Not only jail, but he would have to register as a sex offender. It was critical to the court’s decision that he was subject not only to a custodial sentence but to additional penalties including a lifelong stigma. This put the offence outside the realm of anything that could be deemed a “minor offence”, and strict liability has been held to be constitutional in Ireland only for minor offences.
Those penalties are still there were there was no mistake as to age and thus we had that recent case where a 15-year-old who had sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend is going to spend five years in prison and years after that on the sex offenders’ register. Which seems equally unfair to me.
It’s not about protecting their innocence, in that case, it’s about punishing someone who has damaged them that much further.
Reason says yes. There was no imperative, if he had a concern, to go back to her apartment and have sex right away. Women don’t exist in a vacuum without lives, friends, family and other connections (school, work) just because you’re horny for them. If you can’t be sure of as basic a fact about them as their age, can’t come to any reasonable conclusion about it based on what you know rather than what you’ve been told, because you know other people in their lives, because you’ve seen them on the college campus, something meaningful, then yes, you err on the side of caution. When it’s the difference between having fun and committing a felony, then you stop and take a step back and try knowing a woman before you stick your penis into her.
Or you confine your semi-anonymous sex to women who are demonstrably and obviously not 15 or younger. (For the vast majority of the U.S., age of consent may vary in your location, etc.) As a bonus, the sex will likely be a lot better. 15 year olds? Not experienced enough to be so great in the sack, as a general rule, and if they are, they’re coming with a hell of a lot of baggage you don’t need anywhere near you unless you’re their shrink.
This is a tough one, Dopers. As far as the example that Laudenum provided, the 15-year-old bar patron with the excellent fake ID is open about sex, but bring that to a courtroom, I doubt that a jury will really give credit to a guy who claims, “She wanted it! I have witnesses!”
It is definitely clear that the girl should be charged with possession of fake ID and illegal consumption of alcohol, but what **Dio ** and tumbledown point out, the law is concerned with what you DO, not what you THINK or THOUGHT.
Should laws like this change? Yes. Only in the example with this scenario, it’s clear that the guy in question did take the necessary steps for a successful one night stand, and so did the 15-year-old at her personal deception game. It is still statutory rape, but I REALLY, REALLY do not feel that the hypothetical guy should ever be on a sexual offender list. His jail sentence should be less than those who forcibly rape or stalk, etc.
What would I do in this situation? I’d be afraid of an STD. Seriously. Anyone I just met who wants a one-night stand with me doesn’t really have to worry about their age as much as turning over their medical records. Screw the ID, I want a blood test. (Pun intended)
What if you have sex with a 16 year old who looks 21 on the border of two states, in one of which the age of consent is 16, and one in which it is higher? Does it matter which side of the border each of you are on? Does it matter which state her fake ID is from?
What if you’re standing on one side of the border in an age-of-consent-16 state, and a 16-year-old girl who looks 32 stands (facing away from you) on the other side of the border in an AOC-17 state, and she accidentally backs onto your erection (which was caused by medical priapism and not arousal) while you’re unconscious and also it’s exactly midnight on her 17th birthday and you’re both wearing gorilla suits?
Not ranking on you, Carmady. I’m just having a little fun with some of the hypotheticals in this thread.
The guy mentioned in the OP was in his 50’s. Are most of his defenders within the “Romeo & Juliet” age range of the chickies they want to bang? Or are they more “mature”?
I don’t see how people can contest that a 17 y/o can look like a 21 y/o, or for that matter that a 15 y/o could.
A girl who enters puberty prematurely will easily look 3-4, even 5 years older than she is. And someone who enters puberty later may well look many years younger. My girlfriend is close to 40 but still has to show ID every time she buys alcohol. Everyone thinks that I’m older than I really am and I haven’t been ID-checked since I was 15.
You just don’t know.
And 21? Really? You’re supposed to not have sex until you’re 21? What’s the average age that people become sexually active in the US? Here it’s about 15, and that’s what the legal limit is as well. I’m thinking your law is a bit out of touch.
DUI is itself a criminal act, and the perpetator presumably did not have the alcohol involuntarily injected into his veins or physically forced into the driver’s seat. In the sort of deception case described in the OP, there was never intent to commit a crime of any kind whatsoever.
