are you referring to in this case?
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I have a much dimmer view of humanity.
We live in a world where “swatting” is a thing.
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I agree entirely there is no ethical reason for this outcome, but the law isn’t about ethics. It’s not even a good approximation of ethics. And a judge doesn’t even need to agree with the outcome on a personal, ethical basis to find himself having to rule in favor of it.
Law is all about parsing language and facts within an inch of their lives, usually with much more care, rigor and attention to detail than anybody else involved cared (or was qualified) to put in. If the legislature enacted something with stupid consequences, and there’s no compelling evidence that they really meant (or were statutorily obligated to) something more sensible, then the judge’s duty is to apply the facts to the laws as written. There’s no “are you sure this is what you wanted” backdoor for the judge to request clarification, and the fact that the legislature specifically failed to close this loophole instead presents pretty clear evidence it is what they wanted.
Now, you and I can see quite plainly that it almost certainly is the case that the legislature is full of posturing idiots who wouldn’t want to go on record without opposing teen girls having sex, rather than horrible idiots who want teen girls convicted as child pornographers, but there is no legally probative criterion by which the judge can assume that. Maybe the legislature that passed this law, and the subsequent legislature that failed to fix it, were actually stocked with inhuman monsters duly elected by an inhuman electorate all of whom actually want this horrible outcome. The court’s role in the system isn’t to second-guess what the people and their representatives clearly indicate they want, and in the absence of somebody making a legally sound argument for rejecting the letter of the law that the court can find in favor of there isn’t much recourse for a judge to independently introduce rationality to the proceedings.
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I think the assumption that the law is primarily meant to protect any given individual from being exploited (and is thus invalid in this context) may be mistaken.
Instead the law is there to protect society as a whole from the ill effects of child pornography, and the child’s actions help break that protection.
Thus it is not surprising that the vast majority of the judges voted to convict.
If they did not, then how would they justify the incarceration of millions for consentually breaking drug laws that theoretically exist to protect them from harm as well?
As a society we have long accepted the existence of dire punishments for acts that hurt only the “criminal” because of the presumed collateral damage it does to society as a whole.
The law may be wrong, but it has millennia of vigorously enforced precedent.
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Nah, but she does have to register as a sex offender and stay at least 500 yards away from herself.
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Uh … the courtroom is exactly the later time when those questions should have been asked.
The courtroom is most emphatically not a omfgImustmakeadecisionnoworsomeonewilldie situation, which is the only sensible justification for shoot first (and even then it’s a pretty thin reed)
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Yep, I think that puts it nicely.
I remember a less emotive case: a guy who was charged with being drunk while in charge of a vehicle when driving on the road. The state law did not explicitly say whether a horse was a vehicle when being ridden, so the legals searched through court records all the way back to the 1920 to see whether some recorded comment qualitied a horse as a vehicle or not. They found something, and I think the guy was found guilty.
This seems a really silly way of getting at a decision: on a par with searching religious texts to see what Leviticus has to say about under-age sexting. However, what were the alternatives?
They could have said “Oh, I know a horse that could find his way home. Case dismissed”, or “Horses aren’t safe to wander the roads without a capable rider. Guilty!”. But that just goes on what horses they may have known. That’s just as random.
There is one other thing they could have said, which is “The law is not clear on this point. We will find
this person not guilty, in this particular case, but suggest that any future offenders should be found guilty until such a time as the legistalors make a ruling on this point”. This way, the particular case could be dismissed without going back through the records to the 1920s, provided due diligence was shown when consulting the law, but without creating a precedent for hordes of other drunken riders.
I have no idea whether actual law people would make of this. Anyone?
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By openly advocating, selling actually, his own resort as the host site for next year’s G7. The foreign governments would be forced to pay to stay there for the event, all the proceeds of which would directly accrue to Trump personally.
In Maryland, a 16-year-old girl texted a video of herself engaging in a consensual sex act to her best friends.
