From New York Penal Law:
And even the 17 year age limit can be waived if the parties are married:
There are some age-specific laws.
For example, it is rape in the third degree if:
And rape in the second degree:
And rape in the first degree:
But it seems that 17 is the unambiguous age of consent.
If you want to look at the laws yourself, go here and put sex offenses into the search box.
I don’t know the UK position, but over in the States (most states I think - possibly all) statutory rape/sex with a minor is one of the very few strict liability offenses - there is no need for any showing of intent; so if you are in a state where the age of consent is 18, and she is 17 years and 364 days, carries fake ID, and swears on the Bible she is 18, you are still liable for prosecution. Now many states also have Romeo and Juliet laws which decriminalize what would be statutory rape if the parties are not far apart in age - a 19 year old and a 17 year old, for example.
There just isn’t a get out clause to say that you thought she was of age, regardless of how reasonable that belief might be.
Woohoo, it’s legal to rape 16 year olds who dress provocatively in England! Book me a flight!
Anybody else having trouble with the whole idea of a ten year old passing for 16? Smells like “they wanted to believe it, so they believed it” to me.
If only we could find a happy medium between the idiocy of this UK judge, and the idiocy of strict liability when applied to statutory rape.
JonBenet was six and could have passed for 10 at least.
Not me. I once knew a girl of ten who could have passed for eighteen. She filled out early and was born to a family of amazons. (Dot com.) And acted really mature.
I think the middle ground comes with prosecutorial discretion. A 25 year old who ends up with a just under 18 year old he met in a bar (so presumably she had ID good enough to convince the bar she was 21) is, I would think, unlikely to be prosecuted. The problem with that, of course, is it is incredibly uncertain - if you have a hard ass prosecutor, or one with issues with certain ethnic groups, or one running on a religious based, anti-sex platform, or even a situation where the girl’s parents get involved, then you will get unequal enforcement of the law.
I don’t know where the balance should lie. I have to admit I have precious little sympathy for a 45 year old in a state where the age of consent is 15 claiming that the 14 year old he ended up in bed with swore she was a high school sophomore not freshman.
But the fact remains that, if the prosecutor chooses to be a dick and proceed with the case, the guy cannot then use the girl’s presence in the bar, or her possession of a fake ID, as a defense in the case, which is patently ridiculous. All he’s left with is the hope of jury nullification, which is not, in my opinion, a good basis for determining a just outcome in trials. And while the Nifong case might be unusual, i’ve seen other cases over the past years that don’t give me absolute confidence in the use of prosecutorial discretion in America.
I think a guy like that is pretty creepy, but creepy people deserve the same legal protections as everyone else. If that girl did, indeed, show him ID or give him other viable reasons to believe that she was of legal age, then he should be able to use that in his defense.
Our legal system accepts, in many other cases, that under-age people of a certain age can still be held accountable for their actions because they were able to understand right from wrong, and to understand the nature of their crime or their deception. Plenty of 15-year-olds in this country have been tried as adults. Why can’t we accept that the same level of deception is possible in cases involving statutory rape?
OK, I fully realize that the thread title should speak for itself, but it would be nice to have the RO in the title. There was the slimmest of chances that it could have been something else.
It could have been that she provoked him in the knees with a baseball bat, but after 8 months of therapy he will walk again.
What, is that a rule now? If so, it is, to quote Clarence Thomas (to bring it back to judges) an uncommonly silly rule.
u r dum. :rolleyes:
Try to keep up here, Erik. The guys were still convicted of the statutory offence, but the sentencing reflected the mitigating circumstances - weird as I personally find said circumstances. How anyone with a modicum of intelligence could imagine…
considers the source
Nemmind.
Oddly, that thought (or a variant of it) did occur to me. I’m sometimes too hopeful that people are more creative than to create classic RO repetitively.
Nope, it’s not a rule. But it seems to have taken the form of a courtesy lately since I’ve noticed it a lot.
I hope that Clarence Thomas explained why he was calling a rule silly. You didn’t seem to bother.
Here’s how it goes. There’s a handful of people here who feel the NEED to post RO. And then there’s a few people (like me, I suppose) that don’t care to read RO. So those of us, like me in this thread, open the thread and are dismayed that it was RO and then stop to write something about it. Then the people posting the RO get upset that people are threadshitting in their thread. So in order to avoid that from happening, people who post RO can add the RO designation and will decrease the chances that someone like me will come into their thread thinking that it’s about something else and making a comment.
By not placing a simple RO designation in the title, a whole string of events seem to be more likely. For one, someone will go in the thread who didn’t want to read it and comment on that fact, and then someone will get upset about that someone threadshitting and comment about that. It seems like a pretty easy precaution to label the thread in advance.
What’s your rationale for calling it silly?
I didn’t even know he posted here. He’s Bricker, isn’t he?
All I can say is, you wouldn’t believe the whorish swaddling that today’s infants flounce around in. If even that – I have seen them NAKED in public.
Sluts! Makes a man want to give up his gerbils.
I was going to reply to this but **Malacandra ** has said what needs to be. When the facts don’t support RO, no problem, just make up shit.
from the BBC Article linked:
Why is there such a determined effort made in relation to these things to ignore the facts so as to be able to work up RO? Of all people, Evil Captor, I would have thought you the least likely to get caught up in a moral panic.
Edited to delete when I realised I’d misread.
I’m not in a moral panic, I missed the part you quoted which does indeed make it seem reasonable that the guy could have mistaken her for 16. I don’t think it’s morally panicky to view such a claim with a certain amount of :dubious: . I have a kid, who has friends, and in my experience, 10 year olds act, look and talk very differently from 16 year olds. She must be exceptional in that respect, like Tracy Lords was as a kid. Exceptional kids do exist, but I’ll bet it’s much more common to have guys who are attracted to young stuff saying, “NO WAY was she ten years old!”
And that’s as maybe, but over here the age of consent is 16. That means anyone from 16 to 99+ can **legally **have consensual sex with someone who is also over 16. However ‘skeevy’, creepy or immoral that might be, that is the legal position.
In this instance, it was agreed that although the (consensual) act was against the law because she was not actually at the age of consent, the sentence reflects the detail of the case in that the judge deemed it not unreasonable to assume the girl was 16.
And yes - tragic all round, but this girl’s issues started long before this case began.