It’s happened again - someone is caught in an internet sting. He thinks he’s writing to a 15 year old, but in reality, he has been communicating with a police officer who is setting him up for a sting. The guy goes to the appointed meeting place and is promptly arrested for soliciting a minor for sex. But, in fact, even if he thought he was doing that, he wasn’t. How can he be arrested for doing something if he wasn’t doing it? Suppose he were to meet a 15 year old who said s/he was 18, and he solicited that person for sex? Illegal? Suppose he met an 18 year old who claimed to be 15 and soliced him/her for sex - illegal? Despite our need to protect youngsters from predators, there’s something disturbing in the way these laws are applied - an element of entrapment and something that says you shouldn’t be arrested for doing something if you didn’t actually do it. Any enlightenment out there?
Crimes like soliciting are all about intent – if you intend to commit the crime, and take a concrete step toward committing it, you’re guilty, regardless of the true circumstances. Furthermore, factual impossibility is NEVER a defense for crimes of attempt. It doesn’t matter if your gun wasn’t loaded, or if your target was actually a wax dummy – if you intended to kill a real person, and you took steps to do so, you’re guilty.
A similar analogy would be - you’re trying to score a decent-sized amount of cocaine to resell, and after searching around, you find someone online who’ll do business with you. You meet with the seller and take a number of large plastic bags of cocaine. Suddenly the doors burst open, your seller pulls out a gun and badge, and cops come through the doors. You’re under arrest for intent to distribute a controlled substance. You find out later that there was confectioner’s sugar in those bags, with only a little sample of cocaine from their evidence room as the “proof” that it was good stuff. Are you going to argue that you can’t be busted for intent to distribute cocaine since that was sugar? Or more properly, do you think a judge would take that argument seriously?
I’m thinking you might have more luck arguing the entrapment end of things, but they’ll have detailed logs of the messaging sessions to pull out for evidence.
Then are the penalties for solicitation somewhat less than the penalties for actually committing those crimes? Inasmuch as a solicitation crime - or crime of intent - seems to be an intermediary step between THINKING about doing something and actually DOING it, the penalties should be somewhat in between those two extremes, I’d imagine.
After the arrest, when they seize the guy’s computer, the lawmen usually find other crimes they can charge the perv with - child porn, correspondence with actual children, etc. - so the solicitation charge is just one item on a long list of offenses. (I had a friend whose job it was to go through these guys’ hard drives and classify everything she found; she quit a while back because the work was too depressing.)
In the newspaper stories I’ve read on similar cases, the feds will confiscate the suspect’s computer. Upon finding child porn and evidence that he has passed it around to other child-porn fans, they bust him for that rather than the solicitation.
I’d have to go home and bleach my brain every night, that would be a horrid job=(
Eitherr that or they would have to lock me up for tracking down the computers owners and doing very rude and uncomfortable things to their reproductive anatomy that would make mr BagelDogDick look positively normal.
That makes me wonder about the other point mentioned in CC’s post. If a man meets a female who claims to be 18, leads him to believe she is 18, he believes she is 18, and she turns out to be 15, how much of that responsibility is his?
I mean, if I go to buy sugar, you tell me it’s sugar, I have every reason to believe it’s sugar, and it turns out to be cocaine, would I still get busted for that?
This topic is covered very thoroughly here
Thank you.
Ok, so we’re getting a bit of a law education here. There are crimes that are strict liability crimes and others that are crimes of intent. Never knew of that distinction. No wonder law has always been a relative of philosophy. Ahh. The Straight Dope. An education in and of itself. gotta love it.
I wondered that in reference to the Jim Carrey movie, Liar Liar. I forget the exact details, but he miraculously solves the legal case by showing that the wife’s license was a fake, she was not 18 at some crucial time in their history, therefore any agreements she entered into were invalid or some such… and of course the husband had no way of knowing any of this at the time, entered into contracts in good faith, then got royally screwed.