Sex and children is the new witchcraft. Burn her, burn her!
I’ve served on a jury so I am familiar with how they are instructed, but I would not make such a morally wrong decision no matter what the law was.
You people down south of us scare the living daylights out of me frequently. I hope common sense will prevail in this situation but I’m not optimistic.
I would really like to see the wording of the law that she’s convicted of breaking. Could it really be that specific, that the jury had no choice but to find her guilty of it based on what happened? If the law says that, then the law is a ass.
I’m confused by this reference to a six member jury, what kind of court is that? Also why was she charged with risk of injury to a minor? I’d have thought that was for letting them play with a handgun, or sitting in your lap while driving on the freeway.
If you read the linked article it gives the full charge as “risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child,” which makes a good deal more sense. Well, relatively speaking, that is. It’s still a ridiculous situation.
Well the jury can always nullify the law and refuse to convict. Now the lawyer cannot ask them to do it, and the judge has no obligation to instruct them that they can do it, but they still can.
Not that this alters the potential idiocy of the law, of course.
Nah. It’s analogous to “contributing to the delinquency of a minor”, meaning it covers not just physical but also emotional and mental hazards.
Color me unsurprised. Some of the most insignificant or even imaginary threats to children provoke many of us Americans to almost ridiculous levels of anger and kneejerk-ism, while most of the real threats (seriously, people, put a fucking fence around the pool until little Jimmy’s feet touch the bottom, please?) go ignored.
Ask and thou shalt recieve (and let me just say the good people of Connecticut had some fucking idiots design the search engine for their Statutes and General Acts.)
Parts (2) and (3) deal with direct genital contact and the transfer of ownership(!) of children. They can be read here along with copious case notes, if desired. However, for the benefit of you, dear fellow dopers, I have done so already, and you may simply point your eyes down a couple of lines. The only part that has any relevance to this case reads as follows:
Even that bit isn’t particularly important, except to establish that someone has already been convicted of a violation of this statute for a broadly similar offense. We can surmise from the text that the circumstances were quite different, of course.
Presumably the jury felt that the morals of four children were likely to be impaired by having seen a couple of porno pop-ups. I wonder why there are only four counts; I would assume that CT class sizes just aren’t that small, so what the hell were the other twenty-odd kids doing at the time? Or perhaps they all saw it, but the jury determined that the rest of the class had no morals to impair…
What planet do you live on that pool fence laws are not draconian? My opinion is that you should watch your fucking child until he or she is old enough to be responsible around a pool.
a) I don’t have a child, and if I did I’d hope he isn’t fucking yet; b) What planet do you live on upon which my post said anything about mandating pool fences in law? It was a plea to parents, who apparently can’t be trusted to watch their kids, your opinion notwithstanding.
No, I’m asking, where do you live where pool fences are not already mandated by law?
Oh. Florida, where your pool has to be enclosed but not actually fenced… so if your screen door is open, there’s nothing to stop little Timmy from falling in.
A quick googling shows that 46% of infant drownings last year occurred because of un- or poorly-enclosed pools. Oddly, about 75% of the hits I got were about
Australian pool fence laws.
Ahh, here you not only have to have your pool fenced and locked, you have to have an alarm on any doors, including screen doors, leading to the pool.
Now look. You killed a perfectly good thread.
Stupid pools.
Yeah, and if you so much as mention “jury nullification” during jury selection you’re excused.
Here in FL, any new pool construction is supposed to have the same thing. The pool must have a fence/enclosure etc on all sides, OR on 3 sides, with the 4th side being the house. In the latter case, and opening that opens into the fenced in area that is 1)a door, or 2) a window that is lower than 4 feet from the floor must have an audible alarm. All openings must be lockable, and one must have a shunt button to temporarily disable the alarm, which otherwise cannot be turned off(unless you unplug it)
I work for a low voltage wiring/home theater company, we deal with this all the time. Some counties have inspection procedures that are more stringent than others.
I should add that this is for new pool constructions, existing pools were grandfathered in, and don’t have to add the alarms. I believe if a certain amount of renovation is done, the pool alarm can be required to be added to an existing pool
Dudes, can we take the whole pool thing over to anther thread? It’s rather a huge hijack. Please?
One does not even need to go to porn sites!
That’s my biggest problem with sex offender lists, they can include anything from rapist-murdered to “was caught watching plain vanilla porn on the company’s computer”