“Hey, everybody lies on the Internet. She said she was 14, but I said I’m 21 when I’m actually 48. I never expected she was really 14. Figured she’d be some 35-year-old skank. It was just part of the role playing/flagrant lying that you expect on these chat lines. I assume that everyone is lying to the same extent I am, which is to say about 99% of the time.”
Would that hold water? Or would the court system just insist on proceeding as if you were having a perfectly normal conversation in which you believed everything the other party said?
Check out a website called Perverted Justice. They have participated in these scenarios and work with law enforcement to convict predators. From what I have gathered reading their website, they make sure the predator is fully aware of the age of the (under aged) participants.
In many of the chatlogs posted on the site, the predator will often ask if the other participant is a cop or even say things along the lines of ‘I could get in a lot of trouble for this…’ To me this makes it seem like the predator is fully aware of what they are doing and how wrong it is. Not to mention the “grooming” that occurs over multiple chats between the pervert and the target. For a good example of that, see this chatlog which resulted in a conviction.
Thanks, Minnie Luna. I don’t doubt that there are cases where the guy clearly knows what he’s doing. I’m more interested in the cases where he could argue that he didn’t really believe the other party. There must be situations like that, but maybe PJ and the authorities don’t pursue those?
Perhaps it helps if the total loser guy can show that he said he was a jet fighter pilot and part-time Chippendales dancer and the police can see that…ummm, he’s not. So he figured she was lying just as much.
A) You’d have to convince a Jury that although you were sufficiently convinced that the person that you were talking to was of age, despite the fact that they had indicated otherwise in all their communications, that you were willing to risk appearing to be a paedophile if you were wrong. I can’t imagine being swayed by that argument in a hurry if I was on the jury.
B) I wouldn’t be surprised to find that you’d committed serious offences in a lot of jurisdictions just by communicating in such a way with someone representing themselves as a minor regardless of intent.
C) Why the interest? I mean we seem to be suddenly flooded with these queries. I find these televised stings rather distasteful and stupid personally, but I have little doubt that the people that get caught up in them are guilty as hell, and I’ve got absolutely no sympathy for the fuckers who, lets not forget, are engaged actively in pursuing a sexual relationship with a child.
Pardon the language, but while I tend to believe that there is no such thing as a bad question, we sure as hell seem to be getting some disturbing ones around here at the moment.
I don’t see the need for this in the way these OPs are being phrased. They don’t sound anything like actual discussions of the law. Even if they are being done purely out of curiosity we don’t need to be putting ‘beat the rap for pedophiles’ hints out there. I’m surprised at an almost instant warning for information about safecracking and these threads continue like this.
Ahh, just plain old intellectual curiosity, which is usually welcome here. Not looking to rush out and defend any of these sleazeballs, but my curiosity was piqued by the confluence of the widely acknowledged lying on the Internets and having the courts treat everything said there as the gospel truth.
From looking at the PJ site and seeing what they do, it seems the predators intentionally seek out chat rooms that would contain minors and target minors. If my screen name was iCarly1998 or Beiber<3sMe, you might guess I was a teen girl. If my screen name is Monica1976 or duranduran#1, I am probably not a teenager. A predator won’t target Monica1976, but would target iCarly1998.
PJ acknowledges that there are people who do indulge in fantasy/role playing for sexual reasons online, and those people are not their target. I imagine the chat logs between someone looking for role playing and a predator are very different.
When the volunteers use pictures that are obviously of a 14 year old in their profiles, and repeatedly confirm their ages in the chat, in my view that goes a bit beyond the “everybody lies on the Internet.” Besides, if everyone lies, why couldn’t the target have actually been 13 or 12, and only pretending to be 14, thus making the accused even more culpable?
Nonetheless, the accused is absolutely free to argue it was not reasonable for him to think the target really was underage. The jury’s function in a trial is to weigh the evidence and decide what to believe. If his claim is believed by the jury, he’ll be released.