Okay dude telling everyone they are a liar and being so black and white about this whole situation is a pretty bullshit maneuver in my opinion, and really isn’t your style. You are smarter than that man.
But anyway, hate to burst your bubble but this does happen, I swear to god. My old roommate used to be the manager of a very popular bar in my area, and we used to hang out there while he worked. In Dallas you could get a really good fake ID for about 60 dollars, and high school girls and college but underage for drinking girls used to come in there all the time.
Its extremely plausible to be sitting at a bar drinking with a 17 year old that used her fake ID to get in. Its dark and she is smoking a cigarette. She pulls you in behind the Golden Tee machines and you start having a private conversation. Soon, you are making out with her and she is calling the tab to be ordered. With a slight buzz you leave the bar and walk next door to the adjacent Holiday Inn and fifty bucks later you have a room for the night.
Reasonably, if she is in a bar that charges a cover and checks ID for anyone under 21 that is being monitored by the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Comission (which runs the machine that verifies ID) and you hook up with someone that has passed the state requirements for ID verification, how the hell should you be liable for that?
Now if you go hang out in an elementary school with a hand full of My Little Ponies, yeah, it isn’t going to fly if you try to tell a jury that you thought the little girls were all 18 (or 17 or 16 depending on what is legal.) But if you are in a bar that to enter you have to pass state guidelines for age verification…
You have to be able to see the difference. I know you are smarter than that, try to turn off the emotional haze and recognize.
Yep, if you look close enough, you can tell that the picture of him on the ID isn’t really him. Maybe if you look close enough with x-ray vision… :rolleyes::rolleyes:
Too many shots at the juice bar can really do a number on your reading comprehension…
Psh. What a sissy cop-out way of dealing with the actual issue.
Stop making me agree with you! And, as someone else said, it got off the ground because we have a very hard time doing anything reasonable in this country related to drug law enforcement because nobody wants to appear soft on drug crimes.
When you operate a vehicle after you’ve been drinking, you have a reasonable expectation of being impaired. If you have sex with someone who looks to be past the age of consent who has documentation to prove it, you don’t have the expectation that they’ll be underage.
Ah, another to add to the list! I’m now also awaiting *your *copies of notorized birth certificates for everyone you’ve ever had sexual contact with.
When I was 12 or so, I was out to a pizza place near a Milwaukee university campus with a bunch of people from dance, including parents, and when I ordered a Sprecher, the waitress almost brought me the beer instead of the root beer. Some people mature faster than others, and some people are just crap at telling ages. (This is especially true across some ethnic groups–I turned 21 when I was living in Tokyo, and all my Japanese friends were shocked because they’d assumed I was several years older.)
We’re not just talking about “I didn’t know.” We’re talking about “I had reason to believe that this person was above the age of consent.” Not a hunch, not they looked old enough to fuck: evidence.
How, exactly, does a man (or a woman) know someone else “well enough” to know how old they are? Short of a notorized birth certificate, which can still be faked (and which I’m, as mentioned upthread, waiting for from you for all of your partners), there’s no way to know. I mean, sure, maybe you met their parents. But what if their parents are in on it? What if they started having sex at 16, and they think their kid should be able to, too? And who are *you *to dictate how well I have to know someone before I can have sex with them?
I think it’s disgusting that you’re assuming that everyone who disagrees with you on this (a) is male and (b) wants to fuck children. I’m female, and I’d barely be interested in anyone in their early 20s, let alone younger.
Sure–usually. But we’re not talking about the usual cases. We’re talking about times where someone is having sex with a person who looks to be above the age of consent *and *has documentation to prove it.
It is, if you can prove that your speedometer was miscalibrated. I don’t even drive, and I know that much. Think of an underaged teen’s fake ID as a broken speedometer. You did your best to make sure you were following the law, but some external mechanism for gauging your progress was giving you a false reading.
Which people do. Which is why we’re discussing situations where someone had every *reasonable *expectation that their partner was over the age of consent.
