Girls that lie about their age to get sex

Sorry to hear that. How did it get reported to the police? Did the prosecution make an offers to put you on probation? Did it go to trial? Did Julia testify? Did your attorney talk to the jury afterwards? How did the sentencing hearing go? how about the appeal? I’d love to see the caselaw on it. It’s a bit harsh that someone with no prior criminal history with that story would end up sentenced to prison for having sex with someone within 5 years of their age. Rough go. If true, that is.

You do realize that the law was written to protect more people than just Julia, right? The law would be intended to protect all under-age girls, not just this particular one. The fact that there is one, quite possibly imaginary, 14 year old girl who is built like a 19 year old and who goes through a great deal of planning in order to have sex with someone they, apparently, really like, but then somehow reports it to the police, the case goes through the entire court system, she agrees to testify, and at no point was there a possibility of a plea deal for a first time offense, does nothing to negate the vast majority of other girls and boys who are not so … unrealistic.

This is why a defense of “reasonable” ignorance should be allowed. This is already done with many other crimes. For example, if you are a banker and you have a vague suspicion that one of your customers might not be entirely legitimate, you are probably ok. If you start seeing the classic signs of organized crime, terrorist financing, or other shenanigans repeatedly, no amount of sticking your head in the sand and denying the significance of what you saw will exonerate you.

So if a guy just picks someone up and doesn’t take any reasonable steps, then yeah, he should be guilty. But if he tries to be responsible, asks for ID, examines the ID for tampering, and scrutinizes her physical appearance and, if she appears “too young”, does additional checks such as running a background check or interviewing others who know her. So what is “reasonable”? That’s why there is police and prosecutorial discretion, and why there are judges and juries.

You were asked for examples of “underage harlots purposely lying about their age to send people to jail”. That description does not apply to either the actual Roman Polanski rape case or the weirdly inaccurate version you’ve imagined.

No shit. I wasn’t there either – I wasn’t born yet, and I don’t often get invited over to Jack Nicholson’s house even now – but this is hardly an obscure case. The basics of the Roman Polanski scandal are easy enough to find online, so I’m wondering why you didn’t bother to at least read the Wikipedia article about it before bringing it up here.

So does anyone know if there are actual procedures for this? Is there a 1-800-DATE-CHK where you can run an age and competency background check on that girl you picked up earlier? I would have hoped that some university would put up a “Best Practices in Love and Responsibility in Casual Hookups - How to Verify that your Date is Legit” guide, considering that schools here literally give away tons of condoms every year.

Broader legal question: Could a defense attorney use a banned argument or fact quickly enough that it would burn into jurors’ minds before a judge can silence the attorney (such a “Be quiet! You are not allowed to say that!” might even further confirm the argument’s “validity” in the jury’s minds?)

If he’s willing to risk the jury being discharged, the trial being aborted, his client being remanded for a new trial in some months time and he himself being reported to the bar association by the judge and/or being the subject of contempt proceedings, yes, he can do that.

There are college kids still using Myspace?

“Reasonable ignorance” is a much better solution than the joke automatic liability we have now. If someone examines their partner’s ID, that should be good enough for the law. In that case, the minor is not only actively lying, but has gone to great lengths to support her lie. That she faces no consequences and the guy gets to be a “sex offender” for the rest of his life is ludicrous.

The purpose of statutory rape is to protect minors, but once they’ve crossed the threshold of furnishing proof of adult age, that automatic protection should end. If there’s any coercion, of course real rape should be charged, but if not, then the bounds of statutory rape should end there. We trust juries with far more, and it’s ridiculous to argue that they couldn’t handle this.

I think it should help, but not be the be all and end all.

A brothel with underage girls shouldn’t be able to circumvent it with a fake ID

I think they should use reasonable ignorance (including circumstances + fake papers) as well as age differences. If one of them is an authority over the other, then they should be treated more harshly.

It’s weird because it acts like strict liability, but technically is other legal theories.
It’s a mix of A) negligence on the part of the perpetrator, that is, it doesn’t matter if he didn’t know she was underage, he SHOULD have known, and perhaps SHOULD have been careful to check. Normally there’s the “mens rea” element in crimes, but they’ve (the powers that be, i.e. government prosecutors) been chipping away at that for years. The extent to which this holds is up to a jury. Perhaps a very strongly older looking girl would sway a jury into believing a perpetrator honestly did not know and could not have known a girl was underage. Though, it needs to be noted, the judges and prosecutors strongly pressure the jury into thinking that they have to follow the letter of the law, and suppress the knowledge of jury nullification. They’ll even do their best to imply to the jurors that they can face criminal charges if they don’t rule robotically according to the text, which is a false claim.
and B) minors can’t be held responsible for their actions.

I think the biggest element that needs changing/could be changed is B). I think we wrap kids up in a bubble way too much. In America, even poor kids are essentially spoiled, which is leading to a lot of the cultural trends we’re seeing nowadays. Oh, and god forbid we admit that women WANT sex a lot of times. It’s like 70% of the population doesn’t understand that most women have a libido, and it’s just a simple libido, it isn’t about “love” or “romance”, it’s just a straight desire for sex.

:dubious:

What does this have to do with it?

Except that they can, and even sometimes can be tried as adults. Which is yet another inconsistency. If the 16 yo is the victim, he’s considered to be totally unresponsible, and nothing he said or did is of any relevance. But if he’s the perpetrator, he can suddenly becomes fully responsible for everything he did, without extenuating circomstances.

I won’t even touch being able to consent to join the army and fight in a war at 17, while not being able to consent to a good fuck. “Make war, not love”.

