Most liquor store armed robberies involve the use of a firearm to threaten the clerk and the taking of all the money in the cash register.
If, in charging a man with one liquor store robbery, you were to present evidence of a series of previous liquor store robberies in which he, armed with a pistol, forces clerks to empty their cash registers, it would not qualify for admission as a prior bad act – even though each armed robbery was committed in identical fashion. There would be no distinctive features to the methodology uncommon to most liquor store robberies. However, if this same armed robber repeatedly demanded all of the Cheese Whiz that the store had on hand, instead of its cash, you’d be in good shape.
Similarly, there’s nothing particularly unique about chatting up a teenager for the explicit purpose of sex that would permit one uncharged act to be admitted to show that the accused acted in conformity therewith on a second occasion.
But also, Kobal, what’s the benefit to not arresting the guy? He might have his life ruined? When you try to commit a crime, that’s probably a positive. The police aren’t there to hold your hand and tell you that going to that underage girl’s house is a bad idea and not in your best interest.
Username ? Specific grammar/spelling errors ? Specific requests/come ons ? Same computer used ?
Which seems to be the core of the problem. You ask “is it effective ?”. I’m more concerned with “is it fair ?”. There’s lots of ways to have a very effective unfair system. I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.
The main benefit is making my conscience STFU and being confident I (and by extension, society) did all I could :).
Also, you’re right - I probably wouldn’t call for a warning in any other kind of crime. Then again, there are few (no ?) other kinds of crime where the first response is a sting. And as I said before, the social stigma associated with sex offense is much more severe than that any other crime.
One has a hard time building back a life as an ex-con no matter what, but if your name is on a public database ? You can expect your whole neighbourhood to spit in your face if they find out. You can expect to be fired if your employers find out. You can even expect to be attacked by vigilantes years after the fact… It’s not so much the prison I object to rather than this eternal punishment, even if you’re so much as a suspect.
Absent conviction, you know, there’s not really this “years after the fact” thing you’re talking about. Sex offender registration is a consequence of criminal conviction, not of being a suspect.
You seem to be speaking of a non-specific, abstract, theoretical unfairness biased against some hypothetical individual, and in exchange for balancing that fairness, you seem willing to let real, living breathing children suffer.
One: I don’t know of any adult in this country who didn’t know raping little kids is illegal.
Two: I don’t know if there are any actual incidents of suspects arrested in stings who legitimately thought they were coming to meet someone 18 or older who was simply pretending to be a minor as part of a sexual role-play fantasy.
Three: If your hypothetical examples in One and Two truly outweigh the number of real victims of child abuse, it should not be hard to prove. There would be abundant evidence of it, were such examples to exist. And yet neither you nor I know of any specific, concrete examples.
Post 159, and my reply “However, do note that in at least two of the cases, the child had represented herself as being 18+.
"
*When authorities arrived, they found both Mellow and the girl, who he thought was 18.”
“The girl first told officers she was 18, but she is 15”.*
Of course, that’s a minor who was pretending to be an adult.
Maybe Bricker can find cases where the defendant was arrested but was found Not Guilty, or the charges were dismissed. But those don’t often make the news.
At one time, there was a famous CA Supreme (?) court case where the perp admitted he had sex with the minor, but stated he thought she was of legal age, and he won.
Years after the fact, I can’t say with certitude, no. But I do remember one specific case, discussed here on the Dope IIRC, of a teacher accused by one of his students. Caused an immediate lynch mob. Except the charges were revenge-motivated bogus, which were all debunked - yet the teacher was suspended, and had to leave the town. He probably won’t be hired anywhere else if his past record his put under scrutiny.
And even in case of conviction, if a guy has no prior record, no other incidents are reported during the course of his trial, and he never does it again, is it OK to excommunicate him ?
Unless I’m mistaken, none of us here are in the lawmaking biz. None of this discussion is of any import whatsoever - we’re just shooting the shit. We’re all talking non-specific abstracts.
Nope, but knowing something is illegal yet thinking it may still be OK ethically (or OK if it’s you doing it cause you know what you’re doing) is not alltogether uncommon. Also, not all statutory rape is about little kids - the guy in the OP thought “she” was 15. Nor is it all rape, as in “unwanted traumatizing sex horror”.
Did I say that ? Not that it would really matter - if they did, how could they prove it ? How do you prove a thought ? Joan of Arc had a real hard time of it
And if those stings did reduce the number of abused children, it shouldn’t either.
But now you’re getting into the realm of “the law isn’t right” and sex offenders are treated too harshly. But the OP’s question doesn’t concern whether or not enforcing these laws is just. It’s about whether it’s legal to have a sex sting conviction without an actual victim.
The hypothetical case that [del]Kobol2[/del] you put forth was not “I thought she was 18, officer.”
It was “yes, she said she was 15, but despite that, I was under the impression that she was lying and only saying she was underage because it was part of a fantasy role-play I was specifically seeking, although I never actually mentioned that in any of the chat logs.”
We’ve been away from that for a long time :).
