Reading about cybercrime, I see that “strict liability” means that the FBI has successfully run stings, for instance, in which an adult poses as a minor online in order to catch predators (if the predator is talking to someone he/she believes to be a kid, but is actually an adult, he/she is guilty anyway because he/she thought the person was a kid).
But AIUI, it also works the other way around - if a kid poses as an adult online, anyone who sexually initiates to that ‘adult’ is also guilty under strict liability because the kid is in fact a kid, even though the kid posed as an adult and was believed to be an adult. Isn’t this kind of a legal contradiction - that it’s applying two opposite standards to a similar situation (someone pretending to be something he/she is not)?
Strict liability laws are full of contradictions like that. That’s why many people oppose them. Mens rea is a fundamental, millennia old aspect of common law for a reason.
But also, remember that strict liability only applies to statutory rape in less than half of US states. The rest require mens rea. And a circuit court upheld a “good faith defense” in the Traci Lords case, presumably available to other statutory rape defendants in that circuit.
fwiw, strict liability could apply to the second scenario in the OP (no intent, but in fact under age), not the first (intent, but FBI agent not under age)
I think that was the OP’s point. If the standard of strict liability applies in one case, it should apply in both. If you can be convicted on the basis of a person’s actual age rather than their presented one, then you should be exonerated on the same grounds.
That might make some sense if both situations involved the same crime- but that’s probably not the case. I’m not entirely certain what "anyone who sexually initiates to that ‘adult’ " means, but I assume it doesn’t mean simply communicating online with someone who presents themself as being an adult. I suspect that it means actually having sex with a person under the age of consent who misrepresented themself as above that age.
I believe the sting operations usually end up with arrests for such crimes as soliciting child prostitution - but here’s the thing. If someone is making arrangements to have sex with someone who they believe to be a 12 year old, then that means they *intended *to have sex with a 13 year old. That’s the opposite of strict liability - strict liability means your intentions don’t matter. If you are driving with a BAC over a certain level, you are driving while intoxicated whether you intended to do so or not. And for crimes where intent does matter , you can be charged with an attempt even if completing the crime was impossible due to facts unknown to you - you can be charged with attempted larceny even if the pocket you tried to pick was empty.
This is the problem - strict liability means you are guilty if you do it, even if you had no intent to do something that broke the law. I.e. statutory rape - “I though she was older” may not be a defense.
The OP’s FBI sting is the opposite - the perp intended to commit and offense, and should obviously know it was an offense - plenty of mens rea. But - no offense could possibly happen. I don’t see a great deal of difference between this and a policewoman posing as a prostitute in a known area of the city to arrest men looking to pay for sex. The FBI agent just doesn’t have to wear high heels and lots of mascara (although apparently Hoover did).
This falls more into the realm of “at what point is this entrapment?” there’s a pernicious thing going around with the “drug house bust”; police or an informant tell some unlucky bad guy they know of a drug house they can knock over that has over $100,000 cash and a huge amount of drugs. They even provide weapons. then they arrest the guys and because they told them a ludicrous amount, they get charges and sentenced base on that huge amount of drugs that never existed. Or the vast majority of FBI arrests since 9-11 of people who were recruited and supplie with weapons and targets by the FBI informants (who are paid handsomely) and then arrested for terror plots. Recently a person with obvious mental deficiencies was the “mastermind” arrested.