Sorry, I did not mean to generalize US law. However my point still stands that a one year difference in sex that is legal makes the whole case a bit more complicated.
And no, there have been various times in the show were the girl was 15 and 16. Most of the men I saw in a marathon of the show they gave about two weeks ago were going to have sex with a 15 year old.
I agree that 13 year olds are too young. I don’t think anyone debates that.
I take** Dio** and Bricker’s point about the legal definition of entrapment.
On a legal point (and this has nothing to do with the situation in the Predator show but it does interest me, say a minor posed as an 18 or 19 year old in a chat room and got into an explicit chat with some guy who genuinely thought he was dealing with someone over the legal age. At some point the minor reveals his or her real age and the guy instantly shuts down the contact, recoils from the computer in alarm and horror and vows in the future to stick to hookers.
Has the guy committed an offense? Would he actually be prosecuted? I’m assuming here that it would be legal for adults to engage in explicit sexual chat on the internet, although I don’t know if that’s true in every state.)
He would not be guilty of an offense.
He’d certainly go to bed an older and wiser man though. In such an intimate area of human relations it beats me how anyone can believe a single thing anybody says of themselves on these internet chat rooms.
I think one of the defenses these guys commonly use is that they assumed as a matter of course that the decoy was an adult pretending to be a minor. It may be an argument with some validity in some corners of the internet where it’s understood that people are role playing like crazy, and 3/4 of the chicks are dudes, but it’s probably a little less credible in a child forum. I think it becomes even tougher if the suspect makes arrangements to meet, and explicitly expresses an intention to have sex with a person who has not represented her/himself as anything but a minor.
Slightly more credible than the other reason: “I knew he or she was here alone and I just wanted to check on them to make sure they were okay.”
I.e., protect them from all the other doughy pervs who might show up with a trunkful of butt-plugs and a pony keg of lube…
No, it’s not entrapment. As was helpfully suggested above, the word entrapment has a very specific legal meaning, and this ain’t it.
As to your second point – that because no actual underage persons are involved, the whole accusation is somehow “unfair.”
Again, no. They are accused, in most cases, of attempted crime. An attempt occurs when the actor intends to commit the crime and completes an ineffectual act in furtherance of the crime. That’s what they did, and that’s what they’re accused of, so there’s not a jit nor jiggle of unfairness.
Study the law of attempt. Study “legal impossibility,” “factual impossibility,” and “hybrid impossibility.” Give your analysis here.
Sounds like fun, but I really don’t ahve the time. It’s a shame you are declining to elaborate.
Would you believe his definitions if he did elaborate? Or wave them away?
Well lets toss another log on the fire here
from wikipedia
Maybe if you paid him…
If you said this for the reason I think you did I think I just fell a little bit in love with you.
Dagnabbit, I wasn’t saying I didn’t have time to look it up, I didn’t have time to get all caught up in yet another avenue of the law that I want to explore. I love this shit and it tends to absorb me when I don’t have the damn time! GRRR.
All to say I wish you hadn’t made it so easy!
So, quickly: fascinating stuff, and I see the point that is being made (very disturbing, though… the older view of what constitutes attempt made much more sense and is what the average person apparently gravitates towards.)
And here’s why I think it would not apply in my scenario.
First, if the female player in my scenario (and lets not forget it’s my scenario I asked about) were actually 14 (I think I said 14, right?) what would the crime be? Statutory rape. What are the elements of statutory rape? I found a very old text that listed it as 1. sexual intercourse and 2. age of the victim. Further research on more modern assessments got very complicated, but none of it seemed to make a difference in my scenario, so it seems that my crime is statutory rape.
So, according to the legal concepts we’re talking about, as you cited, our man could, conceivably, be convicted of attempted statutory rape. Theoretically.