I already stated my opinion on the matter - cops setting out to sting = bad, cops stinging after real live teenager/parents prompts them to = iffy, ambivalent, it depends, I’m not sure, couldn’t we avoid it, more complex, case by case, yadda yadda.
But how can there be a crime if there is no victim, even if you believe there is ?
**Bricker **offered earlier a shooting dead guy scenario - I agree it’s a murder case, but there still is a dead guy to shoot at. He’s there, on the lawn, physically. He can be shot at. Same for the raping Angelina Jolie - there really is a stunning woman called Angelina Jolie out there who could have been harmed had the rapist not have his testicles gnawed off by Fido the pit-bull. Whether or not she’s in the house doesn’t matter - she could have been raped. The stinging proxy on the other hand never could have been in that motel room.
Say I assault a ghost. I really believe there is a ghost in my living room. We talked a lot. I also really believe I killed him, and I feel sad about that cause he was kinda nice come to think about it. I go to the police and give myself up. Should I be charged with Casper’s murder ?
Look, if you say registered sex offenders are treated in a way that’s inconsistent and possibly nonsensical, I won’t argue. I don’t think the idea of RSO lists and living restrictions make sense: if they’re that dangerous, they should be in jail for life, and if they are fit to live in society, they should be out. It’s largely a product of politicians trying to look tougher and tougher and Saaaaave the Chiiiildren and I don’t like it. But these people do exist, even if they’re not around every corner and on every third computer the way the TV news suggests. So they need to be dealt with. Your idea doesn’t do that.
These people do exist yes. And some of them are abominations, too, who need to be dealt with, like you say. Whether that involves jail or asylum is up for grabes. But it’s not just the SO lists and the living restrictions - it’s the general culture of fear that’s built around and out of them that bugs the everliving piss out of me.
I’ll explain what I mean : While I don’t have kids, nor want any, I have moments of… I dunno, soppiness I guess ? More like reverse nostalgia - remembering the things you’ll never have. What I could have taught my kid if life wasn’t too shitty a gift, etc… and when those moods strike, I love going to the park and watching kids play. Cause, well, kids are cool, and cute, and creative, and funny as hell. Also, kids remind you very very fast why you don’t want to have them, but I digress :). What I meant to say was that I can’t do that anymore - single, tall, dressed in black, watches the kids with a dreamy smile ? Yeah, I get The Look in 5 picoseconds. And the last time I did go to the park, mummy asked a rent-a-cop to make me leave, which he promptly did. How badly fucked is the collective psyche that “he’s a monster” is considered not only possible, but the most likely hypothesis when dealing with a stranger ? Is it healthy to live like that ?
Ah, fuck. Whatever. Got carried away on not the point at all - I was more interested in what you had to say about Casper.
I’m not going to argue in favor of anti-RSO paranoia. It’s stupid. But I also understand that a statistic like ‘only one kid out of 100,000 ever gets molested’ is not any comfort to the parents of that one kid.
Ghosts don’t exist, so even if you believe you killed Casper, society isn’t going to believe you are a danger to other ghosts. When a guy gets busted for setting up a date with an undercover cop he thought was a child, he’s not a bad guy because he talked dirty to a cop. He’s a danger because he showed he was willing to do this to a real kid.
Buddy, if I believe ghosts exist and should be killed, I might just believe you’re one, too ;). And here you’re advocating arresting them on imaginary crime right now because it’s convenient, but really for crimes they showed they could commit at some point. In other words, putting them in prison+ruined life to protect assumed future kids. That’s not exactly fair, is it ?
Wait, I think I found a more realistic alternative to stings. Now, forget the random internet ones, they still suck. But in a case like Freudian Slit’s one : advise the minor to /ignore the guy. The ask a judge permission for surveillance. Bug his phones, monitor his net access. Then, if/when he finally gets a desperate girl to meet him, spring a trap at their meeting place.
There you’d have good policework, absolutely no suspicion of even the possibility of entrapment, actual crime with a real person, and proofs that he tried numerous times before. I can absolutely live with that.
I might be able to live with that, but it’d require a lot more people losing privacy and you’d certainly have to devote more police to it. Weren’t you saying earlier that the police should prioritize other things?
What rubbish. This line of reasoning is used to justify all sorts of discrimination, but it’s little more than an ageist version of phrenology.
One problem is that the brain is a complex organ, and even a damaged brain can compensate by relying on different parts to accomplish the same task. There’s no one region that controls the ability to “evaluate and appreciate” the consequences of sex. You can’t look at an X-ray or MRI and know whether or not an individual has this ability, much less generalize about everyone of a certain age.
Another problem is that the subject is vague and nebulous in the first place. What does it mean to be capable of evaluating and appreciating the consequences of sex, anyway? Do you have that ability, and if so, how can you prove it? I think you’ll find that any argument in favor of your emotional capacity can be applied just as well to many teenagers.
Is there actually any reason to think we can know who is or isn’t “emotionally capable”, or is it merely one person’s opinion against another’s? If I say I was emotionally capable as a teenager and so were my teenage girlfriends, as evidenced by the fact that we all made it through the experience healthy and sane, can you offer any evidence to the contrary, or will you just write it off as getting lucky?