I read the article, she was performing a consensual sex act on a male (no need to say more). Did she also obtained explicit consent from the male to be recorded and the video distributed to her social circle by text? Did the recipients requested such video? Apparently they were engaged in a “one up” game, trying to outdo each other in a “dare” game so maybe she did not get consent from the male to distribute the video.
I am not sure if the ruling is right or not, but the fact is that technology is several steps ahead of the law and sometimes the courts have to work with what they have and interpret the law to cover very unusual cases
Because the fact of the matter is that although the video that was meant to stay private within the chat group, was (inevitably) leaked to the rest of the school
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And? Then you still charge the adult for distribution or possession of child porn and not the child. Charging the child only adds to the problem, rather than fixing it.
Imprisonment for a picture of your own body is more inherently coercive. It makes no more sense to have a legal penalty for this because some kid might try to use a loophole than it does to charge a child with statutory rape for masturbation because sex trafficking exists. Sure someone might coerce them into a bad situation, then you charge the responsible adult, not the child for images or actions with their own body.
You simply charge them with possession of child porn or distribution as the case exists. Even if there is a cabal of pedophiles involved, you still don’t charge the child. We have a long history of cases for possession and distribution without knowing the creator, there’s no reason for not prosecuting the child to change that.
You don’t have to prove they did it consensually, just never charge someone for possession of images of their own body. If someone else coerced the, charge that person.
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You brought up the point that crossed my mind. Kids who take pictures of themselves, get caught with them when they are older…yikes. Others have pointed out telling kids not to share these, but just having them on a device could cause lots of problems in the future. 
Worse than that, I’d bet that she would have to register as a sex offender for the rest of her life. College, jobs, heck, I’d bet nursing home placements will all be significantly more difficult to get in her future.
for goodness sake, read the article!
the court specifically said she will not have to register as a sex offender!
And they also recognise that the solution is imperfect but they had to do something because for whatever reasons, a video of two minors performing a sex act was distributed in the public domain!
I don’t want to specifically play the sexist card but if the case was a 16 year old boy sending the video having consensual sex with a girl maybe the reaction would have been different
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Ya know what I’d like to see? Them staying there, but then having them skip on the bill…state visit, after all.
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Not to burst your pre-conceived notions, but the bench is 4 women, 3 men. Maybe you can stereotype them differently? All conservatives? Although they seem to be evenly appointed by Republicans and Democrats.
Or, just accept the very real possibility that they are hemmed in by the law, and ruled in a way the law dictates rather than whatever they might feel “should be.”
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I don’t think this is true at all. I know many lawyers and a few judges, and looking at the situation in it’s totality, taking things in context, etc., is definitely part of their job. Judges make plenty of rulings based on “this would be absurd” and lawyers who try to argue absurd conclusions from wordings of law get yelled at by judges.
In this case, I don’t think the judges would have ruled this way if the teen was being sentenced the way an adult would be for the same act. Like if they were going to make the teen register as a sex offender and put them in prison then I think the judges would have found themselves coming down on the other side, because I don’t think they are sadists, and I do think they are considering harm to the victim.
What I’m more concerned about is that judges have a blind spot for harm done by procedure. Juvenile record expungment does not appear to be automatic in Maryland. For a judge it’s easy to ignore that the mere fact of having been convicted, even if no punishment were given, might completely screw up the rest of this teenager’s life. They could easily by 34 and saying, “I can’t volunteer at my kid’s school because I was joking around with my friends when I was 14.”
But to be really clear, the judges, I think, just made the wrong call. The consequences may be very bad, but judges are like surgeons, they make mistakes and people suffer terribly as a result. The prosecutor, on the other hand, is just awful.
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Yeah. This is a case where prosecutorial discretion should have been exercised. The case should have never reached the justices.
In the article it says the girl has to wear an ankle monitor, get weekly drug checks, and do anger management- wtf? Why anger management?
The male partner was the one who held the phone. Did he consent to having it sent? Dunno. But I want to know why he wasn’t charged for doing the filming.
Actually, I think a male in this situation wouldn’t have been charged- it would have been dismissed as “boys being boys.”
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