But in reading the examples and cites and digging up more on my own, I didn’t find any direct correlations to my scenario. The attempted murders made sense: shooting where you think your victim is when he isn’t there, giving your husband poison that isn’t poison, etc. Makes sense. But in those cases, the perpetrators had genuine victims that they simply could not have harmed even though they thought they were. In MY scenario…there is no genuine victim, and that’s where it gets much more difficult to sell, I think.
Now, there was one case that talked about the rape of an unconscious woman by several persons…who thought she was unconscious when she was actually dead. (and we can all collectively gasp and say EW!! now) They were instead convicted of attempted rape, and that would certainly seem to be very close to my scenario. Except I think it is very similar to the murder examples, in that the intention was to harm this person, only this person was not available to be harmed by the act, like the policeman in the upper floor.
But in my scenario, the 20 year old woman claiming to be 14 is not 14. She is not and cannot be a legitimate victim of the crime of statutory rape. Statutory rape requires a victim below the age of consent. No such person is here. Therefore there is no victim, available or not.
SOOOOOOO… if you were to arrest the guy that screwed her thinking she was 14 and try to get a conviction, I think you’d have a very hard time getting a conviction. Because you’d have to argue, I think, that just because there was no victim here doesn’t mean he wouldn’t fuck some other 14 year old somewhere else, he’s shown that he’d be willing.
And then you really are getting into thought crime, don’t you think?
Are there any laws or legal concepts that permit prosecution for crimes that normally must involve a genuine victim when there is none? As I said, the murder examples did have real victims - the policeman and the husband. It was the circumstances that prevented their being victimized, not the fact that they didn’t really exist, and that’s this scenario. As well as the “Predator” scenario.
I haven’t read the thread in depth, but has there been any linking to clear explanations of why there have been almost no prosecutions for any of these? What I recall reading was that it was in part because it was challenging to figure out what real crime had been committed, but it’s been awhile.
PJ currently has 325 convictions to their credit, many involve minimal sentences, the attempt crimes they are convicted of rarely result in much more than probation and or community service. Some of them have done short jail sentences but the sentences are minimal for the reasoning you are following. They didn’t actually hurt anyone, but they made a good faith effort to commit the crime.
Maybe a more apt anology, if a cop sees me trying to pry open a locked door of a house am I attempting to break and enter or did I just intend to vandalize a door frame and walk away.
One more thing… the “victim” issue seems to be one of teasing apart the difference between factual impossibility and legal impossibility. For my money, the factual impossibility of this crime (statutory rape of Girl X, who does not fit the required legal definition of the victim of this crime) creates a legal impossibility. It is legally impossible for Man Y to have had sex with a female below the age of consent when no female below the age of consent exists for him to have sex with.
But there’s still a locked door. Our freakishly youthful 20 year old is still a 20 year old.
AHA! By Jove, I do believe I may have found the explanation that shows that my assessment is correct. (Damn you again…I have things I should be doing…)
My Man Y has attempted to commit an imaginary crime, therefore cannot be convicted for contempt, as follows from this, starting on page 10:
Man Y’s intent (debatable, yes, but at the end of the day, I think this prevails) was to have sex with THIS FEMALE. That he believed she was 14 is secondary. His intent was to have sex with this female, and this female is not underage, so his crime is imaginary.
You have to start reading before that page to get the whole pictures, really, but it’s very interesting stuff. I want to read the whole thing but I can’t right now…
Okay fine, last thing, then I have to stop…
Our man would be attempting to commit statutory rape on a woman who was not underage…seems very much like non-stolen property, a non-controlled substance, etc.
Actually her age is primary, they are not being charged with attempting sex, they are being charged with attempting sex with an underage person.
Can he pick the woman he was planning to have sex with out of a lineup? He has every reason to believe he was going to participate in some kind of intimate contact with an underage partner, and made a physical effort to make that possible by placing himself at the arranged location where the underaged person
Remember he IM’d a girl who has profiles and supporting social networking pages stating she is underage. There are teams at PJ who build all the background profiles and make a serious effort to make them believable.
Your interpretation of this would throw almost any crime involving deception by undercover law enforcement.