Yeah, brah, historically, they’re spoiled using government money and policy. It’s illegal for little kids to work, so all the kids do not work, whereas historically they had to help around the house. You could claim that parents can still do that, but it’s impossible to enforce, as it’s basically illegal to corporal punishment your kid even the slightest amount, and culturally a lot of people have taken up that mantle. So the kid could be doing badly in school, and still not have to work at home (why go to school if you’re not good at it?). Then these same do-no-harm policies exacerbate as the kid gets older. In poor school districts, the whole class is always stunted by jokesters who disrupt class. But they’re not allowed to expel them. The kids are even allowed to fight but they can’t expel them once they’re in certain school districts. And again, going to corporal punishment, no one else is allowed to hit kids either, even when they commit crimes.
Basically, in certain poor areas, there’s a recipe for raising a sociopath, by protecting a child’s every harmful decision. They KNOW that they have free reign to do what they want anywhere, and since people are creatures of habit, that sticks with them into adulthood. Witness the recent story of the kid who knocked out his teacher. There’s lots of other incidents like that. It’s a small percentage of kids, but with the right life experiences and personality types a small percentage grow up like that.

It’s a mixed bag, and it also works the other way, as the perception becomes that kids have no agency whatsoever by nature of being a kid, and don’t know what’s good for them, and so they’re forced into terrible situations, when maybe alternatives to traditional education would be better. I remember watching a show about one of the worst school districts for kids with “behavior problems”, and the school was awful for them, even if a kid would get harassed everyday with physical violence everyone still made him go. But they were only that violent because they were forced to be there. You know, like a prison. Treat them like prisoners, they’ll act out vuiolently, just like prisoners do, go figure. It makes sense, you’ve got nothing better to do in prison, so you just do violence when someone messes with you.

The point is, when you fail to apply consequences to people and protect them from conseqeuences, either punishment or natural conseqeuences to actions, and remove and responsibilities from them, you get people who don’t understand responsibility and conseqeuence. Our society is practicing this to an extreme, and these themes / beliefs have been taken up to the extreme in our culture/blue state culture.

If my young daughter slept with some guys and lied to them about age and tried to sick the authorities on them, I’d smack her. I’d tell her “You wanted some sex, well you got it”. I mean, this is assuming the OP’s premise, where the girl genuinely just wants it. Of course there is the sometimes situation where an older man manipulates an impressionable younger girl with sweet talk, and in that case yeah I’d be pissed at the guy. But assuming the OP’s premise, which does happen, but of course not at 12 (think Fast Times at Ridgemont High where the 16 year old girl went on a date and slept with some adult man. Yeah, girls want sex, especially from older males, who evolutionarily were better candidates), I’d hold my daughter responsible for her actions. BUT, is it hard to imagine modern d-bag parents who would never, ever consider their daughter as having done something wrong? Are there not a million parents nowadays who cannot imagine that little Johnny could ever do any wrong?

Our modern culture, at least in the blue states, is quite fucked up. I often wonder of moving to Texas or Nebrasks or something would be better. It sure as hell would be cheaper over there.

You might want to check teen pregnancy rates in red states before moving.

In 2011, e.g., Texas had the fifth-highest rate of births among 15- to 19-year-olds, behind Arkansas, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Oklahoma (and just ahead of Louisiana). New Mexico, of course, is the only state on this list that is not unambiguously red.

The five states with the lowest rates were New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, and New Jersey.

Feh. Liberals (not implying that you’re one) always point to weird minor statistics that have small differences among them as proof of this kind of stuff. I don’t find it very compelling

In the blue states, ms teen preggo would just be disowned by her parents if they’re foreigners (because in Old World cultures, nothing is worse than even a single failure), and then her friends would encourage her to have an abortion or have the baby and never marry so the kid grows up without a father (because god forbid you ever be slightly dependent on someone else). Her friends and family (if they didn’t disown her) would say that a man would only drag her down from her dreams. But her dreams would be as vague as they are stupid, with a stupid “career” that involves one of the leach-on-society industries as opposed to real production, the “freedom” to party like a bimbo, and generally never make an actual interpersonal commitment.

In the red states, she’d be pressured to marry to give that kid a damned father. She wouldn’t massively raise her chances of cervical cancer later in life with an abortion, and she’d be giving up vague and ultimately meaningless “freedoms” to give the kid the best chance (fathers massively increase metrics of success statistically), and in the process she might learn that life isn’t all about you and sometimes working toward something and having real community ties might make you happy.

Encouraging the least health-damaging life paths and traditions which are actually born out of biology and actually lead to the greatest happiness and the most productivity for society is blasphemy in the blue states.
A lot of this comes from life experience. Eh, mostly I’m just sick of the cultural memes I get bombarded with up here, especially by my retarded family.

Now you’re just pandering to stereotypes that have no basis in fact.

For example, the states with the HIGHEST rates of out-of-wedlock births are Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Mexico. In nice conservative red-state Texas, 42% of all births are to unwed mothers (versus 35% in flaming blue liberal Massachusetts), while the abortion rate is only slightly lower. You are imagining a world the way you’d like it to be, but that’s not reality.

Oh. We’ve got one of those.

Nope, like I said, this is all from my personal experience. The blue-state side of it anyway.

Oh, those are interesting statistics about births to unwed mothers. That says nothing about general cultural beliefs, and what the mothers do from there. Just because a culture believes in marriage, doesn’t mean they marry the girls off before they give birth. There is a middle ground, she could get married eventually before the kid gets too old

Memes? Did you mean stereotypes? Because if so, I agree completely. But if you’re really sick and tired of stupid generalizations without basis in fact, as I am, then please have a word with this guy:

Not only that, there are guys posting to the SDMB from prison!

And the wheels of justice apparently spin much faster than we thought, if he met Julia the other day and has already been convicted and imprisoned.