Pretty sure everyone here would feel guilty if they had sex with someone they thought was of age but turned out not to be. The question isn’t whether people should *feel bad *about it–it’s about whether or not they should suffer the same *legal consequences *as someone who didn’t have a reasonable expectation that their partner was old enough to consent.
Don’t foist your puritanical morals off on others. They probably don’t care if you only want to have sex in committed relationships. Accordingly, please respect their right to go home with a different stranger every night.
Guess that makes my friend Mike a baby-rapist for having sex with his wife Emily, then. Because while she’s 28, she’s half-Pakistani and only five feet tall, so she looks a lot younger. Just a couple of years ago, in fact, she got carded when we went to a mall with a curfew for under-17s. Guess those security guards shouldn’t have let her in. After all, it *could *have been a fake ID!
My most recent ID has never looked much like me. Guess I’m never getting laid again! Remind me to tell my boyfriend he’s a rapist because **Dio **says so. Oh, shit, you know what? He never checked my ID, either. That’s even worse! I mean, he doesn’t *know *that I don’t just *look *like I’m in my late 20s.
There’s a really strong undercurrent of sexism in this thread. Why is everybody only talking about fucking underage girls? Why should someone be held to an unreasonable standard of proof, when they have what should amount to reasonable evidence that their partner is of legal age, regardless of gender? What if I don’t *want *a guy to meet my family and friends, and we just want to fuck? Who are *you *that you get to declare that I can’t have consensual casual sex if I want to?
There is *no absolute proof *of someone’s age. None. *Everything *can be faked, with enough effort. And to even get at the strongest evidence would require an insane and unreasonable amount of research and legwork (e.g., getting a copy of the birth certificate from the government, looking up the doctor who delivered the baby, etc.). As long as someone *claims *to be over the age of consent, *looks *like they could be over the age of consent, and *has reasonable documentation *(driver’s license or other state ID) that their DOB is what they’re claiming, someone who has sex with them should not be held to the same level of accountability as someone who knowingly has sex with a minor or who doesn’t at least attempt to ascertain that the person is of legal age.
ETA:
IIRC, if the cops trick you into buying drugs (in that they offer them to you without you having asked), you can’t be prosecuted for it, because it’s entrapment. So, if an underage person tricks you into thinking that they’re above the age of consent, why should you be any more culpable? After all, there is no proof that you would have still had sex with them, had you not had what you thought was proof they were of legal age.
I read somewhere that the writer intended it to be “sixteen” but didn’t think the studio would go for that – so it was written as “thirteen” with the intention of “plea-bargaining” it down (well, up) to “sixteen” – but the line got through as written.
I suspect that this is the only time in his life that Diogenes has been accused of having “puritanical morals.”
Having said that, his critics are exactly right. The law gives allowances for situations in which people took all reasonable precautions and yet messed up anyway. That’s why the courts will usually cut speeding motorists some slack if their speedometer is broken. Of course, if they were driving at some unreasonable speed – 40 mph above the speed limit, for example – then that excuse won’t hold. For smaller discrepancies though, a reasonable judge will take this malfunction into account, provided that the offender has taken reasonable precautions.
The problem – and I don’t mean this as a flame – is that Diogenes tends to take reckless positions, refusing to back down or acknowledge any exceptions or nuances to his claims or any possible weaknesses to his arguments. These discussions would be a lot shorter and more coherent if not for that.
She didn’t entrap him, nor does she have the legal, cognitive or emotional ability to do so.
This is exactly the kind of attitude I find so disgusting – trying to flip things around to turn the rapist into the victim and the victim into a criminal.
Actually – and I want to state this very carefully – I think that it is a recurring reason why these discussions tend to get needlessly volatile and drag on far longer than they need to. This sort of thing happens all the time, and it really shouldn’t.
We aren’t talking about 17 year olds, and the schmuck in your scenario is liable and culpable for not making sure he knew what he was sticking his dick in. It’s just like firing a gun into the air. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t mean to hit anybody. You don’t fire the gun unless you know for a fact what you’re going to hit.
And, as someone else said, it got off the ground because we have a very hard time doing anything reasonable in this country related to drug law enforcement because nobody wants to appear soft on drug crimes.