Teen prosecuted as adult for having naked images – of himself – on phone.
Boy, I’m sure glad North Carolina is making the world safer from dangerous predators who traumatize themselves with all of those damaging naked selfies. This will surely make the poor victim’s life better that the perpetrator got the justice he deserved!
What makes this extra absurd is that he’s simultaneously being charged as an adult and for taking pictures of a minor.
No, what makes this extra absurd is that if he and his girlfriend (whose naked pictures were also on the phone) had been fucking, well, that’d be cool - the age of consent for intercourse in NC is 16.
Theatre of the absurd.
Next story: masturbating 14-year-old charged with statutory rape.
I guess my question is this: why isn’t it established as a general legal principle that it’s impossible to commit a crime against yourself? I can see why the laws might not carve this out as a specific exception, but it really seems like it should be a longstanding rule that a crime has not been committed when the actor and victim are the same person.
Is the answer that laws like these are a fairly new phenomenon? Claiming that I stole something from myself is logically untenable, but that’s not quite true with sex laws. Do we need constitutional protection?
Suicide used to be a crime, but I was always disappointed that they never went for full absurdity and made it a capital one.
Gilbert and Sullivan (well Gilbert anyway) made suicide a capital crime in THE MIKADO. (Creating as many paradoxes as you could wish for.)
That would basically abolish all drug laws, at least where personal possession is concerned vs. trafficking. Clearly, we need Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.
You do not committ a crime against other or yourself. You committ one against the sovereign (in this case N Carolina,) and its attenpts to maintain peace and order in its realm.
That vaguely makes sense for crimes for which the law was always against the sovereign, like drug law. But what’s the legal justification for taking a crime where there was already a victim, and turning it into one for which there is no victim?
We want to see the selfie. Someone, please post it as soon as possible.
Suicide as a crime is absurd because you’d have to prosecute a corpse, and it cannot interview witnesses. What I think you meant is suicide attempt used to be a crime, but that doesn’t make your joke funny.
Thats the fundamental difference between a crime and a civil wrong. A crime ia always against the sovereign. Its not a question about “making sense”. Its about the nature of the thing.
Disclaimer –> I’m not anything even approaching being a lawyer.
You are right that the crime is considered to be committed against the state and the state is acting on behalf of the victim (where one exists - sometimes the State itself is the victim.)
But if possessing a naked picture of your underage self constitutes a crime against the state (no victim since you did it yourself - cutters don’t get charged with assault) then shouldn’t the cop that took the phone get busted for possessing child porn?
If so then when it got passed to the prosecutor shouldn’t the cop be charged with distributing and the prosecutor be charged with possession?
I mean if the prosecutor, and then the court, are willing to entertain something so fundamentally ridiculous then shouldn’t they accept the logical, albeit ridiculous, conclusions of their pursuit?
I doubt this argument would hold up but I’m curious to see what actual lawyers would cite as the reason why this shouldn’t happen.
You can’t prosecute a corpse, but you most certainly can prosecute the estate of a corpse. Whether this was ever a law, and whether such prosecutions have ever happened I have no idea (but wouldn’t be surprised if they had). But there’s nothing inherently absurd about the idea of bringing proceedings, both civil and/or criminal, against a deceased person’s estate, and those proceedings having consequences of significance to the heirs of said estate.
I’m aware that you can civilly sue an estate of a deceased party, but hold an estate criminally liable, presuming it–they–are disconnected from the charged offense? I’d sure like to see precedent on that one.
I still don’t understand. The state takes the role of prosecution because the victim is not always in a position to do so (e.g., murder), and because it may be in the interest of the state to prosecute even when the victim wishes otherwise. Sometimes, as in drug law, the presumed victim is the state, or the people, or some such. But that’s not the case here; the victim is an individual.
I believe all crimes are against “society” and thus the actual, individual, victim, as in rape, say, doesn’t receive compensation from a criminal conviction, i.e., they don’t receive any portion of the fines.
I get that criminal proceedings aren’t intended to compensate the victim–they’re intended to (through a roundabout process) reduce the number of similar crimes in the future, and thus benefit society. But surely someone has to be harmed, somewhere, even if only indirectly or possibly in the future. We can argue (badly) that drug users are more likely to go crazy and commit other crimes, and that it’s valid for society to nip that in the bud. But what’s the justification here?
Again, this is why prosecutorial discretion will never be enough.
Well, imagine your daddy is a Pablo Escobar-esque narco kingpin swimming in money. Then he dies, guns blazing, in a shootout with police, maybe taking a cop or two with him. I don’t know exactly how they’d do it, but I imagine between legalized theft statutes and probably some posthumous fines from his criminal behavior, they would ensure you never see a penny of inheritance. Obviously IANAL and this is a big tangent from the OP (and even from the remark about criminality of suicide that spurred it), but I’d be curious how that kind of thing would work. But the idea of charging deceased persons criminally doesn’t seem outrageous to me, for this reason.
It’s the tort that counts.