As an example: An 18yo get’s busted for having sex with a 16yo. His GF of say 4years. Now said 18yo has to live his life on the sexual predators list.
We all know this is BS. But thanks to lawyers and prosecuters being what they are this (hypothetical) kid is screwed.
So color me stupid. What is wrong with being jugded by a jury of your peers on the animus of the law and not the letter of it?
And I mean this accross the board. Not just “sexual deviants”.
In your example, I’m assuming the 18 year old is a male since you refer to the 16 year old as “his GF of say 4 years.” So you are placing a 14 year old male in the position of having a 12 year old girlfriend? If that is so, the law or a parent or someone should have put a stop to it then and there.
I might reconsider my example if I were you but YMMV.
Good luck getting people to agree on the intent of any given law in any given case, and good luck trying to deal with the fallout due to lack of consistency.
I’m not expressing agreement or disagreement with the OP, but I think you’re a bit off here. The law should have stepped in and prevented a 12 and 14 year old from saying they’re dating? Come on!
I had a ‘girlfriend’ when I was in sixth grade. We were both in the same grade, though for much of that we were of ‘different’ ages (12 and 13). We kind of kissed once or twice (pretty innocuous kisses). After a month or so we stopped being boyfriend and girlfriend.
I also held hands and kissed (almost with tongue, but not really, just kind of open-mouthed) a girl who was in 8th grade when I was in 7th grade at a dance or two.
The law should have stopped all that because it’s somehow wrong because we were of different ages?
“Sooner or later the guy who lives across the street from you pays more to ride the bus.”
The letter of the law is enforced because you have to draw a line, and, no matter where you draw that line, there will always be someone who’s juuuuuuuust on the other side of it.
That’s what prosecutorial discretion is for.
The issue here is with your hypothetical prosecutor, not your hypothetical law.
However, like many hypothetical situations that cause untold amounts of righteous indignation, your hypothetical lacks so many background facts as to be worthless.
Why is the prosecutor going forward with this case? What are the circumstances of the sexual encounter? What is the community like? Start with those and you may begin to come across reasons.
Every such interpretation of the ‘spirit’ of the law, unfortunately, creates a precedent other people can point to in different cases, so this at best serves to muddy the waters and at worst makes jurisdiction so inconsistent as to be worthless. If the letter of the law is amenable to interpretations contrary to its spirit, then it’s the law that’s bad, not those interpreting it.
What if it were your 12-year-old daughter, still in rubber “Hello Kitty” pants and gnawing a pacifier, dating that shifty 14-year-old punk with the Fu Manchu and the flame-muraled van with a mattress in the back? Eh? What say you then, you free-thinking modern parent, you?
There are already multiple mechanisms for forestalling or mitigating unreasonable application of the letter of the law (prosecutorial discretion, jury nullification, sentence suspension, pardoning, etc).
OK, so your local park has been having problems with teenage mopeders blazing through the trails and causing havok. Your city council decides enough is enough and enacts a law to counteract it: “no vehicles in the park.”
Problem solved! No more mopeds.
But now park rangers, trying to enforce the law, start ticketing bicyclists. Police start to ticket cars in the park’s parking lot. This can’t be right, can it? Surely the police can see what the intent of the law was. But…there’s intent and there’s what’s written. It’s not the police’s job to interpret. They enforce.
So the city council goes back to the drawing board. “No motorized vehicles allowed on park trails.”
Then one day Officer Literal comes upon a grandfather in a motorized wheelchair and writes him up a citation. The city goes crazy and the SDMB has a field day pitting the officer, but the city council sees that maybe the law should be changed again.
“No two wheeled motorized vehicles used for recreational purposes allowed in the park.”
These teenage hooligans, seeing that the moped can’t be ridden around anymore, switch over to three wheeled motorized trikes. Crap!
“No motorized vehicles used for recreational purposes allowed on the park trails.”
Offroading suddenly became a lot more fun. And hey, the parking lot’s still fair game.
This is one example. One very simple example. Imagine it across the entire spectrum of laws. I want you to understand that writing laws well takes a lot of effort and a lot of brainstorming on different possibilities across a spectrum of potential human behavior and even when done correctly will only have a 95% accuracy to it.
The founding fathers were really really good at writing laws and yet every single portion of the Constitution (ok, save for Amendment 3) have been argued upon in a court of law. What does the law say? What does it REALLY say? What did the founding fathers mean? Should we accept a rationale based upon what they meant when it cannot be conclusively proven or do we go with what’s written?
There will ALWAYS be situations where a conflict arises between what the legislative body intended and what was written. What do we choose? The law or the rationale? The law is black and white, written down for all to see. The intent is nebulous. We have to research what was going on that spurred on the law, the debates on the Senate floor, the committee notes, and more.
Our legal system is the worst there is…except for everyone else’s.
I was going to say something similar to this. If it’s not spelled out it would just be someones (judge etc) opinion. Then all the things that color ones mind would be allowed to overide the law, making it pretty much useless.
So let me get this straight: You want the same people who are enforcing the law and its punishments to interpret the laws?
“While it was an unfortunate incident, I rule that the lynch mob had been sufficiently provoked, and we’ll just let those murder charges slide.”
“While the attorney blowing the whistle did reveal massive corruption in my father’s law firm, it’s possible that he simply wished to send my father to jail, and on those grounds I sentence him to 20 years.”
Yes, and that’s also why we have juries. They can choose not to convict in the case posed in the OP because they don’t buy social value of the prosecution’s case.
Without hijacking this thread, if possible, it strikes me that the sorts of cases SHAKES and others have brought up as examples of where strict application of the letter of the law results in a perceived injustice, are exactly where jury nullification is appropriate. As I understand it, the ‘proper’ use of nullification, so far as there is one, is for a case where the jury might (but of course would not in actuality) say, “The facts in the case we were empaneled to judge do meet the standard of the law as written, but the intent of the law was not to prosecute people in the particular situation of this case, and to convict the defendant would be an unjust application of the law.”
One example of where I’d see this appropriate is Ender’s hypothetical case of Grampaw riding slowly down the park trail in his motorized wheelchair. Another, more closely related to SHAKES’s original example, is this: In the State of Hypothetical Examples, the “Romeo and Juliet clause” says two years’ age difference. The local DA, fighting a tough reelection campaign, has vowed to “get tough on sexual predators.” A naive virginal college freshman boy, who turned 18 in August, meets a sweet young thing at a teen club shortly after he starts college in September, and, finding her not only receptive but aggressive and physically quite mature, loses his virginity to her. They are, however, caught by the local police in flagrante delicto, and some information about the sweet young thing comes out. It turns out that she has had sex with a dozen boys who frequent the club, and her mother has turned a blind eye to her sex life, in fact putting her on the Pill. She will, however, celebrate her sixteenth birthday a few days before Hallowe’en. By the law, this is a case of statutory rape, and the DA intends to push it to bolster his image as a “get tough on crime” prosecutor. I would think, however, that while the boy did not use the best judgment in the world, convicting him on the full charges of which he is manifestly guilty by a strict reading of the law would be seen by most people as an injustice.