Still, it’s a good question. Given the numbers, surely it must have happened at least once that one stinger talked to another stinger, right? One from TV and one from the cops, or a cop from Florida with a cop in Miami.
What happens if a private group doing stings meets a cop? If they have the paperwork to prove that they are doing stings, would that count?
I remember a scandal with semi-prominent politican (and/or a senior cop) looking at porn (don’t remember if it was kiddie porn or “just” sex-slave porn) on their work PC and claiming “Well, I was just researching the topic/ I was doing a sting” defense.
The consensus was "we can’t decide if his claim is true, but even if it’s true, he should be punished for stupidity, because everybody with an ounce of common sense should realize that in such a hot button issue, if you want to do a sting, or research, you get backup in triplicate from superiors and let everybody know to be clear, instead of just starting up your search engine.
I may be wrong, but I’m not sure I can see how ‘attempted statutory rape’ can be a strict liability crime. Strict liability means that intent does not need to be proven in order to convict for an illegal act.
If the ‘predator’ is stopped before before having sex with a child, though, all that the court is able to judge is intent. It becomes key to the case.
Pete Townshend was caught doing that and used that defense. He got away with a caution eventually and from my vague recollection the general public believed him, although considered him a dumbass for doing it.
IIRC there was a VP(?) of go.com who was caught and used the defense about 10 years ago. In his favour, he arranged to meet at the Santa Monica pier, not her house. The cops found a young rookie who could pass for 14. After they met, he told her “I’ll pick you up over there,” pointed her in one direction, and then went back to his car and appeared to be heading in the other direction when they nabbed him.
The IRC chat site was something like “older men with younger women”, so it’s not like he was trolling for underage in a kids’ chat group. His defence was that he thouhgt it was an older woman role-playing (logical possible inference in that chat) and essentially seems like tried to ditch her and get away when he found she looked underage.
Unfortunately, he was caught with illegal pictures on his laptop too… about half a dozen IIRC. His arguemnet there was that in IRC chat his client could be receiving pictures without him knowing - again, a plausible scenario. IMHO I believe him not because he’s innocent, but because a perv would likely have hundreds of pictures on his PC. Odds are he had a hidden stash and cleaned his PC; and those pics were there because, as he said, the client put them there without his knowledge… or else he did a sloppy cleanup.
In the end, IIRC, he pled guilty to the posession charges and got a suspended sentence and was going to “assist the DA in how to catch others”. This suggests the DA saw flaws in its underage case. Regardless, he lost his extremely lucrative job at disney’s go.co, which probably hurt the most.
I can’t see a sting nailing a stinger, because all would be posing as underage girls; unless one or the other thought there was something od about this person who claimed to be a teen girl. They would be trolling for people looking to hook up or visit, not someone else trying to look vulnerable… Unless pervs pose as also being teen girls to gain their confidence. I wouldn’t know.
I assume the perps are chargeable because nowadays in most places, the soliciting is a crime too. Since no act happens, they are not charged with (statutory) rape. Similarly, possession of tools for the intent of performing sexual assault is probably a crime, and if someone walks into a house expecting to find a young girl, carrying liquor, duct tape, handcuffs, plastic gloves and condoms, etc., I think I’d love to hear how they try to explain their way out.
Normally I think it’s big-brother overkill how there are a hundred crimes the DA can charge you with for one act. It’s a pressure tactic to induce a plea bargain; plead guilty to this for 10 years, or we’ll send you to trial on 20 carges and you could get 3 life sentences, served sequentially. However, in this case, the soliciting or possession of tools are laws that plug an escape hole.
Maybe some of these deals go to trial, but given the subject matter and public attention that defendants do not want, I am sure it’s plea-bargain city.
We got you.
Here’s the dirt.
Your lawyer knows your toast.
You know your toast.
Here’s the reduced whatever
Don’t take it and you face >some sort of incarceration hell<
-end