If I hang out on a street corner and solicit my sexual services in exchange for money, thet’s pretty much illegal.
If I hang out on a street corner looking too sexy for my shirt and respond to sexual advances in a positive fashion contingient upon my receipt of monetary gain, that’s illegal.
But what if I hang out on a street corner looking too sexy for my shirt and respond to sexual advances in a positive fashion with no mention of compensation? I would of course never turn down a gift, but neither would I request one.
Well, it happens in bars every day. The street corner aspect might introduce some sort of lewd public behavior issue, but just trying to find someone for a mutually satisfying sexual experience is not in and of itself illegal.
This is a lot like the classic tax question - “What if I do work for my neighbor without asking for a fee, but would happily accept any gifts he might give me? Do I still have to pay tax on my earnings?” Yes, you do, and volumes of case law can go into the finer points.
I don’t know the finer points of prostitution law, but I suspect the court is going to use the same criteria to judge your case. If you regularly engage in the activity and regularly receive monetary benefit from it, you’re probably doing it because you expect the monetary benefit. And if the person is offering a “gift” in relation to you performing a service or delivering a product, then it isn’t really a gift any more than a tip for your waiter is a gift.
Seriously, if it ever got to a jury, it would be all about intent. If a prosecutor could show that you tried this stunt on a regular basis and got a gift every time, the intent to trade sex for money was there and a crime was committed.
No prosecutor could show as much. Indeed, no one can show as much.
All that would need to be show, however, is that money was exchanged in one situation for sex. It would require a showing that the monetary exchange was specifically for the act of sex.
Otherwise, dinner and movie might cause someone problems.
I once read an anecdote in the newspaper about a vice cop who was trying to nail a particular prostitute but failed because she never asked for remuneration. When asked why, she responded that “he was so nice to me that I couldn’t charge him.”
Prosecutors don’t have to. As the rest of your post notes, in the law actions are intents. If you fire a gun at someone, you don’t have to hit them to be charged. Claiming that you intended not to hurt them will get you nowhere. Your action was sufficient.
Legal intent is defined in a different way than the everyday meaning of intent.
Standing on a streetcorner in sexy clothing and accepting gifts will get you charged with solicitation. Your actions show your intent. The prosecutor won’t make any attempt to gauge what’s going on in your mind. The judge won’t either. The jury might, but they aren’t supposed to. Your actions are supposed to be sufficient.
That’s a good thing, most of the time. It allows for fairer justice than attempting mind-reading.
I’m aware of that. I was correcting the person whom I quoted; it was s/he who asserted that prosecutors would have to show that in all situations such and such was the case. Despite it not being true, it’s impossible to do. (Sorry about the blank verse).
The rest of your post is somewhat true, but not relevant so I’ll leave it be.
That’s exactly equivalent to saying that actions equaling intent. That’s what a prosecutor does - indeed must - do to get a conviction. It is correct.
I don’t understand what part of it you think you are correcting. If your problem is “all” then that’s wrong, too. The prosecutor doesn’t have to show that it’s true for all eternity, just the specific cases that are being tried.
Since your reading comprehension seems to be lacking, I’ll more plainly delineate this for you:
A prosecutor must show the following things:
1.) you regularly try this,
2.) in every instance that you’ve tried this, you get that “gift”.
Why you’ve read that at least twice and failed to understand that the universe of activities in question is the one involving all attempts at this ploy by the one person in question and not the full universe of all hookers escapes me. My only conclusion is that you do not critically read, or the issue is too complex.
This it that to which I replied. You know this because it’s the only thing in the thread to which my words have any direct relevance.
I’m sorry, but say what?? Are you a lawyer? I’m not, but this rings completely false to me. Consider the action of running somebody over with your car. As far as the law is concerned, this may be first degree murder, or it may be no crime at all, or it may be any of a number of things in between. What differentiates one from another is intent, and if the prosecutor wants to nail you for first degree murder, the burden is on him to prove to the jury beyond a reasonable doubt what was going on in your mind at the time, that you had the mens rea to be a murderer. Intent is far from irrelevant in court.
In this particular instance, in the case of this quasi-prostitution, intent may or may not matter… but I’m not a lawyer and don’t know.
And given the prices in many places I’ve been in, plying the masses with a few drinks begins to approach a typical hooker fee (considering a 20% cast to catch ratio) when you look at cash outlay/coitus.
So a prosecuter is going to be looking at my intent then? Because there was a time in my life (like for about 20 years) when I would have gladly offered my services free of charge as described in the OP. (please, I’m not romanticising the hooker’s lifestyle so don’t start throwing rocks at me). How would that have resulted in an arrest? A vice cop starts noticing me hanging out and socializing with a suspiciously large circle of friends over time? If I’m not soliciting payment I sure as hell can’t get busted in a sting could I? Not unless I just did the cop and she offered to pay up after the fact?
And since we’re all about motive, I guess what’s driving my question is: It’s illegal to be a prostitute, but is it illegal to be a slut? How about a kept slut? At what point does a sugar-daddy’s mistress become legally a prostitute?